When in Mali

The second week in February my friend Jennie and I traveled to Mali, this is the tale. So we left Kedougou and made it all the way to Bamako in the same day (it’s a pretty far trip and we only managed it thanks to a lucky hitchhike from some Moroccans working near the Senegal-Mali border town of Kenieba, which our guidebook described as ‘the dog’s breakfast’ whatever the hell that means).

me hitchhiking in Kenieba with the beautiful escarpments in the background

We spent the next day buying our next bus tickets and roaming around Bamako, the national capital. We couldn’t really find anything that amazing in Bamako except for a ridiculous amount of public gardens (both ornamental and vegetable) and a disturbing lack of bars (we eventually found one, alhamdulillah).

this garden even had a train which I couldn't resist taking a photo with

 We also found the Peace Corps house and some volunteers who helped us plan some of the logistics for the rest of our trip. The next morning we left on an 9-hour bus ride to Mopti, a nice little town on the banks of the Bani and Niger rivers, which also boasts a pretty fantastic looking mosque built in the Sudanese style (out of mud, no cement), which is the basis for a lot of the local architecture throughout Mali and especially the Dogon Country.

the Great Mopti Mosque

Oh yeah and there were brochettes de capitaine, or fish skewers, soooo delicious! The next day we took a shared taxi about 12km away to Severe where we met our Dogon Country guide Hassimi. Hassimi is the best; he’s really awesome, extremely knowledgeable about the Dogon region and its’ peoples (because he is one himself), very funny, and oh yeah speaks English too. We left Severe that same afternoon, just Jennie, me and Hassimi in his car, and drove through Bandiagara to the beginning of the Dogon Country. 

an onion field on the road into Dogon Country

the same landscape literally 100 meters down the road from that onion field, amazing what one can accomplish with proper watering during dry-season gardening!

It’s an area in Central-South-Eastern Mali, near Burkina Faso (that description was terribly confusing, so if you are indeed still confused, that’s why god gave us the google, bismillah). The area consists of a high rocky plateau that extends for about 150km, South of it is a wide sandy plain that extends into Burkina Faso (seriously if you’re still that interested google it!). Either way, the Dogon people are (or mostly were) Animist which means they have a pretty cool culture, and to protect it from the incoming Fulani (ancestors of my ethnic group here in Senegal) who were spreading their new-found Islamic faith fast and hard. The Dogon people fled to this region and made their towns high up in the rock face of the edge of the plateau.

the cliff town of Teli

beautiful, nestled into the rock face

these tall structures are the graineries where the Dogon people store their grains, most usually millet

me and some graineries, and that's a Dogon ladder behind me

They were actually taking after an earlier group called the Tellem who made their mud huts even higher up (you can see them as the smaller, more ridiculously higher up structures on the rock face), but I digress and you’re not here for a history lesson…so back to our trip. We spent 3 days and 2 nights and trekked starting from Teli, slept in Ende, through Bagrou, had lunch in Yabatalou, through a local market in Doundouru, climbed up the rock escarpment (our word of the trip!) where we encountered this amazing green valley of onion fields (the Malians seem to have taken 1^st place on their ability to dry-season garden, whereas the Senegalese like their tea, aka they’re a bit lazier…)

it was like stepping into a valley-garden of eden

We then spent the night in the town of Begnimato on the edge of the rock plateau, with an extremely beautiful sunset. The next morning we met a local hunter there where I just had to get a photo…

me and a Dogon hunter, he actually sold Hassimi the roasted pig leg that we ate for dinner the night before

We continued along the edge of the plateau through Indelu where we finally climbed down the rock face through a crack, literally through a crack.

Jennie using a Dogon ladder as we began our descent down the crack (she's not wearing any shoes because she didn't want her boutique flip-flops to break, Hassimi thought she was crazy, she kind of is)

And back out to our guide Hassimi’s car. Sorry for all the details of towns’ names, etc. it’s mostly so I don’t forget it. I also picked up this pretty neat Malian lock that they put on their grainerie doors. At first I thought it was a simple wood slide but it actually has an ingenious little locking mechanism on the back that requires a key to open it. I discovered this after being locked out of our room the first morning for 15 minutes before Hassimi came over chuckling and told me there was a key (of course you fool). After all that I just had to buy one.

the Dogon door lock that I bought in Yabatalou

the key slides in behind the wooden slide (here the key is coming in from the top, blogger won't let me flip this photo) and where you see the 3 metal pins on the key, they push up 3 corresponding metal pins that drop down and lock the slide when it's lined up

After Dogon Country we spent a night back in Severe at Hassimi’s house complete with a dinner of capitaine fish and fried plantains. (Jennie and I must have consumed at least a kilo each of fried plantains during the trip; they just don’t exist in Senegal…) We continued on to the city of Segou which was in the midst of hosting the 8^th annual Festival Sur Le Niger, or the West African Music Festival on the Niger River. We stayed with some of our new Malian Peace Corps friends (a big thanks to Devon and Jason again) and wound up watching that night’s performances from the seats of a lifeboat upon a larger cruise boat that was moored next to the stage which was also on a barge…confusing to explain yes, but it was totally awesome and we got to watch the show for free (sorry no photos of this).

The next day we traveled back to Bamako and slept until the day after that when we marathoned it all the way back to Kedougou. Overall it was an amazing trip. Mali is definitely a cool country; unfortunately we couldn’t go to Timbuktu in Northern Mali because of the recent Tuareg rebellions (see here) I hope it all calms down soon, it’s too nice of a country for it to fall into turmoil.