Our latest border-crossing adventure behind us, we settled happily into life in the next new country – Cote d’Ivoire, in a town called Man. We moved from the hotel we’d stayed at the first night, with its sullen staff, to another more central hotel with just as sullen staff. Even more so, if that’s possible (turns out, it always is). Cote d’Ivoire has lots of hotels, and they’re slightly better value than in Liberia. Here, the locals take holidays to the coast or to the mountains and they stay in hotels and enjoy themselves in spite of the staff. I suppose they are just used to them.
We didn’t know much about the country, or about this town. Oyv had posted some questions on one of the forums we use for this sort of thing and now when he googled the same topic, all he got back was his very own (unanswered) question. Big surprise: once again, we hadn’t seen another foreigner since arriving – not since somewhere back in Liberia, actually.
Over breakfast one day we met with Baptiste, a local guide. He suggested a wildly expensive daytrip to some nearby villages. This kind of ‘cultural experience’ makes my skin crawl. I hate being ushered through a village while the inhabitants tend to look either resentful (understandable) or just eager to please (also understandable). The trip usually ends with some kind of display performed totally out of context for the benefit of a busload of tourists in safari gear, like a harvest ritual enacted in the middle of the growing season when nothing at all has in fact been harvested.
The villages Baptiste wanted to show us are known for stilt dancing. I pictured some kid minding his own business but then suddenly forced to don a pair of stilts and lurch around, whether he was actually a trained dancer or not. However, since there were certainly no busloads of camera-toting tourists around, we considered the trip for a while. But when I WhatsApped Baptiste for some more information he became very evasive and we never heard from him again. We figured he had exaggerated the cost and then decided we weren’t worth the bother.
There was another guide lurking nearby. He’d seen us arrive and had tried to attach himself to us as we dragged our backpacks up a steep hill to reception, sweating and panting in the heat, while the sulky staff watched us struggle from a distance. Toure showed me videos of white people enthusiastically enjoying themselves at a stilt dance and tried to sign me up even while I shook my head in irritation (I was really, really irritated). But we decided to hear what Toure had to say about the villages, and he came over to lie to our faces about the cost of the trip instead of just lying over WhatsApp. We appreciated that, and gave up on the villages and stilts altogether.
Both of us were kind of relieved, actually. That sort of thing just isn’t really our style. Giving up on any organised guiding for the time being we made plans on our own, but that didn’t exactly work out either.
We took a walk out of town to a nearby waterfall but along the way we learned it was ‘closed’. We thought about hiking up the Dent de Man – a peak jutting out of the mountains and looking like a giant tooth. It’s known as a fantastic lookout point. But the harmattan winds carrying dust from the Sahara had turned the sky white and pretty much obscured any view we could possibly hope to see from the top.
In the end none of that really mattered to us. We’d been on the move a lot lately and we wanted to relax. Man is an energetic little town in the beautiful Dix-Huit Montagnes.
The air is cool in the evenings.
There are a lot of bakeries selling baguettes and pain au chocolat, a leftover French legacy. The French left other dietary legacies behind, too:
And some with a more local twist:
There is some good street food and friendly people (who aren’t employed at our hotel). There’s the usual market-madness of a buzzing African town and we liked it.
Our new hotel had a pool and the pool actually had water in it, so that was a major plus.
There’s a liquor store in town and they let us go right into the back and climb over the crates and boxes to pick out a couple bottles of wine.
We learned a long time ago that everything is easier said than done around here. There are generally few of the traditional ‘sights’ that draw tourists or travelers, and that’s exactly what draws us. We like the challenges that come with an unexplored and unusual destination, where our focus is on things like the logistics of the actual travel itself – just getting from place to place on our own, and seeing what we find there. Hiring a guide is hit and miss. Sometimes they really aren’t any good – yet other times, we’ve had an amazing day thanks to a thoughtful and knowledgeable one. Information is pretty scarce and whatever we do find is very often obsolete – things change rapidly, like the closing of the local waterfall. Don’t worry – if you’re planning to go to Man, the waterfall has probably opened again even as I write this post.
Read More
For more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Ivory Coast, check out the rest of my stories from the road.
