This Weather is Making My Nose Bleed

I think I'll hit fast forward here, and catch even up to today, the present: Wednesday, 2:30pm, Ouagadougou; hot and dry as a bone. Okay, so I hustled up through Ghana. I spent a few days in Kumasi, and encountered one afternoon, at the dilapidated Olympic size swimming pool at the University of Science and Technology, a just married Italian couple taking their honeymoon(!!) in Ghana. I was very lonely that afternoon and bounded up to them like a Golden retriever when I spotted them coming across the parking lot -Claudia and Roberto. They seemed happy, but man oh man what a spot for a honeymoon. I spent New Years in Tamale, and absolutely nothing of interest happened. I crossed the border into Burkina Faso on the second at Paga, and spent two nights in a tooth paste green, molding, fairly disgusting hotel room in a border town, Po. The windows to the room had metal blinds that sealed up like a bunker, with me laying on the bed looking at the plywood ceiling and the swirls of damp and mold on the wall, picking my nose -if you can believe it, my nose picking has actually become worse in the desert- with a fan a foot from my face. I walked out to a neighboring village one day to see a chief's compound mentioned in the guide. It was a lovely walk along a flat, tree flanked, red dirt road through dry, flat country. People passed on bicycles, and in metal carts pulled by pony sized donkeys. It turned out the chief was dead, for the past eight years, and the compound had crumbled in the rain. But I was shown around the village, a collection of square, mud houses and mango trees. One of the villagers gave me a hen. I thought it would be too rude to refuse it, so brought the hen back to Po, hung from the handle grip of a moto, and ate her that evening.