I hummed and hawed about whether to keep my 29-year-old Peugeot 504 and take it to Burkina.
After getting a quote of about $760 in parts to get it on the road, plus another sum for insurance etc. and being told I’d get a maximum of $3000 if sold in good shape, I decided to go ahead with it, thinking that even with customs duty in Burkina Faso it was better than the $10 000 price for a decent secondhand car there.
The mechanic kept saying “it’ll be ready tomorrow” but it was finally finished the morning we were supposed to leave. He was coming with me to ensure nothing happened on the long trip, so we ended up leaving at 3pm.
We didn’t cross the Burkina border until 7pm, and the customs guy on duty said the car needed to go through processing ‘with the chiefs’ during working hours, so we had to stay overnight at the border. Besides which, the next 100km or so of road was already closed for the night because of bandits.
After a bit of a search we found a very basic inn. The mechanic slept in the car with my more expensive and fragile goods, and I had a room with a bed and overhead fan - and nothing else. No ceiling, no screens, and the latrine and open room used for a bucket bath the other side of the courtyard. I didn’t sleep much anyway, so we were up in plenty of time to sit and wait for customs to open at 7am and see the customs agent that was ‘preparing our file’. There was a lot of smiling, polite conversation with people in uniforms, drinking water and drinks from wandering sellers to cope with the heat,an electricity cutoff for almost 2 hours delaying the computerize document ...
We finally left about 11.30am after paying about $30 for the appropriate customs document and about $80 to the agent and arrived in Ouaga at 4.30pm, 25.5 hours after leaving Parakou. The SIM office contacted another agent once we got to Ouagadougou and I haven’t seen the bill for that yet (do I want to?). I do know that he said there were problems, that the customs alone was over $1700, but one tank of petrol, one week, and oneside mirror later it became a Burkinabe car and ready to be bumped through the hard rocky back roads of Ouagadougou, deformed by the rainy season into obstacle courses.
