More travels

The dress!  The photo doesn't do it justice, in my opinion.  The print has a real hand done quality and is mostly purple and orange - two colors I rarely wear but they just popped on this fabric for me.  There's quite a bit of seaming and a zipper up the back (I've had to do extra yoga to keep my shoulders limber enough to zip it up myself - a new problem what with living alone for the first time in my life!).  It's a little longer than I'd wear in the States but the women here don't often show their knees.

I took a trip to Dapaong this week and we stopped on the way up in Kara for lunch.  I'd wanted to go to a restaurant that I knew of in Kara that has nice bathrooms but my driver didn't know where it was and took me here.  The restaurant was nice enough and the food was delicious (see below for more details) but the bathroom was a hole in the ground.  Interestingly it was a very elaborately tiled hole.  The area around the hole and the walls were made from a colorful assortment of broken tiles (like you would find on a floor).  This is a very common way of using tiles - there are few areas of sidewalk in my neighborhood made the same way.  It struck me that so much care was taken to decorate the latrine while the latrine itself was so basic.  Also no toilet paper so I have a little packet of tissues with me at all times.  Not easy to wash the hands either so I had some purell in the car. 

I thought this mural on the wall in the restaurant was quite interesting.  I'm not sure if it's legible but it's a prayer.  Many of the small businesses in Togo, the trucks on the road, etc. have religious names (like Thank God) as part of their names or painted on them (in the case of the trucks) - mostly Christian seeming.  I think it's done in hopes that God will help the business to prosper and the trucks to avoid overturning (more about that later).  Togo is about equally divided between Muslims and Christians with about half the population having traditional, animistic beliefs.  Supposedly there are more Muslims in the north but they seem more prevelant in the middle part of Togo (from Kante to Sokode) and scattered elsewhere.  The women wear head coverings that are long (and not infrequently made of sequined material so they sparkle) but often have bare shoulders.  There seems to be a lot of variety in how they dress.  The mosques are often the best kept building in town.

My lunch in Kara - not African food according to my driver (which is pate, foufou or rice with a sauce). The menus of the restaurants are all pretty similar - various meats, poultry or fish listed with various simple accompaniments.  This was the 1/4 chicken with pomme frites.  The chicken in Togo is a big crapshoot - sometimes it's like jerky and sometimes you can actually chew it easily.  Chickens are often seem walking around the restuarnts unfoot, I guess just waiting till their number is up.  This particular piece had little meat and was very very chewy but the pomme frites was the main attraction:  thick cut fries with big rings of fried onions, tiny hot peppers and sliced tomatoes on top.  Quite greasy but really delicious.  The bread, as usual, was nothing to write home about.  That Maggi pitcher had water in it but I wasn't going to drink it!  Maggi is a common brand name here - it's a type of seasoning that is common.  I may have had it on restaurant food (or my cook may use it), I don't know.  I had 1/4 chicken and pommes frites 2 other times on my trip - these were the best fries but the chicken got progressively better with the other meals.

The road between Kara and Kante.  It slopes down a large hill and we passed (very slowly cause there was so much traffic) two other overturned trucks.  The truck on the right had driven off the road, I'd guess, to avoid stopped traffic in front of it.  There's a tremendous amount of truck traffic in the northern part of the country - I think going back and forth to Burkina Faso.  The trucks are often loaded to far above the height of trailer in back which seems to make them unstable and prone to tipping.  When a truck goes over the Rue Nationale becomes a one lane road and travel is really slow.  North of Mango (I hope you have your Togo map handy) this main road becomes worse than usual - the sides of it are crumbling and it really is only one lane and  full of trucks going 5 miles/hour due to potholes.  It's kind of a nightmare.  I couldn't wait to leave Dapaong cause the traveling was so bad and, of course, it was so hot.  I literally spend my 3 days there bathed in sweat.  The area around Kante, though, is very pretty - brown grassy savannah with trees scattered over it and rocky hills in the distance ("what I thought Africa should look like" according to one of the volunteers I saw).  The houses up north are collections of round huts with thatched roofs.  The huts stay cooler with that design, apparently.

My driver stopped to answer his cell phone and I rolled down the window to take a photo of these huts.  A group of girls came out of nowhere and I took a few photos of them, too.  They found the whole thing very funny!