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Travel notes from Bamako 2
Hi Everyone,
I'm back in Bamako after spending the last two weeks touring around the country. After my exhausting two-day trip from Senegal to Bamako and successfully meeting up with Joanna at the Lac Debo hotel, I spent a day taking it easy. Bamako is not a very nice place, it is a large African city, polluted and without much charm. A lot of the side roads are dirt and in the evening the city is choked with wood smoke from fires used for cooking. It's a dusty, dirty place.
The Lac Debo was an expensive place to stay, and not really worth it, so we moved to the old Lebanese Mission, which has been turned, into a hotel. During the day we met the Slovenian couple again and we agreed to travel together.
We soon left and took a bus the 245km along the Niger River to Mali's second city Segou. The main road through the country, which follows the Niger River is paved and in very good condition.
Unfortunately the bus wasn't and about a third of the way through our journey the suspension broke and we had to limp the rest of the way to our destination. We made it and checked into the Centre Accuiel. We spent a day in town walking along the river. We had trouble trying to shake off some guides who decided to follow us everywhere. Eventually we succeeded. There are not a lot of touristy things to do in Segou; most people pass through here on their way to Mopti and the Dogon region of the country.
The next day we took a bus up to Sevare next to Mopti, the hub of the tourist industry in the country. The bus journey was long and hot. It didn't help that Joanna and myself were not feeling too well. We arrived in Sevare and were swarmed on by guides. We took a taxi out of the town centre to a guesthouse called Macs Refuge. I collapsed when we arrived and crawled into bed suffering from a fever and diarrhoea. We couldn't of chosen a better place to be ill. Mac, an American ex-pat will surely become a traveller's legend. The hospitality was second to none. He nursed us back to health, which took three days.
We were now running short of time as Joanna had only a couple of weeks in the country. We had wanted to spend some time out in Dogon Country, but now only had time for a couple of nights.
We hired a car and driver to save us time and drove out to Sanga about halfway along the escarpment. The Dogon people live along a 250km escarpment and have a very individual culture. I'll write more on it in my travel report when I get home. We hired a guide for a day to hike down the escarpment and between a couple of villages. The villages are all made of small mud brick houses. It was harvest time, the busiest time of year for the Dogon. The millet was being harvested and the onion crops being planted. The escarpment echoed to the sounds from the villages, the pounding of the millet and the screaming of the children.
We hiked for about 3 1/2 hours from Sanga to Banani where we stopped for lunch. At the villages the people were welcoming and pleased to see us. Everyone was very relaxed. After sitting in the shade during the heat of the day we hiked back up the escarpment to Sanga.
The next day our travel plans went pear shaped as they so often do in Africa. We arranged a ride from Sanga back to Bandigara along a small little used dirt road. We thought that that would be the most difficult part of the journey. At Bandigara we ended up waiting for five and a half hours for a bush taxi to take us back to Sevare. We basically ended up losing a day sitting in a hot and dusty taxi park with no taxis going anywhere.
By nightfall we had made it back to Sevare, we had planned to go to Djenne today, but sacked those plans and stayed again at Macs Refuge. An American girl, Teresa had already arranged a car and driver to take her to Djenne the next day for a day trip. We joined her the next day and split the cost of the car between three.
Djenne is one of the most picturesque towns in West Africa and one of the oldest. It sits on an island in the Niger River. All the buildings are made of mud brick and it is famous for the giant mud brick mosque. We hired a guide to take us around town for a couple of hours. it reminded me a lot of the towns in Yemen I visited in 1998.
Despite our short lived illness we still managed to see everything in Mali we wanted. It would of been nice to spend a couple more days hiking in Dogon Country, but we had neither the time nor the energy to hike for miles, especially in the heat here.
We took a bus back to Bamako yesterday as Joanna is flying back to London tonight. Tomorrow myself and Teresa are taking the bus to Sikasso in the south of the country. From there Ill be crossing the frontier with Burkina Faso and will be starting another new adventure in another new country.
Regards
Geoff
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