Burkina Faso - Land of Honest People

Yep - that's what the name Burkino Faso means in one of the hundreds of languages spoken in this country, only the size of the state of Colorado. Some people might remember its former colonial name of Upper Volta. This clean and colorful place is also peaceful. We left on the U.S. inauguration day and there were visible signs that Africa is ready for an Obama administration. We saw elephants, colorful villages, vibrant markets and one great outcrop of sandstone. I'll let the pictures do the talking.


The Kazenga Reserve - envisioned and articulated by a Canadian living in Upper Volta in the 1970's is obviously a very forward thinking kind of preservation. We watched elephants bath and swim underwater in this large pond.






Check out these homes in the village of Tielebe near the southern border with Ghana. They are made of adobe bricks and painted by hand.







Here's an "alleyway" I wandered down while everyone in the village was at the dance.The pots are used to get water or to store millet.







These are the warrior dancers of Tiebele. Everyone looked quite healthy and well nourished. We found out that food resources are allocated to the men first, then the young boys, then women. Children are the last ones on the list - they do this so that only the strongest ones survive. Different for sure but not a bad strategy.



The villagers looking on at the dancers.









The mosque in the town of Bobo Dioulasso. The sticks in the walls are used to climb and repatch the adobe. How exotic. We got to go onto the roof of the mosque.









Entering the "Domeland" near the town of Banfora in the southwest of the country. We used the private jet to fly 130 miles away this day.


What a great outcrop of early Paleozoic sandstone. I saw both symetrical and asymetrical ripple marks in the deposit and it was coarse-grained. It looked a lot like the Cambrian deposits in western North America.


We rarely stop at geologic sites on these trips but everyone was fascinated by this place.


At home on the rocks!