Trip to Lomé

We planned to travel very early in the morning to Togo in order to arrive in daylight. However, this is Africa so things don’t always go as planned. We arrived on time at the bus station but the busses do not ride on a time schedule, they ride when the bus is full. Therefore we had to wait more than 2 hours to finally take off. The bus station we were taken to only had small cheap busses, they looked as though they could fall apart. Everyone sat very close to each other on the bus and there was a lot of noise. No worries, we survived though.

During the bus trip a young girl on the bus bought bread from a street seller but she was to late with paying and the bus driver drove away. The seller ran incredibly hard after the bus but he was not able to catch up. The girl wanted to throw the bread back to the seller out of the window, however the bus driver was kind enough to stop and wait for the seller to catch the bus. It really amazed us how the seller was fighting to get the (small amount) of money.

When we arrived at the border we were picked up in Ghana by 2 aunts and 2 nieces of Rachidatou. They paid a women to carry our bags (+-35 kg ON HER HEAD). It really is amazing how hard people work for their money (small amount)...

When we wanted to enter Togo we had to fill in a lot of paperwork. There were some issues because the family of Rachidatou suddenly had to have visas before reentering Togo. This doubled the amount of paperwork we had to do. When we finally entered Togo there was a guard who started talking to us and showed us around the border and the borderline between Ghana and Togo. We stayed at one of Rachidatou’s aunts. In the evening her aunt prepared fufu in the traditional way. We were aloud to pound yam ourselves (which was very hard, see video)! With the help of the whole family the food turned out very nice!