This all feels a little like the morning after Christmas. "What now?" The question hangs in the air, surreal and impenetrable, following me around like these wonderstruck children. We actually did it. Well, there's still plenty to do, but a big driving force in our lives has been removed. Our organizing logic is gone. Now we just have six days to tie up loose ends, see old friends, and wring a few more revelations out of this continent. It doesn't seem like enough time, but I'm still restless to go. The week after my arrival in Canada will be my first proper vacation in six months.
The Togo trip we were supposed to take didn't really happen. We had already discovered that we couldn't receive a visa on the spot in Nyive, so we decided to road trip it to the nearest big crossing, which is at a town called Aflao (pronounced "A-plow", which strikes me as a mailbox's last words), right across the border from Lome, the Togolese capital. Our plan was to visit our chief, eat some French food, ride horses on the beach, and scoot home two nights later.
Well, we got stamped out of Ghana and approached the Togolese immigration officials, only to discover that the price for the visa was higher than expected. Considerably. Unfortunately, I didn't figure out how much higher until I had already authorized the imigration officials to give us our stamps. He quoted us a price in francs (20,000), which an obliging cash hustler offered to change into cedis for us. The problem is that the exchange rate has rocketed as the cedi has devalued in the last year, meaning that our visas were going to cost us over $100 in total (graft included).
By the time I worked out that, not only did I not have that much money with me, but I didn't have enough money to buy visas and also stay in Lome, our passports had been stamped and it was too late. In response to my lame explanation of the situation, the immigration guy stuffed our passports in a drawer and proceeded to ignore us. No choice but to pay.
By this time I was having a large-scale anxiety attack, and insisted that since we couldn't afford to stay, we should turn around and go home. Although it probably would've been both cheaper and easier to spend one night in Lome and just hightail it in the morning, I was so frantic and psyched out by the cops and customs officers that I made us go back to Ho instead. We barely made it to Nyive on the last car of the night, around 10:30 - tired, caked in dirt, and destined to be famished until morning - with only a Togolese stamp in our passports to show for it.
Luckily, our $100-visas should enable us to enter again, so we are planning a trip to Kpalime tomorrow for a nice meal to celebrate my new favourite holiday, "8/7 Day" (i.e. Sidney Crosby's birthday). While I hear that Halifax will be swamped with fans enjoying a Stanley Cup parade, sadly we will have to make do with baguettes and stir-fry. (Apparently Togo's a good place to get Chinese food.)
Needless to say, this experience, if nothing else, got me psyched for home. Only five more sleeps to indoor plumbing, six more sleeps to an airport full of absurdly handsome Arab men, and seven more sleeps to all my loved ones!
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