Photographic Voyage

For four weeks we traveled through Mali, and it has made our list of one of the best countries we've ever been to. The people are friendly, the landscapes are beautiful, and the food is good. We were able to immerse ourselves into the Malian culture and see the country in ways that we never would have imagined.

We crossed over the border from Senegal where there was a transportation strike. Our voyage was a bit rough, and when we got to the Mali side we found ourselves waiting to catch a sept-place to get to Kayes. (A sept-place is a 7-seater shared taxi.) As is the norm in West Africa, the sept-place driver was only going to leave when it was full so that he could maximize his income. However, we knew that no one was coming from Senegal due to the strike, so we decided to just buy all of the remaining seats in the car. There were already three men who had bought tickets and they had them in their hands. As we were getting into the car, the ticket man wouldn't give Laurie and I our tickets, though. I was worried about not having proof that we had payed, and so I repeatedly asked him to give them to me. Finally, instead of handing me two tickets he gave me all of the remaining tickets for the car and said, "Here, go sell them yourself on the road then!" This is not what I had in mind, but now that I "owned" the rest of the car, the prospect of picking up more passengers and making a little money back seemed intriguing. The road to Kayes was good and smooth, but it went through the middle of nowhere, so we unfortunately did not come across any more potential passengers.

Kayes

Kayes is the hottest city on Earth. Not only is it in Africa, which by default makes it really frickin' hot, it is also surrounded by hills that are full of iron ore. In the summer the city literally bakes itself. Despite this heat it is quite scenic. The Senegal river flows through the middle, and the daily market is very large and active. When we arrived we had some trouble finding our no-longer-in-business hotel, so we stumbled into another one that had air conditioning, but at 22,000 CFA (about $45), it was more than we wanted to pay. We spent a few days resting and wandering through the market while enjoying fresh papaya and mangoes. Then we ran into Emily, a Peace Corp volunteer living in Kayes and she offered to let us stay at her place for a few days. She had a kitchen, so we went to the market and bought a bunch of food for dinner. Going through an African market with the intention of buying stuff is an entirely different experience than just looking around and taking some photos. After awhile we had the ingredients we needed. We managed to make some good non-African-food meals and enjoyed the company of Emily and a few other Peace Corp folks while watching some American television shows on DVD. After a few weeks in Senegal, it was needed. It was a nice escape from our immediate reality, and it made us realize that since our trip began we had been always vigilant and acutely aware of our surroundings. We needed a mental break, and homemade Mexican food with trashy reality TV served that purpose well.

Emily also spoke the local language, and she taught us to say very important things such as, "You eat beans!", a powerful insult in the local language.

Segou

A very long bus ride took us from Kayes to Segou (bypassing Bamako), a quiet but large town on the Niger river. We arrived at our chosen hotel just in time for Pizza Night. Every Toubab in town was there. ("Toubab" is how the locals refer to white tourists.) The hotel had a brick pizza oven and was making them to order, so we couldn't say no. We spent four days in Segou, and there was a lot to see. On our first day, a Sunday, we explored the town. Most of the homes were made of square courtyards with mud walls, and smaller huts inside. Everyone was constantly going to and from the river with clothes to wash or food brought in from boats. The local kids started to follow us around town. Some would ask for money or candy, but most just wanted to have their picture taken and then see the photo on the screen of our cameras.

Every Monday in Segou is market day, and people from all around the region bring their produce, pottery, fresh meat and fish, plastic buckets, and other random things to sell to each other. It was quite the scene, as people flooded the streets and built temporary shelters in any available space they could find in the streets.

On our last day we took a boat ride to Kalabougou, a village about an hour up the river. The village is known for its pottery. Most of the residents have joined into a type of cooperative where all of the profits from the pottery sales go towards things in the village such as the school and the wells. Our guide took us into a few people's homes. Once inside the wall that forms the courtyard of their homes, they all basically live outdoors. Everything is arranged in the courtyard, but they sleep in very small structures. Most of the people in villages like this don't have electricity or running water. They must make multiple trips every day to the nearby wells. They showed us how they make the various pots and plates from clay, and paint them with natural dyes. Finally we returned by boat back to Segou.

The only bad part about our time in Segou was that a goat was tied to a tree just outside of our hotel room door. It belonged to the family living in the house next door. All day and sometimes during the night it made its bleating noise, which was very annoying.

Djenne

Djenne is a small town in central Mali, built on an island in the Bani river. It is famous for being almost entirely made of mud, including the large mud mosque which is the largest mud building in the world. Many of the buildings are two and three stories tall, which is an engineering miracle since they are made of dirt and a few wooden supports. Every year after the rainy season, the people of the town repair their homes with mud bricks and sludge from the river.

We arrived on a Thursday night and had some very good but overpriced pigeon for dinner at our hotel, "Le Campement". Like many hotels in Mali, they had a variety of rooms for every budget. You could sleep on the roof (actually very tempting because of the heat) or get a deluxe room with air-con and your own bathroom. We chose something in the middle for a reasonable 12,500 CFA. The next day we looked for a cheaper restaurant, but they were hard to come by. We went back to our old staples of fruit and bread from the market before finding a reasonably priced place to have lunch. We ended up eating almost every meal at this restaurant. This was surprising to us since Djenne is one of the premier tourist attractions of Mali, and the whole town only had three places to eat!

We spent the next few days exploring the amazing mud town and many of the surrounding villages. The local children, as usual, began to follow us everywhere we went. In one of the small towns nearby, some students proudly showed us their notebooks from class. They were learning about geography and had drawn maps of almost every country in the world.

Like Segou, Djenne has a huge Monday market, and this one was the biggest we had seen so far. Almost overnight the area in front of the mosque and the surrounding streets filled with people and their goods. We bought some of the largest mangoes we have ever seen for 50 CFA each from a man who was selling them out of the back of a truck. The truck was huge and full of mangoes, and another man was using a bucket to shovel them out.

Then we met up with man named Amadou who works for the Red Cross. He runs an organization that finds homes for orphans in Djenne, and he is also trying to raise money to build an orphanage. He showed us the location for the future building and told us about the plans. He even wants part of the orphanage to be an inexpensive hotel for tourists so that the project will be sustainable. Amadou invited us to his home to have tea and meet some of the children. The kids were excited and in a frenzy to meet us Toubabs, but after they left we had a chance to have a chat with Amadou and check out his house from the inside. The mud home was very interesting. The family spends most of their time in a small courtyard area the size of a normal room, but open to sky. A few smaller rooms went off to the side with beds and tables. A mud staircase went up to the roof, and a smaller 2nd story was built on top of the house. Inside the first room was a shelf with a dozen sets of 6 very nice matching pots that neatly stacked upon each other, and each having a different flower pattern. We found this interesting since they don't have a stove, but cook all of their food on these small metal charcoal holder things. Furniture was limited, even their old dingy TV sat on a chair.

Dogon Country

A 200 kilometer long cliff cuts through southeastern Mali, and about 80 small villages can be found in and around the escarpment and the surrounding rock formations. The Dogon people fled to this area hundreds of years ago to escape the other ethnic groups, and now the area has become the main sight to see in Mali. Despite the growing number of tourists that come, the area has a truly authentic feel. Laurie and I both agreed that once the word gets out about how amazing this place is, The Dogon Country will soon become one of the top places to see in the world, right up there with the Pyramids of Egypt, Angkor, the Grand Canyon, Venice, and the Great Wall of China. I'm not exaggerating, Dogon Country really is that amazing.

To get there from Djenne we took a bus to Sevare, a crossroads town where we met up with Hassimi, our Dogon guide (recommended to us by Emily from Kayes). We decided to do a 4-day, 3-night trek in and along the cliff to see some villages, and the next day Hassimi picked us up in his 1968 Peugeot Piece of Junk. It is very difficult and expensive to obtain what we would call a "normal" car in Mali, and besides, these old beaters add to the African atmosphere. Our first stop was a small village on top of a rocky hill at the end of a long dirt road through the middle of nowhere. We walked through town and saw the small mud and stone houses next to the hut-like granaries. Dogon men can have as many wives as they can afford to support. Each man has his own granary and fields where he grows millet for his family. Millet only grows during the rainy season, and so the men store the grain in the large granary for the rest of the year. Each woman also has her own granary and fields, but she grows other crops for year-round consumption such as tomatoes and onions. While the men farm much more, it is usually during the rainy season, and the women are responsible for most of the other domestic chores. The women definitely get the raw end of the deal in Dogon culture. The worst part is probably dealing with the water. The women must carry heavy buckets of water on their heads from the wells, usually a long way, while the men sit around and wait for the rains to start in July.

After the first village, we drove and then hiked down over the cliff to another village where we spent the night on the roof of a small campement on some thin mattresses. It was much cooler than being inside of a clay building that has been warming itself all day in the sun. This first night it actually got quite cool as some light rains blew through. The nice people at the camp had set up a bed for us inside the building so that we could come down if we got too cold. Unfortunately, none of them actually told us about that, so we spent the night shivering with one of the mattresses pulled on top of us for a blanket. Our guide laughed at us the next morning, but we didn't want to appear to be the wimpy Americans who couldn't handle the cold weather. It turned out to be a nice reprieve from the heat.

That next day we hiked to a town that was partly built up into an opening in the side of the cliff. The day after that we hiked up a ravine through the cliff and spent the night in a village that sat on a large rocky outcropping of the cliff. The views across the land were wide open and pocketed with occasional trees. On our last day we hiked down and out of the cliff through a narrow gorge that opened into a view of the cliff extending out to our right and the distant desert extending to the horizon. (Words can't do it justice, so check out the photos.) The best part was that each village was not a tourist attraction, but instead was an actual village where the people were going about their daily lives. Instead of the "human zoo" experience that we've had in other places, we felt more like guests in their homes, and almost an intrusion into their culture.

Mopti

Once we left Hassimi and the Dogons behind, we went to Mopti (which is very close to Sevare). Mopti lies on the Niger river, and we noticed many similarities to Segou. Boats were coming and going up and down the river, and there was a lot of activity. Parts of it had a dirty and modern feel, which was probably magnified even more since we had spent the last 4 days in small villages without electricity or water. We found a cool hotel, "Ye Pas De Probleme" which in French means "It's not a problem". We had a very clean and modern room, and the place even had a swimming pool. We ate lunch one day at the Bissap Cafe. Bissap is a delicious local drink made from hibiscus flowers and sugar. It is cooked down like tea until it is very thick and dark red, and it tastes like super-concentrated koolaid, but without the artificiality. Mopti was really a place for us to rest for a few days, and it served that purpose well.

Gao: Beyond Timbuktu

Everyone wants to go to Timbuktu so that they can say they went there. It's just in the name, really, that says that you went to the end of the world. It was a very hard decision, but we decided instead to go to Gao. Getting to Timbuktu is very expensive and time-consuming because the roads are horrible. We would have spent a lot of money and spent the night on the side of the road to get to a place that everyone said was not worth visiting. While Timbuktu may have been the grand Saharan caravan-port city in the past, apparently now it's just a few old mud buildings decaying the desert. To us, it just wasn't worth it to go for one night, take a photo, and then come back the next day (as a few tour guides told us that was what most people did).

Gao is actually much further into the desert and down the Niger river than Timbuktu. However, it has a well paved road leading to it, and so most of Mali's major bus companies go there. The only bad part was that the bus ride was overnight. Sleeping on a bus is never fun, but we went for it anyway and it was well worth it. On our first day we arrived around five in the morning as the sun was rising. We checked out an old and grand hotel that must have been absolutely amazing in its day, but now is a total dump. We decided to go to a newer hotel that was further away from the middle of town instead. We slept some and then explored town.

Tuareg, Songhai, and other nomadic people's temporary homes had been erected in many of the town's open areas. They come to Gao during the Harmattan, the seasonal winds that drive dust and sand into the air. It was fascinating to see these dome-like makeshift shelters around town, built in empty lots and sometimes in the middle of large but quiet intersections. These shelters, combined with the other mud brick and low built cement structures, gave the whole town a dusty edge-of-the-desert feel. We had an early lunch at "The Source du Nord" which served us some terrific fish (Capitane) from the Niger river. It was so good we went back for a second lunch a few hours later. We also explored the nearby market which contained a lot of different foods and wares. Boats from Nigeria, Niger, and other places along the Niger river made it this far up the river and deposited their goods. We had planned to hire a boat to take us out on the river, but since we were still tired from our overnight bus ride, we decided to wait until the next day. It was also a long walk back to our hotel at the edge of town, so we thought it would be a good idea to change to the old elegant-yet-crummy hotel in the middle of town that we had first seen when we arrived.

The next morning our plan was to change hotels and then find a boat to go out on the river. But when we woke up and went outside, we were hit with the full onslaught of the Harmattan. Visibility was about one hundred feet. It looked like the fog of San Francisco, but more brown, and very painful. The wind was strong and drove the sand into our skin like pins and needles. If we started to talk or breathe, it felt like someone had thrown a handful of dirt into our mouths. Almost immediately a nice guy we had met the day before approached us. He was an artist and wanted to know if he could show us his paintings, but at the time we were eating lunch and had given our standard answer of "later" to the numerous people who try to sell us things. This guy was persistent though, so at this point we really had no choice but to follow him to his shop a few blocks away, despite the sandstorm-like conditions. Looking back it was worth it just to walk for a little while in this weather, because the people who live in this region of the world deal with this all the time. As painful and uncomfortable as it was, I can now say that I saw the Harmattan first hand. We finally got to the guy's shop, which was also his house. It was somewhat new, and was a plain building with a few small square rooms. He showed us his interesting paintings and we bought one, and he also showed us his house. He was very happy to meet Americans. He was wearing a Barrack Obama pin on his shirt. He had a poster showcasing the recent election in America on his wall, with pictures of Obama, Biden, McCain, and Palin, all posed as if it were a movie poster. It also had a picture of the Capital Building that was labeled "The White House" and small photos of every past American president. Next to this poster were several others, including a large poster of a nude white couple embracing in a way that was very close to porn, and a large poster of the French soccer player Zidane, famous for head-butting an opponent in the chest. The only other things in his house were a small single bed and a short table with stools.

After returning to our hotel in the sandy wind we waited out the storm for awhile before packing up and catching a taxi to the other hotel. We again had lunch at the fish restaurant and then found a guide to take us out on the river to see the large "Dune Rose" sand dune. This time of year the Niger is very low, and we set off with our guide and our boat driver in a little wooden canoe-like boat. The boat man used a long pole to push the boat through the water, and it took us about an hour to get to the dune. Once there, we climbed to the top and saw the river below us and the desert stretching out forever to the other side. There were a few villages around the dune of the local Songhai people, one of the local ethnic groups that are semi-nomadic. Even though Gao is a fairly large town with some modern amenities, I found it hard to believe that people could live so far away from the rest of civilization and make a life for themselves. It hits you very quickly here that life in this area is very hard. In the Songhai language, the name for the Dune Rose is "Come Understand". It is a place where people come to pray and witness the desert. After 2 days in Gao we saw a lot, but it is still hard to understand the difficulties of life that these people deal with everyday.

The bus ride back to Mopti was long, but at least this time is was during the day. There was a man on our bus dressed in traditional blue robes with a yellow head wrap, and he was carrying a sword. During the bus ride, we were able to watch the desert roll by along with the occasional small village and odd rock formation. At one point in the middle of nowhere the bus stopped. The man in the blue robes got off of the bus. He had a water bottle and a his sword. As the bus drove away, he set out away from the road on foot into the desert, and we strained our eyes to see if there was some village off in the distance, but we saw nothing. Out here, "middle of nowhere" has an entirely new meaning.

Once back Mopti again we took the local bus to our hotel from the bus station. It was an old beat up thing with wooden benches in the back. I felt something rubbing my leg under the bench, but it was now dark and I couldn't see it. I reached my hand down and then something squawked. It turned out to be 3 live chickens that belonged to the man sitting next to me, and he laughed at me when I realized what it was. He got off of the bus before us carrying them away by the feet, flapping their wings and squawking as we drove off. After a few more days in Mopti we left for Bamako, the capital of Mali, so we could catch our flight to Paris.