"It's been real Mali, maybe a little too real..."

That’s what Maria, one of the girls who voyaged to Mali with me said as we boarded the plane to return to Senegal from Bamako, Mali. Truthfully, I was thinking the same thing at the time, but that was the end of the trip, and Mali really is a great country.

Our trip started on a bit of a strange note, because buying our bus tickets turned into a very shady exchange with a man working out of his car…We arrived at the train station the day before we were leaving to buy tickets, and we were slightly disappointed when the workers there told us that you can’t buy bus tickets there. But luckily, this man sitting next to his car in the parking lot sold us bus tickets for $50.00 and told us to return to the same place the next day at 9am. So, Saturday morning we arrive on time, and the man informs us that the bus is somewhere else, throws our bags in the trunk (it doesn’t close all the way), and tells us to get in. A few minutes later we arrive at the depot where we catch the taxis to go back and forth between Saint-Louis, and I have since decided that we could have skipped the middleman. Oh well, next time, haha.

Upon arrival at the “bus depot,” the bus departing to Bamako appeared to be nearly ready to go, so the timing seemed almost perfect. As it turns out, we were supposed to exchange the tickets for other ones; consequently, they didn’t let us board that bus and told us we had to wait for the next one. Five hours later, we hit the road; I guess it paid off to wait such a long time because the bus had so few passengers that we each had 2 seats to ourselves almost the entire trip. During the trip the rest of the day, we made a few stops, including a dinner break where we paid 30 cents to use a toilet that turned out to be a room with no hole in the floor (at least that I saw).

We made pretty good progress that night, and then during the day it was slow going because much of the road wasn’t paved, and we had frequent stops to pay of various police like officials. I’m not sure why we paid them, maybe because our bus didn’t have the appropriate papers? One particular instance had us worried when they told us to get off the bus and give our passports to some random man, but we quickly realized that we were at the Senegalese/Malien border and they needed to stamp my passport. A few hours later we crossed the border and arrived in Kai, a lovely town that suffered from and outbreak of dengue fever last month, where the bus driver informed us we would be spending the night and leaving the next day at 4 am. Theoretically, I would have been a little worried about this unknown stop, but after the previous few days I didn’t really think twice about it. Ok, I did think twice when I realized I would have to sleep outside on the floor of a gas station because the bus turned out to be at a sauna like temperature. Hence, my first night in Mali was a little bizarre, and with worries of dengue fever and spending a whole week in this country, I slept for about an hour.

Monday evening around 7 we pulled into the Bamako (the capitol of Mali) “bus depot” and proceeded to collect our belongings. After the 54 hour voyage, our backpacks that they stored under the bus were completely covered in dust, more specifically, my backpack, which is a dark red, was bright orange when they removed it from the storage area. Once we got our stuff, we attempted for about 15 minutes to escape the throng of crazy men yelling at us about how they know a nice hotel and strange things. Finally, we found a telecenter because my sim card from Senegal apparently doesn’t work in Mali (who knew?) and we called the woman who we would be staying with. Amazingly, she arrived 5 minutes after we called her in a very nice car, and brought us to her apartment right in the heart of Bamako. We had our own room with three beds, and we shared a bathroom, with running water!, with the rest of her family. The woman renting us the room is the sister in-law of my host mother, so she gave us a good price (at least she told us, it was like $12.00 a person per night), and she runs a restaurant downstairs where they sell Senegalese cuisine. To clarify, when I say restaurant, I mean they have a table with benches and lots of bowls of food. Furthermore, I just wanted to point out the irony in the fact that I went to Mali and spent the week living with Senegalese people and eating Senegalese or French food.

The following day, Tuesday, we got up, enjoyed a nice change in our breakfast habits with croissants instead of baguettes, and then we learned that the woman hosting us, Sokhna, asked her friend to show us around the city. As a sidenote, it was nice having him help us out because he had a car and he spoke english, but we felt slightly awkward because we were afraid we would have to pay him like 50 dollars. Anyways, the first place he took us was the Bamako zoo, bet you weren't expecting that one. I wasn't either, but it was really fun since I haven't been to a zoo in years, and I got to experience an African zoo. The zoo was complete with camels, donkeys, wolves?, hyenas, lions, and an assortment of really freaky looking birds. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to explain how most of the animals were kept in cages/pens, but we had a few awkward runins with camels and donkeys charging down the path at us. After the zoo we had a nice driving tour of Bamako, which is fairly different from Dakar, for a city so near to Senegal and with similar French influences. First of all, the ground is a dark red color, which is strikingly different from the light sandy color in Senegal. Plus, the region surrounding Bamako is very hilly and looks alot like the rocky terrain of Arizona minus the cacti. Another stark difference is that Bamako seems to make an effort to clean up trash off the streets, and on the street running past most of the government buildings there are legitimate trash cans.

After a lovely Senegalese lunch of ceebujen, our friends younger brother who is an actual tourists guide, took us to the Niger river for man powered boat ride. Our captain paddled our small canoe with a long pole that he pushed off of the bottom of the river with, evidently the river is not very deep. In general, the boat ride was very nice, but after we negotiated a price for two hours, the boat driver was intent on holding us to the two hours. Consequently, when it started getting dark at 6:15, the mosquitoes came out in full force to punish us for wanting to enjoy the scenic beauty of Mali. By 6:45, we told the driver to take us in and we'd pay him for two hours anyways...moral of the story, bring bug spray? Mosquitoes were a frequent companion during our stay in Bamako, probably because the daily temperatures in the mid 90s and overnight lows in the 70s kept them very happy. In fact, at night they were so bad, that Sokhna would spray our room with some scary toxic chemical that we had two wait 5 minutes before even entering the room, and then we would play a fun game of run into the room as fast as possible so fewer mosquitoes could enter. It seems to me that the mosquitoes in Mali are just alot more courageous because I got several mosquito bites in the shower.

That second night was little rough because Carlie got a nasty bout of stomach problems that could have been from our bad choices of drinking tap water the night before or the various strange things we bought from vendors on the side of the road during the bus ride. My theory is, you gotta keep things interesting, so might as well eat the sketchy meat sandwich from the woman shouting in strange languages at you. Although Carlie did have a good point, that if we get in a bad situation and someone asks if we made some bad choices to get us in that position, we would have to say, "um,which one are you referring to?" Just kidding!

I'll continue our adventures in Mali in my next post, but at the moment I'm back at school in Saint-Louis awaiting my benevolent professors and hoping they will decide to grace us with their presence. Although, I heard that tomorrow is another holiday celebrating the Muslim new year, so who knows really.