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We "awoke" at 6 am after an awful night's sleep. Each of us had lain awake practically all night, for no apparent reason. We stumbled out of bed, and got showered. The layout of the bathroom meant that anything within the bathroom would get soaked by the shower head, so we handed one another towels from the other room once we were finished showering. We headed out to the courtyard for our appointed 7 am breakfast time. We had Nescafe, tea, orange juice, baguettes with jam, Laughing Cow cheese, and banana bread. At the tail end of the meal we had some very funny political conversation. Bahini was amused and said that Tina was "a funny talker."
At 8:20, we hit the road in the direction of Mopti. Bahini and Pam stayed in the way back of the car, and Tina and Susan switched off in the front seat. Craig and I happily stayed in the back seat (Craig took the middle), thinking that we would save our front seat priveledges in case we ever really needed them. We crossed a bridge over the Niger as we headed out of Segou. We listened to Bouba's "Ali Farka Toure's Greatest Hits" cassette. Bouba's full name was Boubacar, and we joked that the Land Cruiser was our Bouba Car. We had a lot of laughs. We passed many termite mounds as we drove. It became obvious why most structures are built out of mud rather than wood in these parts. Bouba announced a "Peepee!" break and stopped the car. We wandered away behind some bushes and Craig noticed an animal in the distance with a kill in its mouth. We thought it might be a jackal. We called Bahini over and asked him about it. He said that it was "just a dog." Wildlife is not as plentiful in this arid land as it is in east Africa. As we walked back to the vehicle, a man and his son (a little boy wearing a castoff oversized sportcoat) approached as they walked down the road. The father was carrying a spike which he was using for breaking stones. They smiled and wished us bonjour and shook our hands. This is how the Malian people are, always very gracious and friendly. Bouba saluted Craig once again. "General!" He then saluted me and said "Commandant!" and shook my hand. He was a riot. We got back into the vehicle and continued our drive. At 11:15, we stopped at the Hotel Teriya for lunch. We sat at a table in the open-air A-frame building and ordered Fanta and beef filet with French fries. Some young girls outside were trying to get our attention by dancing. They were very cute. I got up and took a couple of pictures of them, and then an adult shooed them away. They ran away but hid behind things to continue watching us. We enjoyed our lunch and the ability to stretch our legs after the long ride. We used the outdoor restroom and then piled back into the car. By 12:30 we were on the road again. We listened to another of Bouba's cassettes, this time Samaya Djeli. We pulled over in a village with a roadside market. Bouba hopped out and quickly bought some kola nuts. Bouba chews the nuts, which contain caffeine, to keep him alert while driving. When we arrived in Mopti, we stopped at a convenience store to buy a case of water. We knew we would be buying many cases of water on the trip, so we took turns paying for them. This time was our turn, and Craig paid and went to pick up a case from the pile. The shopkeeper scolded him, and we weren't quite sure what was going on. The language barrier and different customs were difficult to navigate when Bahini was not right there to help. In the end, it seemed that they wanted to load it into our car for us; that was part of the service and they didn't want Craig to do it himself. But their rather brusque manner had confused us. While stopped at this convenience store, we crossed the stone walled courtyard behind the store (where a herd of goats were huddled in the sparse shade) to use the open air outhouse with 3/4 height walls. Craig bought me a cold Fanta as a surprise treat for the ride. We continued on and I started to doze a bit just as the interesting landforms of the Bandiagara Escarpment started to come into view. The landscape was absolutely stunning. The tarmac road gave way to dirt but the road was still in relatively good shape. We saw a small airstrip which turned out to be the Mopti airport. We drove through the town of Bandiagara, where we would be staying tomorrow night. There were several hotels and businesses right on the main road, but we were soon back out into the wide open landscape. We passed more baobab trees, and the rocky ground looked like it had at one time been the bottom of the ocean. It was other-worldly. Occasional areas of water were surrounded by a patchwork of technicolor green onion fields. Each plot was about a square yard, and the plots were recessed with little stones dividing them. It was a shock of green in an otherwise red and brown landscape. We started to see Dogon villages, with their boxy mud buildings and their granaries with conical thatched roofs and elaborately carved wooden doors. The whole setting was so surreal. We desperately tried to get photos while driving past, and Bahini laughed saying that we would have plenty of opportunities. We stopped in a desolate stretch of road for another "peepee break". Craig pointed out a sizeable rock that was wedged incongruously in the thorns of a shrub. As we drove, we noticed some rocks that were reddish on the outside, and white on the inside where they had broken apart. We realized that this was where the white stone in so many of the non-mud buildings came from. The sun was getting lower in the sky and we realized that we wouldn't make it to Sangha in time for sunset. Little goats on the side of the road finally had some substantial boulders to climb. Little girls were carrying small bundles of firewood on their heads. Children saw the vehicle coming and ran to head it off, holding up cute little Dogon mask dance dolls for sale. We were tempted to buy some, but we were in a rush to get to Sangha, and hoped that we would see some of these dolls for sale in the villages as well. Everything started to glow in the late afternoon light. As we approached the village of Sangha, we could see small buildings and the hotel looming on top of the hill ahead of us. In the low light the silhouettes of baobab trees looked strangely angular, like something out of a Robert Wilson play or The Nightmare Before Christmas. We checked into the Hotel Campement Guina at 5:50, and were led to room 21. The electrical generator doesn't turn on until 6 o'clock, and the room only had a very small window, so we couldn't see a thing. I took a few flash photos and we viewed the room through the camera screen. We headed outside to try to get a few photos of our surroundings before the daylight was totally gone. An employee pointed us toward the fabulous roofdeck which had a 360 degree view of the surrounding area. We went up there and viewed the rosy late afternoon light cast upon the surrounding Dogon communities. It was absolutely stunning! However, with the onset of night, local people were starting fires. This, coupled with the seasonal Harmittan winds blowing Sahara sand from the north, made the air really dusty. The visibility was poor and it was difficult to get many good photos. Susan joined us on the roofdeck, and we all made a mental note to head up to the deck at sunrise the next morning - when we could hopefully better capture the beauty of the environment. We headed back to the room and freshened up (now that we had electricity). We joined Pam, Tina, and Susan out in the courtyard for a drink. Craig had a Castel beer and I had a Fanta. Bahini soon joined us, and we headed upstairs to the outdoor dining area for dinner. Susan and Tina wanted a bottle of wine, and they inspected labels by the light of Susan's iPhone. The meal was included in our stay, and there was a fixed menu that they brought for everyone. We had French bread and a delicious onion soup. We thought back to the onion fields we had seen during our drive today. For the entree, we had rice with onion sauce, as well as some kind of meat. Bahini insisted it was a cow, but it seemed more like poultry, as it had skin and bones and didn't taste at all like beef. We suspect that maybe it was a guinea fowl. We had a great time at dinner and we had a lot of laughs. A dessert cake came and it had some kind of brown sweet substance as a filling. It was probably fig or date, but I suggested that maybe it was onion, and we all broke down into fits of giggles. Tina finally identified the taste as plantain, and we all agreed that must be what it was. Bouba walked by and gave Craig and hearty salute. "General!" I snapped a photo of him as he collapsed into laughter. We took photos of each other and chatted and finally headed back to our rooms at around 9. We had seen the moon and Venus from our dinner table, and Craig and I wandered the grounds and found a dark spot from which we could see Orion and the Pleiades. We went to bed at 10 o'clock, hoping we would get a decent night's sleep. |
 Lunch at Hotel Teriya  Landforms begin to change  Entering Dogon Country  Onion fields  View of Sangha from the roofdeck  Dinner  Pam, Craig, and Steph 
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