Early in the morning I say goodbye to my friends in
the lodge and drive to the border town of
I spend the night in a simple hotel and will
cross the border to
I reach the Malian border post and sort out the
formalities.
Everything goes fast and smoothly, just as the entry
to
Only the customs officer asks me whether I would like
to sell him my motorcycle. Whereupon I answer that I still need the bike to go
to
Kind of not expecting that answer he shakes my hand
and wishes me a save journey.
Around
In the afternoon I still drive the nearly 400 kms from Bobo Dilasso
to
The landscape is beautiful and the road leads through
the bush.
Every time I stop for a brief rest I get company
immediately. Somebody is always interested in the strange white man, who stops
and takes pictures in the middle of the road.
What I notice is that the heavy manual work is nearly
only performed by women and children. The young men surround me
enthusiastically when I stop in the villages but I hardly ever see them
working.
According to my plan I reach
Here things go differently than expected. Normally
there is a set of police controls before each city that would at least say
hello to a tourist on a motorbike.
However, these posts are all abandoned.
Further on there is nearly no traffic on the road and
the center of
Normally this is impossible for an African capital.
The whole thing looks so strange to me that I stop my bike and push it into a
dark drive way to observe the silence.
Suddenly a military convoy with well 50 vehicles
passes the road. The men that I can see are armed and the speed the vehicles go
by, does not indicate a friendly movement.
Additionally the capital is constantly flown over by
aircrafts. Also that is not usual, if everything is calm. And which Air Force
and army is around? Their own? That does not make
sense.
Something must have happened and I don’t understand.
I switch my light off and drive on the empty roads
until I find a hotel.
As I arrive there the owner doesn’t trust his eyes. He
tells me that a state of emergency was actually imposed and a curfew is on.
As I want to know what actually happened, he
apparently does not know exactly. He says, the
military fights against the police!
Without another option I decide to spend the night in
the hotel and hope that I can leave the city as well as the country the next
day.
In the night I hear some explosions in the city and
don’t really sleep.
I leave the hotel at the break of dawn and see people
on the roads again. My plan is to exit the city with the early traffic and then
drive to the border as fast as possible.
I stop at a gas station and try to find out about the situation.
Again people tell me that there are fights between the military and the police.
Nobody seems to know.
If that’s right what they say it could mean that a
civil war is about to break out or has already broken out.
In the relatively dense morning traffic I pass the
city exit between some large trucks. I cannot see police anywhere and I’m
concerned again. How safe is the country when people know that no police is there.
Political conflicts bring up a whole bunch of
problems, which can be far riskier for a traveler
than the actual problem itself.
After three hours I reach the border without problems
and I’m very happy as the Togoleese border guard
provides me with the entry stamp