The wonky stomach for DH continues but it’s not to the point that we can’t travel (or at least she won’t admit that it is) so we decide to push on. After one last breakfast order for the deer-in-the-headlights, slow motion staff at the Rainbow Hotel (which they got wrong), we took a short taxi ride to the start point of our first Tros Tros, the Ghanian version of the Bush Taxi we were more familiar with in Mali and Burkina. Like the Bush Taxi...

We’ve been travelling hard for quite some time now (although it might be tough to qualify the Niger River pinasse trip as ‘tough travel’) and DH has started fighting that scourge of travellers- the funny tummy, so we’ve decide to down tools and rest at a lake near Kumasi, Ghana. Getting to Kumasi means one more hard day of travel but there are a couple of worthwhile sites on the way…provided, of course, you go the right way. Somehow ...

The border crossing on the Burkina side was, once again, relatively humourless but efficient, but much less so as we tried entering Ghana. We had our visas for Ghana but that didn’t seem to speed the process. It was difficult to determine which official was accountable for what and they all seemed to want to talk to us about something- once they found out that DH was a police officer, an unscripted commotion erupted with no identifiable purpose. DH didnR...

To get back on the beaten path (if there is such a thing in Burkina) we decided to take a ‘short cut’ through the Nazinga Game Ranch, a 94,000ha park, for a West African safari. DH has an absolute fixation with elephants, particularly since our East African trip a couple of years ago, and with over 800 elephants and numerous other mammals in a relatively small park, sightings had to be guaranteed? We knew that during the rainy season the road to Nazin...

The drive to Gaoua was supposed to take 3 hours (which we immediately doubled to 6) but it quickly became apparent that both our driver and our vehicle were a little off centre. The engine started overheating and prompted a couple of stops which drew crowds and plenty of loud advice but no actual fixes. At the next major centre we were encouraged to wander through the local market while a mechanic, who appeared out of nowhere, replaced the rad hose (which, of cou...