More travels

Hopefully, this little video will work for readers.  Pat (who arrived safely on June 28) and I took a road trip through northern Togo to get to northern Benin (the country due east of Togo) which has 2 wildlife preserves.  We drove through this town (among others) called Bafilo and decided to film it as we went through.  It's a pretty typical view of a large town on the Rue National (the main north-south road of Togo).

This is the large putddle that forms when it rains outside the Peace Corps office (you can see the round logo on the wall on the left).  The road is being fixed but we've heard it will be 2 years till they actually pave it so we aren't holding our breath.

Hippos!  We saw these, crocodiles, baboons, monkeys, cheetahs, elephants, several kinds of antelope and many beautiful and amazing birds in the park Pendjari in Benin where we spend the long July 4th weekend. Our drive to get there took 2 days and the night before we actually entered the park we woke with a bat inside our mosquito netting (so now we're getting the series of 5 rabies shots which luckily are cheap and available here in Lome) but it was all completely worth it for the amazing wildlife we saw.  We stayed one night at the hotel in the park and there were only 2 other people staying (who I knew because they were volunteers).  The rainy season is the off season here apparently but it only rained for about 40 minutes of our stay and having the park to ourselves (with our guide who was amazingly sharp-eyed) was fantastic.

Instead of taking the border crossing we took on the way to the park, we took a more northern one since we were stopping in the town of Kante to visit a volunteer.  Much of Togo is kind of low scrubland and not all that attractive but around Kante it's more hilly and, at this time of year, very green, so it was a very pretty drive.  As you can see here the dirt roads are all reddish and since we drove with the windows opened (to get a nice breeze and see better since the car windows are tinted very dark) we and the inside of the care ended up with a fine red dust all over us which took several showers to remove.  It's still hot midday but much better than in March-May.  This backroad border crossing didn't have an actual place where you get your passport stamped.  The road from Benin to it was good (this is a picture of it) but once we got to Togo we ended up on a very badly rutted road and even got a flat tire in the middle of nowhere.  We had a spare but it had no air in it.  Fortunately, many people stopped to see if they could help including a guy on a moto (motorcycle) who took our tire to Kante (about 30 minutes away), got it filled with air and brought it back to us.  We were very grateful and relieved and off to Kante ourselves soon after.

More of northern Togo/Benin - really very pretty at this time of year - a nice break from Lome.

So Pat is playing soccer this afternoon for a pickup Peace Corps team consisting of staff and volunteers -not sure who they're playing but it should be pretty interesting to watch.  Other than that he has been very busy at my house while I'm working making a garden, a compost pile and rearranging the furniture so it's a lot more attractive.  He's got some kind of nesting gene I don't have obviously because I'd never really noticed that the living room could be so much more comfortable done differently.  I'm working on 2 summer courses online to finish my MPH degree that I started 10 years ago (glad there's no apparent limitation on how long you can take for this!) which I could finish before I get done here although I think there might be a course that I need to stream video for and that's not possible here in Togo (yet.  You never know, though, with technology).  They are keeping me very busy this month but I'll be done just in time to go to Iceland on vacation - I can't imagine anywhere more different than this.