Mali

Well were back in Gambia and back to work after a great few weeks on our trip to Mali. I don’t know have much detail I will get into here but I will try to give you a rundown on our journey. Check Lydia’s blog also as she has a good post about the trip as well.

Our trip was almost exclusively took place in buses, cars and trucks and consisted of quite a long haul over bad west African roads in bad west African cards. That being said I will say that the transport in the better traveled areas of Mali was surprisingly good. Much better then in The Gambia anyway but once you get off the main track it’s the same old story. Our trip took us over thousands of miles of these roads but even though the travel was always uncomfortable and often painful it was a lot of fun and seeing what we saw was surely worth it.

We started out our trip prepping here in the good old home town of Brikama. Becca our traveling companion came over the day before and we got all our stuff packed up for an early start the next morning. The next few days were spent in transit (as were many days) to Mali from the Gambia. If you look at a map you can tell that its some distance before you actually get to Mali from The Gambia. We spend another night in Gambia in the far eastern town of Basse which was our jumping off point for Senegal. It took us another day to get to the largest settlement in Eastern Senegal which is known as Tambacounda. This town had little to see other then our first encounter with Lydia’s favored French colonial relic, the patisserie. After that it was on to Mali. The next few days were almost non-stop travel to the capitol of Mali, Bamako. The scenery was pretty nice much of the way. Once you get into Mali things start to open up into savanna and you have long views in all directions. There is also some topography here which is a departure from what were used to in The Gambia which is flatness. The villages along the way also changed quite a bit, mainly in their construction style. Most of their buildings are all mud with flat mud roofs which is suppose is due to the lack of grass which is what many roofs in The Gambia are made out of. Once we left Senegal we just took buses and cars non-stop until we arrived in Bamako late in the night and crashed on a porch after having some trouble finding accommodation at the late hour. Anyway it provided an interesting story with a moral, If you ever find yourself without a place to stay ask if you can sleep on someone’s porch and you may get lucky.

Bamako was our first major destination on the trip. It’s a big busy city of a little less then 2 million people set along the Niger River. We enjoyed walking around the different sections of the city and markets. This is where a disease which I am not familiar with started to take hold of me. For those of you who know me I’m not the type to buy souvenirs and things like that when I go on vacation and I never expected to do it this time with the possible exception of a few things for friends or something. Anyway Malians make so much cool hand made stuff that is practical and useful and that they actually use daily that I found things that I just had to have. If its one thing I have a weakness for it’s the practical and useful. It turns out that I wasn’t the only one with this problem and needless to say we had extra baggage on the way home. At one point Lydia and Becca found the ‘fetish stall’ section of the market where you can buy your very own rotting monkey head or other suspicious looking items to include in the ritual of your choosing. Lydia and I took a rainy afternoon to go check out the Muesee National which was amazing and I felt like I was in New York not Mali. It was very well designed and put together and had some cool exhibits on Malian culture and history. Reading all those little plaques gave us plenty of French practice too.

Next stop was Segou which was a nice little quiet town also set along the Niger river that is about 4 or 5 hours east of Bamako. We didn’t do a whole lot here except relax and enjoy the layed back mood. We walked along down the by river which had some nice views and a busy little fishing/cargo port. Here we stayed in a sweet little hotel and got what was to be the first of several discounts along the way just because we are Peace Corps Volunteers (‘Corps de la Paix’ in french).

After that we headed to Mopti and Sevare which are right next to each other but Sevare is where we spend most of our time since it was way more chilled out. Here we found one of our favorite places to stay on our whole trip. There is this little hotel run by an American man that has lived in the area for a long time. He is probably in his late 50s and was actually born in Mopti the son of missionaries that arrived in the 20s. Anyway the place was a good location to stage our travel to Dogon country and to recoup for a couple of days here and there when we were passing through. The food was great with huge breakfasts and dinners all served just like at the farm with everybody sitting around one big table and bowls and plates being passed all around. (I assume this is how its one at ‘the farm’). We wasted a few days here trying to get to a near by town called Djenne which is supposed to have one of the oldest mud mosques in west Africa with some interesting architecture but after a failed attempt and about 6 hours of waiting for a car that might be going to our destination without success we decided that it probably looked like a lot of other mud mosques we had seen. Since none of us are particularly history buffs we decided we could probably let this one slide.

The next big adventure was heading out to Dogon country. This area is a few hours ride from Mopti and consists of a long (around 100km) rocky cliff area. In this area the Dogon people have lived for the last 1000 years or so I believe. They build their villages very close to or on the cliff which was originally for protection from other warring tribes and animals. They have a very interesting belief system and cultural but the most interesting thing for me was just to see the villages and how they were build on the rocks. There are also some remnants of dwellings left by the people that inhabited the area before the Dogon. Some of their dwellings are so high up on the cliff it’s hard to believe they could ever get to them. We hired a guide and spend quite a while in these villages and hiked on foot throughout and stayed in different villages each night. We seemed to get rained on each day but it wasn’t so bad because it cooled everything down but sometimes it caused instant flooding and we had to camp out for awhile while we waited for the rivers to settle down so we could cross them. Dogon was surely one of the highlights of the trip.

:-)

After Dogon we went back and spent some more time relaxing in Sevare and gather up all our things that we had left there so we didn’t have to take them hiking with us. From there we pretty much made our way back home as fast as possible with the exception of another prolonged stop in Bamako for a final relaxing few nights in a nice hotel. We even went out for dinner at a nice restaurant and had a bottle of red wine. Crazy! Hadn’t had anything like that since we left the states. Our return route pretty much took the same path and was mostly uneventful except for the inevitable breakdowns and getting stuck here and there. My favorite was the old truck we took from Veligara in Senegal to Basse in Gambia. It was a small old pick up truck probably from the 50s or 60s would be my best guess. The back had some wooden slats in it and we crammed about 14 in the back and another 4 in the front and an additional 3 or 4 on the roof with the luggage. During the two hours or so we were in this vehicle we had to stop to fill the radiator about 3 times, blew out a shock so they had to rig something with a pipe and some rope to keep the tier from rubbing on the truck, and finally every time the driver was in a low gear and the transmission popped our of gear the apprentice kid who was riding on the roof had to jump down and crawl under the car to push it back into gear.

That’s about it for our trip. I’m sure there is more I might think of later. New pictures of the trip should be up later today so check those out. Hope to hear from all of you soon. Send your comments if you got em.