Well, I made it to Saturday 14th in one piece! I did spend, however, approximately 22 hours on a bus, or waiting for the bus at various checkpoints. It was highly unpleasant and I must have managed about 2 hours sleep, not all at once, but once it got light I could look at the countryside, which is very flat, and dusty, and full of donkeys. The Togo-Burkina Faso border crossing, for those who shared that memorable experience with me, bears no little resemblance to the infamous "arsehole of Africa" - except I arrived there just before dawn. This, I will admit in a vain attempt to draw something positive from the experience, avoided some of the problems generally associated with border crossings in Africa, i.e. hundreds of people trying to hustle you everywhere, but did make it all rather surreal. And it was actually cold. COLD. I had been completely unprepared for that and was just wearing a flimsy skirt and top, rather like that bit in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius where he says he's been living in California so long it never even occurred to him to take a coat when he went to Chicago.

On leaving Lomé I had taken Sarah's advice and decided that wearing my 'wedding ring' as soon as I left the house would be by far the best policy, and despite the fact that it is *blatantly* too big for that finger, and *blatantly* was picked up for about £2.50 in a random shop in Lamu rather than symbolising some lifelong bond of love (well, it may symbolise some lifelong addiction to jewellery shopping in hot countries, but that's a different story), I managed to fool the random Nigerian who sat beside me (which he was very excited about because he didn't speak French and hadn't had much conversation for the past two weeks). What actually ensued was probably still more pleasant than fending off propositions for 22 hours, but the upshot of my brilliant plan was that everyone on the bus thought I was married to the Nigerian (nothing could be further from the truth: he was whiny and stroppy and started to seriously piss me off, and after Atakpamé I spent the journey listening to the much more tranquil Snow Patrol) and he spent two hours asking me questions like, 'What's marriage like?' and 'I once saw a film called Titanic - does love like that really exist?' Which at least made the journey fairly comic...

I'm staying in Guillaume's office in Ougadougou, which is v central and nice though extremely dusty. I am extremely tired, however, so I don't mind in the slightest, it's just nice to be able to stretch out in a straight line again.

I wanted to end this with some appropriate lyrics, but on googling, I've just discovered that I've been under the impression 'Catch the sun' contains the line 'I miss the way you laugh' (instead of 'lie') for the last five years, and it's no longer appropriate at all, so I'm going to go home and sulk and catch up on some sleep, and then tomorrow I'm going to lie by a pool and recuperate, and on Monday I'm going to get a visa for Mali and look at the market and find a bus, and on Tuesday I'm going to get said bus, go to Mali, and try and find a guide to take me trekking in 35° heat.

How did I get more tanned sitting on a bus than from spending three and a half months virtually on the beach? Truly, life is mysterious.