Week 1 Mali

The boy helped us locate the police station, hidden amongst houses in a back street, and we requested an entry visa for Mali. For most countries it is recommended to buy a visa in advance but Banjul has no Malian embassy and we were advised that obtaining one at the border would not be difficult. We were questioned about our route and the purpose of our trip. This produced a fair degree of consternation and shaking of heads, but in time we received the visa in our passports and only had to part with a small extra fee “pour les timbres”. We returned to the road and located a beaten-up Ford Transit van with no glass in the windows, destined for Kayes. Our bags were thrown on the roof and after a delay to accumulate sufficient passengers we joined the huddle squeezed onto a square of loose wooden benches in the back, and drove just a kilometre down the road to the customs point where empty steel barrels painted red-and-white blocked the road. We all retrieved our luggage from the roof for inspection, and two fellow-passengers were called into the office. Whatever difficulty had been identified was soon solved, and we continued on our way. This was it; we were in Mali, the third country of our trip but the first one that was new to us, making the familiar flat dusty landscape on either side of the road seem somehow novel and exciting.

 

Kayes is the principal town in the West of Mali. It sits on the banks of the Senegal River and was the first French settlement in the country. More importantly for us, it has a railway station on the line connecting Dakar (capital of Senegal) and Bamako (capital of Mali), the route we intended to follow for our next stage of the journey, assuming that a train was due sometime soon. We booked into a basic room (complete with bed-bugs and mosquitoes) and headed to the station to make enquiries. Yes there would be a train to Bamako the following evening. Yes, they were sure it would depart on time. And yes, we could buy a ticket if we returned in the morning.

 

We paid a little extra for a reserved and numbered seat in the first class carriage, more for security than comfort. Then we spent the morning in Kayes enjoying the busy market, and the afternoon sat on a bank reading, eating sweet-potato chips and watching boat traffic coming and going across the Senegal River. We returned to our bug-infested house-of-comfort for a shower, and then carried our bags to station forecourt where we ate cous, beans, rice, fried banana and a very tasty chunk of fish, cheap and cooked at the side of the street, under the watchful eye of a very large and not-particularly-dressed woman who, it appeared, spent day and night on this stretch of pavement. Then we snuck into the railway hotel bar, partly to consume time and enjoy a cold drink, but mainly to use their toilet at the latest possible moment before boarding the train.

Once aboard we settled into our seats and the carriage filled quickly. The platform was heaving with people selling drinks, fruit and cooked food. The train was baking hot, having sat all day in the sun, and we were jealous of those who were buying bottles of local water, frozen. Although we drank tap-water and well-water in The Gambia, for this trip we restricted ourselves to bottled water in the hope of avoiding water-borne stomach problems. We chuckled when we saw one passenger wearing a heavy winter coat and a woollen hat. At that point we did not realise that we were about to shiver through an uncomfortably chilly night whilst the Ice Man slept snugly in his cocoon.

 

The train chugged and wobbled towards Bamako, stopping regularly at villages where refreshments and a range of other goods were sold by villagers through the carriage windows, even in the depths of the night. We bought and ate both our breakfast and our lunch this way. A few people risked boarding the train as it moved; some of these rode on the roof. In two places we passed derailed and overturned freight wagons at the side of the tracks, bringing concerned looks to the faces of our fellow passengers. And just after lunch, we arrived in Bamako, having completed 600km in around sixteen hours; slow, perhaps, but it saved us from a riding a long stretch of bumpy road in a geriatric minibus.

 

In Bamako we stayed in two pleasant hotels (the first one lost our custom when we learned that the slightly-steep room price included one breakfast but not two, so we made a point of sharing between us our bread, jam and a single cup of hot chocolate, before checking out). We spent a day exploring the city during which we successfully obtained a visa to visit Burkina Faso, chose not to make a purchase from a stall selling sheep heads and pig feet and (for some reason that now escapes me) walked daringly on top of a tall wall alongside and high above the Niger River. Then we discovered that the Chinese ‘restaurant’ next to our hotel specialised in oriental entertainment other than food, so we ate instead at a patisserie round the corner.

 

The next day I declared my intention to climb the steep escarpment behind Bamako. Louise took fright and pretended to be unwell so she could stay in bed. So I hiked up a hill and down again, and enjoyed both the views over the city and short conversations with occupants of a village high on the hillside who dwelt and worked amidst a harsh rocky environment.

 

 

Our main reason for visiting Mali was to visit Dogon Country, so the next morning we rose early and caught a bus to Sevaré, another 640km along the Niger River. This was uncommonly exciting for us as it was our first journey in a regular large bus since arriving in West Africa two years ago. We were helped at the bus station by a Swedish health volunteer who took pity on us and pointed us to the correct window for a ticket, rescuing us from a throng of touts who were set on coaxing us towards any number of vehicles other than the big shiny blue bus on which we eventually rode. In Sevaré, somewhat fortuitously, we quickly transferred into a minibus that took us the final 60km to Bandiagara, a town at the edge of Dogon Country. As the sun set the vehicle stopped for passengers to say evening prayers on mats or empty rice sacks at the side of the road. On arrival in Bandiagara we found the comfortable Hotel la Falaise, where we washed, ate, and collapsed into bed.

The following morning we arranged a guide to take us on a two-night excursion along the Falaise de Bandiagara, as the Dogon escarpment is known. Louise slept off the remains of her illness and I went out to buy water and snacks for the expedition. We also cut holes in Louise’s trainers to spare her blistered little-toes further punishment. That afternoon we set off for Dogon Country. The Falaise de Bandiagara is a 150km-long rock cliff that stands above the Sahel, on the south side of the Niger River, creating a landscape that is dramatic and beautiful. The Dogon people are known for their art, for unique houses and granaries, and for their complex and dignified culture. Dogon villages are dotted along the top and bottom of the Falaise, and interspersed between them, ancient dwellings of the long-since disappeared Tellem people cling to the cliff-face itself.

 

 

 

 

We walked from village to village along the Falaise, from Djiguibombo to Kani-Kombolé, to Teli, then Endé, and we climbed to Begnimato on the cliff-top before finally arriving in Dourou. Our English-speaking guide explained to us both ancient and current cultural practices, the roles of the Hogon (spiritual leader), Dogon beliefs, and the fact that if you wish to marry a Dogon woman she will be more interested in the size of your granary than your house. At each village we offered a gift of kola nuts to the elders. On one occasion we gave up on walking and hired an oxcart to carry us through the heat of the afternoon. We slept in village campements, spending the night on a mattress on the roof and watching the moon progress across the sky, eventually to slip behind the cliff-top just before dawn.

 

 

 

 

Some visitors spend two to three weeks walking in this region, but our Dogon excursion was just a brief diversion. We still had three countries to travel through and the clock was ticking. Horsey was impatient to move on too, as she had been a bit upset by seeing the oxcart, so we returned directly to Sevaré without stopping at our favourite hotel in Bandiagara (mainly because they did not have a room) and checked in to the Hotel Via-Via next door to the gare routière. Unfortunately this place too was full but they loaned us a tent and we spent our last night in Mali camped on the flat roof, listening to the boom and thud of a disco nearby.

In the morning we hopped over the wall into the gare routière but due to a time zone miscalculation we were a little early. This gave us time to eat spaghetti and beans for breakfast and share some with a group of street children who emerged from the shadows. I also had my shoes cleaned and managed to dissuade Louise from buying piles of tourist tat that we would have had to carry round for the remainder of the trip. When our vehicle to Bobo-Dioulasso arrived from Mopti we were both daydreaming and only the alertness of a gare official ensured that we caught the ride into Burkina Faso. This picture shows our vehicle, and the other is me eating lunch cooked at the roadside. It was a long and uncomfortable journey, with 28 of us squeezed into the minibus. The road to the border was rough and heavily potholed, but in places crossed an attractive landscape of cotton fields. We stopped a number of times to drop or pick up people, and an officious man in the front passenger seat proceeded to organise people and bizarrely instructed everyone into particular seats. Just before the frontier we swung off the road into a yard behind some buildings. Half the passengers got out and disappeared, and the remainder headed for another vehicle. No-one explained what was going on, but we followed our bags which were transferred from one roof to another, and therefore we also climbed into the second vehicle. Perhaps a change of van was required to cross the border.

 

 

Night fell and, as before, we crossed through a number of different border posts. At one, two large buses were waiting and there was a long queue of passengers showing their bags to customs inspectors. Oddly, passengers from our van simply walked past this crowd and through the gate, unimpeded. At passport control our smart new Burkina Faso visas did the trick, and we were allowed in. From here we just had a couple more hours drive with squashed knees before our arrival into Bobo-Dioulasso.

 

Click to follow our journey into Burkina Faso and Togo.

Return to West Africa Overland introduction and index of pages.