February 16 part 2, ouagadougou

The cinema Neerwaya is one of three in the centre of Ouaga and Ouaga is a movie mad kind of place... so they say. So, we decide we really should go see a film while we're here. It's pretty hard to find out what's on as the cinemas don't really advertise, but everyone tells us there is normally a showing at 6.30pm. Taking pot luck that we'll come across something good and reasonably recent - one cinema near the market we passed the other day was showing "The Bone Collector" with Denzel Washington, hardly a new release - we take a taxi and pull up outside the cinema at 5.45. We're in luck, there is a 6.30 showing and it's "Closer", a film neither of us had seen, with Julia Roberts and Jude Law. Inside the compound there is a bar area under some thatched roofing to the right, next to a couple of fast food shacks. We walk into the lobby. Hmm. Where to buy tickets? There's a counter to the right. I approach. I can see a head over the other side of the counter top. "Hello", I ask, twice, without response from the head. "She's trying to sleep", says a lady further behind the counter in a corner. The "sleeping" girl lifts her head with her eyes half closed, scowls at me as if to say "Can't you see I'm trying to sleep!" and then lolls back in the chair and lets her head hang down to one side, her eyes closed. "I see", I say. "Well, can I buy tickets for the cinema here?" I ask the other lady. "No", she replies. "OK, can you tell me where I can?" I try, indicating the sweep of the lobby behind me. "No", she replies again, then helpfully adds, "Ask her over there". She points at a lady behind another counter with a selection of wines on it, all nicely decorated with bows. It doesn't look like the ticket office. It isn't. She can't sell me tickets either and indicates vaguely across the lobby at a blank wall on the other side, telling me to see the man over there. Great. I wander away, passing a man in a little glass office, down some steps, in the middle of stamping some sheets of paper. He can't sell me any tickets either, but says from 6 o'clock the students will be able to. They'll be outside somewhere.

We retreat outside and order a beer from the bar, sitting down to watch "Les Destins de l'Amour", one of the cheap, romantic, slushy soaps so beloved by Burkinabes. While we're sitting there, we notice there is a small compound off to the left of the entrance, about the size of an average size kitchen. Oh my God! It's got 2 hyenas in it. The poor things are walking around and around in a square, taking a good 8 seconds to amble around the edge of their tiny, scruffy world. They're there for the tourists we later learn. Hynenas in a cage by the entrance of a cinema in the middle of a smelly city... an interesting tourist attraction, Burkina style.

By 6.10, we've eventually collared someone who seems to be holding something resembling tickets and she points out a person standing in the street outside. For 50p each, we can join some equally bewildered people in trying to work out where the film is being shown in the cinema. There's no indication and, of course, no-one on hand to point out the way. Even the sleeping girl has wandered off to find somewhere more peaceful to lay her head.

As makes sense somewhere, the entrance to the cinema is not via the lobby, but around the side of the building past the hyenas. We file in, all 15 or so of us into a big auditorium. At 6.30 on the dot the film starts. No adverts or trailers here. We settle down to watch the story of the infidelities of Jude Law and Julia Roberts unfold up on the screen. Over the next half an hour, the auditorium fills up. Around 150 more people come in after the start of the film, working out where to sit, finding and greeting friends, chatting and answering calls on their mobiles. What's great here though is watching a film is interactive. Audience participation IS the name of the game. And "Closer" is a great film for audience feedback. Naked flesh = shouts and screams and there is a fair bit of naked flesh in the film; especially when Nathalie Portman is flashing her legs in the strip joint. Forget trying to listen to the story line, just shout at the screen that you want to see more flesh. And do it loudly! "Get your head out of the way, Clive! We want to see!! " (For those not following, you'd better watch the film (again)).

We'd asked someone before the film started what time it finished so we could tell Toure, our taxi driver, when to come back to pick us up. 8.45pm we were told. At 8.15 then, it's no surprise to find ourselves heading out of the auditorium and into the Ouaga night. Of course, Toure wasn't there. No matter, the TV in the courtyard is now showing the latest installment of 24. Great, we sit down to shout at another screen with everyone else as Jack saves Tony from the nasty teenage kidnapper. Hurrah!

As you'd expect after the movies, we head off to eat. La Quebecoise is a restaurant not far from the hotel car park where we're camped. We fancy some good Quebecer tucker in the middle of Africa. And it's not half bad. My cheeseburger even had a slice of tomato in it and enough burger to reach the side of the bun. OK it was a small bun, but the best burger in Africa to date. (There is only so much lanky chicken one can eat).

We walk home romantically, beside the busy roads with mopeds spewing up clouds of smoke that mingles in with the dust clouds blowing south in the strong winds off the Sahel. The dust fills our noses and stings our eyes and catches in the back of our throats. The tent is covered in a layer of sand when we get back to the hotel, as is the bed as we'd left a side window open.

African nights.

17 february. Ouaga to near the Ghana border

3 month visas for Ghana in our hands, we drive south from Ouaga and camp in a national park a few miles north of the border. It looks and feels like a Blair Witch wood in the park around where we are camping. We expect to hear a lot of mythical creatures in the night (a speciality of mine), but all is quiet apart from a particularly indestructable fly that makes its way into the tent and refuses to be squashed.

Burkina Faso never really had a chance for us to explore it more. We were keen to get to Ghana and see a change of scenery after months of Sahel; the visa at the border was only valid for a week; we met persistent hustlers on our first day in the country and rude hotel staff at the OK Inn in Ouaga. It is clearly richer than Mali, but essentially a continuation of the same. It's not a country full of touristy places to visit, but more a country of people to meet and spend time with. And at the moment our thoughts are fixed on doing that in Ghana.