Financing West Africa

Our journeys in Africa until now have been pleasantly affordable, if not always pleasantly comfortable. We wanted to do the entire region at once, so here is what we can tell you about finances in West Africa. As a reminder, these prices generally include our visas (and visa prices may vary depending on where they are issued) and all expenses for the two of us. They are obviously a rough guide, but should be helpful to other traveling in the area.

Morocco- $47 per day over 15 days. Thanks to Morocco not requiring visas, cheap lodging and transport, and easy do-it-yourself tour options, this is one of the cheapest countries we have visited. We stayed in a few terrible hotels, but also a few rather nice ones, but you could easily stay in nice ones the whole time and not add more than $10/night.

Mauritania- $68 per day over 8 days. This reflects the $45 visa, but is lessened by us staying with a family for a few days. Hotels are a bit pricey in Mauritania for the quality, and most of the food is imported, so it can also be pricey if you want Western-standards. However, transport is cheap, with the iron ore train being almost free.

Senegal- $61 per day over 7 days. Senegal is the other country in this part of the world that does not require visas for Americans (or most Europeans), which reduces the cost. Hotels are reasonable except in Dakar, where you should definitely stay in the very nice Catholic Guesthouse or couchsurf if you are on a budget.

The Gambia- $106 per day over 4 days. This is skewed by the $50 visas and only being there for four days, but in The Gambia, you have to take tours (often costly boat tours) to see much. Guides can be hired very cheaply if you can find them, but boats cannot. We do have some good suggestions for bird and wildlife guides if you decide to go.

Mali- $76 per day over 8.5 days. Visas are $25 each. Mali has more tourists, so everything is a bit more expensive, especially tours of Dogon Country, which are costly, but interesting. If you are really on a budget, you can often get a mattress on someone's roof for very little money, which is actually your only chance to be cool enough to sleep if you are there in hot season unless you pay the outrageous additional amounts (normally $20/night) for air conditioning.

Burkina Faso- $66 per day over 7.5 days. Visas were $20 each at the border, but only good for 7 days. Transport is fairly cheap and often nicer than surrounding countries (even sometimes air conditioned on the main east-west road). Without your own car, you do have to hire a guide and car to see some of the interesting spots in the west of the country, which was not crazy expensive, but raised the average.

Ghana- $46 per day over 14 days. Visas were $30 each. Ghana feels more expensive than it is because at a few touristy places, you feel like you are being overcharged. Food on the street is good (if you can find it without fish sauce) and really cheap. Hotel rooms are very reasonable, though you may want to look at a few in Accra to find the right cleanliness/cost balance.

Togo- $49 per day over 4.5 days. Visas were $30 each. This is completely skewed by us staying entirely with Peace Corps volunteers while in the country. The average would have been about $30 per day more without that. Take the Post Bus, which is nice and reliable (and air conditioned) when traveling.

Benin- $65 per day over 5.5 days. Visas were $20 each. Good value since we had to pay $50 each for the car/tour to Pendjari tour and paid for hotels throughout the country. Take InterCity bus when possible--it was cheaper than most and air conditioned.

Nigeria- $80 per day over 11 days. Visas were $130 each. The visas make it expensive, but our couchsurfing in Lagos offsets that since hotel prices there are very high. Transport costs vary a lot from place to place in the country, sometimes with little reason. Street food availability also varies a lot, and restaurants are expensive. Make sure your hotel has a generator (almost all do) since the country is without power most of the time.

Cameroon- $59 per day over 15 days. Visas were $100 each. Hotels aren't that expensive, though the water and electricity in Cameroon is spotty, so you could find yourself without one or both even at decent hotels (good hotels have generators for power, but the backup for water is to give you a couple of buckets). Travel prices also vary a lot here in different parts, so just bargain hard and hope for the best.

Gabon- $78 per day over 7.5 days. Visas were $100 each. Gabon is expensive. Transport is two or three times more expensive than any other country in the region. Hotels are not cheap, though of a high standard (couchsurfing in Libreville greatly helps our expenses). If you venture to the national parks rather than Lope, they start at $300 per night per person. Yet, we have had a decent time here.

That wraps up expenses. As always, ask if you have any questions.

Obsessions of West and Central Africa!

This post is a long time coming, but we figured we'd wait til the end of this segment of the trip and do one big post covering all 15 countries we've visited so far! Either that, or we've just been lazy. You decide...


I guess we'll start with the three European nations we hit en route to West Africa.


Belgium - Chocolate. That one's easy. Brussels's streets are line with chocolate shops, each one fancier than the next. Luckily, if you hang around long enough and look serious enough about possibly buying something, most of them will give you a free sample!


Gibraltar - "Apes." They're actually baboons, which are monkeys, but all the tour guides call them apes. They were brought over from Africa by army soldiers in the 1800s (I think) for...um, company? Now they run "wild" over the Rock of Gibraltar, except they seem to know exactly where the tourists with the food congregate. Saying Gibraltar's obsessed with them may be a stretch, but hey, we only spent a few hours there and don't really have any other candidates.


Spain - Ham. Or jamon, in the local parlance. Brussels's chocolate shops are replaced in Spanish cities with shops with huge haunches of pig hanging in the window, selling all manner of pork products! In Madrid there is even one emporium called the Museo del Jamon. (It made for a strange gateway to the Muslim world, where pork products are impossible to find...)


On to West Africa!


Morocco - "Berber artisan cooperatives." A.k.a....carpet shops. A guy starts guiding you through the medina (old town) and you think you're just gonna see the sights. Then he steers you to the amazing "artisan cooperative" where you are in luck the Berbers are in town, selling their amazing crafts, just for one day only! (Except that miraculously, they're still there when you walk by the next day, and the next.) Suddenly you find yourself trapped in a carpet showroom, with carpet after carpet being unfolded for your "viewing pleasure" and a slick salesman countering your every objection to purchasing ("Can't carry a carpet around the world? We ship to America!"). And then you start thinking, to your horror, "Hm, that carpet does look nice, and shipping it wouldn't cost so much..." You barely escape. Luckily, this only has to happen to you in one city (OK, maybe two...) before you catch wise and just refuse to even enter such places!


Mauritania - Tea. We thought Morocco was obsessed with tea until we got to Mauritania! A super-strong blend of green tea, fresh mint, and loads of sugar, decanted over and over until your tiny glass is just basically filled with tea foam, and drunk in three rounds over the course of an hour with your new friends, tea is an unavoidable but excellent Mauritanian experience.


Senegal - Pretending to have Internet access. In no other country have we entered so many buildings that had the word "cyber" or "internet" over the door, only to find that the place didn't even have electricity, much less computers or a connection! Senegal's sign-painters are apparently afflicted with an optimism that they will one day have Internet access, and are painting for the future, not the present...


The Gambia - "Happy couples!" For some reason, Gambians like to shout the phrase "Happy couples!" at pairs like me and Andy (i.e. whities)as we walk down the street. This is then often followed by some sort of fairly innocuous attempt to sell you something. We surmise that there was some sort of tourism-promoting PR campaign at some point that proclaimed The Gambia the place for happy couples.


Most of the time it didn't bother us, but one time we had just lost a bunch of money to a malfunctioning ATM (since recovered) and Andy was really mad. Upon emerging into the street, we heard someone call to us "Happy couples!" and begin their approach. Andy barked, "We're not happy right now, leave us alone!" And you'd better bet he did.


Mali - Mud. A lot of West African countries have houses made out of mud, but Mali takes mud art and architecture to a whole 'nother level. It has the largest mud-brick mosque in the world at Djenne, a town filled with other intricate mud-brick buildings. It also sells beautiful bogolan, or mud-cloth, dyed with different pigments derived from, you guessed it, mud. If you don't like mud, you might not enjoy Mali.


Burkina Faso - Mobylettes. The Burkinabe are crazy about their motorbikes, or mobylettes. The nicest store in Ouagadougou is a fancy mobylette emporium. Mobylettes swarm through the cities, and you see pairs that have crashed sprawled across intersections. But if, like me, you are reluctant to take one (without a helmet, down a bumpy dirt road!), people just don't understand.


Ghana - Fish. All of West Africa likes fish, but Ghana is especially obsessed and puts fish in everything. This was a real bugbear to us as we tried to eat street food, because almost every sauce had at least a hint o'fish in it. Every market has a huge, stinky fish section...and it doesn't matter if a town is many miles from the ocean or river--that's what dried fish is for! There is one toll booth in the middle of nowhere outside of Tamale in the north where women with huge baskets on their heads swarm passing tro-tros to sell people dried fish. How this situation evolved, I will never know, but everyone knows the fish-lady toll booth.


Togo - Pate. This is more learned from our Peace Corps friends than directly experienced, but Togolese people are really obsessed with the starchy staple they call pate. It's made of pounded corn and is fairly tasteless (unless you get the fermented version...bleh) but if they have to have a meal without it, they'll go a little crazy. We had to try it, of course...not bad, but we (like most other yovos we met in-country) don't really get what the fuss is about.


Benin - Celine Dion. You know those immortal lyrics, "Near...far...wherever you are..."? Wherever you are apparently includes Benin! We heard Celine playing at the bus office, at the Internet cafe...well, maybe that's it, but it made an impression. Celine seems to be fairly popular in much of West Africa, singing in French, English, and even Spanish.


Nigeria - Locks. OK, we know that Nigeria has a poor reputation for security, but it seems to have an excessive number of indoor locks. In the apartment we stayed in in Lagos, every room had its own lock and key, and in two different hotel rooms we were given a refrigerator with a lock on it. You know, in case those dastardly thieves tried to steal your yogurt...


Central African obsessions:


Cameroon - Beans and beignets. Or maybe that's just what we were obsessed with when we were there. But in every town you can find at least one lady frying up beignets (balls of fried dough) and selling them for 5 cents US apiece. The same lady also always has a big pot of beans (a bowl costs 20 cents) and another big pot of a warm sweet porridge (a cup costs 10 cents). This magical trifecta was our dinner many, many times.


Gabon - Speeding. Good lord, those Gabonese drivers drive fast. Our guidebook features warnings about reckless drivers for several African countries, but only in Gabon do we feel like we're taking our lives in our hands every time we get in a vehicle. And it doesn't matter if it's a taxi or a bus. In most other countries, if a car is driving fast, it will at least slow down as it goes through a village, but not in Gabon--the driver just leans on his horn to warn all the children/goats/other cars to get out of his way. (Honorable mention Gabon obsession: mayonnaise.)

There you have'em, the obsessions from this first leg of our Africa travels! Take them with a grain of salt, of course, and feel free to let us know if you agree or disagree!

Baobab juice, millet beer, fresh yogurt, and other delicacies of Mali and Burkina Faso

I hope you'll forgive us for lumping together the foods of Mali and Burkina Faso in this post. Food in West Africa definitely has variations by region (which sometimes line up with country divisions, but often don't), but as I think Andy mentioned in his Senegal/Gambia food post, there's definitely a continuum and much you'll find in common as you move around, too.

OK, here we go with foods of...

Mali!

Our first meal in Mali was eaten in a food stall in a bus station during a short dinner/pickup stop our bus made between the Senegal border and Bamako. A giant bowl of slightly sweet-tasting haricots, or beans (yum) with some fresh tomatoes (yum) and an unexpected splash of fish sauce (yuck, but we survived). One spoon each for me and Andy--communal eating is big here, and people often share a plate. Total cost in US$, 60 cents.

When we finally arrived in Bamako almost 24 hours later, we decided to celebrate and treat ourselves to a fancy meal out on the town. Our main dishes at San Toro (sounds Spanish, but it's a West African specialties restaurant) cost $10 each, which is kind of astronomical for us, but they were very good.

Andy had chicken in coconut sauce with some fries...

And I had wonderfully tender lamb in "sauce feuille," made from the leaves of the sweet potato plant. I believe this is actually a Burkinabé specialty. Note also our drinks--my purple was made from hibiscus flowers and ginger and was quite strong, while Andy's was ginger and maybe lime, we can't remember, and it could clear your sinuses with one sniff. Good stuff.

Not pictured were our much cheaper lunches the next day at Restaurant le Gourmet downtown, where we had rice with delicious peanut sauce and lamb (me) and even better curry sauce and chicken (Andy) for less than $2 each. Included was a bonus giant pitcher of cold water, too. If you are ever in Bamako, you must have lunch at this place.

While waiting for the bus to Ségou, we bought these muffin-looking "gateaux" (cakes) from a woman with many such bags on her head. You see these all over West Africa and make a decent cheap breakfast when you can't find anything else to eat.

Mmm, fried balls with spicy sauce. These were made from a batter of some kind of pounded starch, probably millet, and could be found in many places in Mali and Burkina. When the heat breaks in the late afternoon, many women build a fire and set up a mobile fryer (i.e. a big pot full of oil) on the street and start frying things up, like these or plantain or banana chunks.

In Djenné, I bought our first mango of Africa. It was amazingly sweet and juicy and delicious. Since we don't have a knife, you can see me doing my magic with my spork here...

(Two tangential notes about mangoes...

1) Djenné is the most touristy town in Mali, and I paid about 25 cents for that mango. A few days later in another town in Mali, a woman was selling mangoes to our bus and they cost only 5 cents each, and I felt like I'd been ripped off in Djenné. Now, in Ghana, where it is apparently mango harvesting season, I have been able to buy mangoes for about 1 cent apiece, making all of Mali look darn expensive...though I will say that the 25 cent one was by far the tastiest one I've had.

2) Andy is quasi-allergic to mangoes (and cashews)--he can eat them, but if they touch his lips, his lips get all crazy chapped for days after. This means that whenever I get a mango, I have to cut chunks for Andy that he can pop into his mouth in their entirety, bypassing the lips. It's kind of amusing to watch.)

A popular snack that people sell to bus passengers in Mali are these slightly sweet sesame balls. Not bad if you like sesame, though one really is enough--they're kind of dense.

If you're looking for cheap street food in West Africa, you can often find stalls selling spaghetti. I would say it's in some sort of tomato sauce, but the red may just be from palm oil. The balls on the top are not meatballs, but some sort of starchy fried dumpling they were selling at the same stall in Djenné, so I had the woman throw some in to my to-go bag.

Hiking in the Dogon Country, our guide found a baobab fruit on the ground and broke it open, letting us all taste the fruit inside. Don't judge from my expression here, it's delicious--kind of sweet-and-sour, though, strangely, it has the exact powdery texture of freeze-dried fruit. Not surprising, I guess, given the very dry climates baobab trees often grow in...

You can see a whole fruit here--the big white chunks are the flesh. The bottle beside it was later used to make baobab juice, or bouyi, for our whole group. You just break the baobab flesh into small pieces and push them into the bottle, add water and sugar, shake it a lot, and voila, juice!

(Side note: Trader Joe's already sells freeze-dried mango and dried hibiscus flowers...I suggest that they get in on the baobab trade next!)

More beverages of Mali: Here is some homemade millet beer, brewed in a Dogon village for the next day's Easter celebrations. Considering that it's uncarbonated, served warm, and only weakly alcoholic, it wasn't so bad. (That's our Ecuadorian tripmate Estefania in the background.)

And here's one of my favorite bottled beverages of West Africa, Fanta Cocktail! Tastes like a can of fruit cocktail made into soda. It's no Lemon Fanta, but after two hours of hiking in 125-degree heat in Dogon Country, it sure hit the spot...

The last place where we had a meal in Mali was at a street stall in the border town of Koro. We have no pictures, but we were served absolutely enormous portions of tasty beans and spaghetti for maybe 50 cents each by a woman who we privately dubbed "the fattest woman in Mali"--she wasn't even that heavy, but I guess we didn't realize until we saw her how long it had been since we had seen an overweight person at all. (Let's just say that Mali has more of a feeding-itself problem than an obesity epidemic going on.) Anyway, based on what she apparently thought was a reasonable portion size, we can kind of see how she managed to pack on a few extra pounds.

On to foods of...

Burkina Faso!

In the capital city of Ouagadougou, a popular and cheap breakfast served on the street is French bread with avocado chunks that have been tossed with oil and onions and some spices. Based on the size of your French bread, you pay between 20 and 50 cents for your sandwich. Delicious.

Yogurt is also extremely popular in Burkina, moreso than in any of the surrounding countries. Every town sells cups and bottles of some locally-made yogurt, and many towns also have big vats of it out on the street alongside a display case full of millet, which gets mixed in. I got this enormous bowl on the street in Ouaga for 40 cents--the lady even threw in two ice cubes, which was ingenious because it was probably 115 degrees out. (If I kept mixing and made sure to only take bites from near the ice cubes, the whole thing was actually refreshingly cool.)

Also, I was full for about six hours after eating it...that millet is fibrous!

Since Andy doesn't eat yogurt, we had to find him some lunch, too. We didn't have to go far to find a vendor selling rice and sauce on the street to hungry locals. $1 got him a big bowl, and he went at it with his right hand, African-style.

Here is a weird Ouaga find--pineapple milk. Pretty sure it was imported from somewhere else. I didn't like it, but I had all that calcium from the yogurt, anyway, so I let Andy enjoy.

In Ouaga, I was really excited when we stumbled upon an Indian restaurant near the airport. Unfortunately, the food was only so-so, and then they really ruined it by tacking on an extra $3 charge for rice. Boo.

The next day, we arrived in Bobo-Dioulasso hungry. Luckily, we didn't have to go far to find a lady frying stuff on the street. We got our first yam (aka cassava, or manioc--a dry and starchy tuber, not to be confused with sweet potato) chips there, with plenty of salt and some sauce. These are popular in Ghana, too, though the chunks tend to be longer and bigger. In both places, they are usually priced by the piece, with prices ranging from about 1 to 7 cents depending on size.

Throughout West Africa, Andy had I have enjoyed little cold baggies of juice--and sometimes if we're lucky, we can even find them still frozen. You just bite the corner off the bag and suck. In Bobo, Andy got a bag of mystery frozen juice that we think turned out to be bouyi (baobab juice), though this color is also similar to gingimbre (ginger juice) and to a slightly gingery millet drink called zoomkoom that is only found in Burkina.

We bought these mystery nuts in Bobo thinking that they would be savory, but they turned out to be strangely sweet, almost like little bites of coconut. Based on that, we concluded that they were probably palm nuts. I didn't like them, but Andy did. (Moments after we bought them, the first big rain of the season hit, and we spent an hour huddled in a sewing shop, snacking on nuts with some locals and admiring the monsoon.)

Mmm, sweet Burkinabé yogurt. (Too bad the flavors are usually limited to vanilla, strawberry, or "nature sucree" (plain sweetened).) Got this cup for 40 cents at a little shop in Bobo that specializes in dairy products, meaning that the whole shop is basically a table and a fridge case with yogurt and milk.
From this picture of a restaurant meal we had in Bobo, you can see how meals in West Africa often work--you get a starch, and a bowl of sauce, and eat with your hands (or maybe a spoon). That's rice in the background, but in the foreground is tô, a starchy paste here of pounded corn, though it can also be made of millet or other grains. It usually has the consistency of mashed potatoes, and I really like it. You grab a bit of it, dip it in the sauce, and eat. Variations of this have many other names in different regions and countries--it is similar to fufu, foutôu, TZ, and banku, and I'm sure we'll learn new names in Togo and Benin!

Outside of Banfora, here I am with a gourd full of palm wine, the slightly fermented sap of the palm tree. It's not strong, but still, this picture was taken around 9:30 AM, so I only had a little sip.

At the Banfora market, more baggies of juice. That's bissap, my favorite hibiscus drink, on the left, and some crazy ginger juice on the right. Baggies like this usually cost around 10 cents or so.

Significantly more costly was this Tetrapak of Twist brand banana nectar that Andy found in a little shop in Banfora. It was imported from Egypt and refrigerated, so it cost something like $2.50. Our treat for the day. It was thick and very sweet, kind of like a banana smoothie. Andy looks forward to trying it again in Egypt.

There you have it--many drinks and a few foods from Mali and Burkina. Both of these countries represented a serious step up in street food availability and quality from Senegal and The Gambia, so it was easier to find snacks and cheap meals in both countries. I especially enjoyed all the yogurt in Burkina, and the avocado sandwiches, but we found actual restaurants to be better in Mali. (Of special note is that peanut sauce in Mali tended not to have fish in it, while the same sauce in Burkina often did taste very fishy.)

Ghana, where we are at the moment, is a whole new kettle of fish. Literally. More on that one day when we find Internet access again!

Dogon: It's hot!

Our adventures in Mali continued with a trip to Dogon Country. The Dogon are a group of people who fled from invading Muslim armies about a thousand years ago because they did not want to convert to Islam. So, they went in search of a safe place to live and found it for many centuries in the cliffs of eastern Mali. Like some Native Americans of the Southwest United States, they found it quite handy to build homes in the cliffs that were difficult to access and easy to defend. More interesting in this case, however, is that a group of pygmies lived there when the Dogon arrived. My interpretation is that the Dogon learned everything about living in the unforgiving environment from the Pygmies (the Telim) before throwing them out. The Dogon claim that the Dogon population was growing and started cutting down all the fruit and nut trees that the Pygmies ate, so the Pygmies just decided to leave one day. Okay, now to the pictures.


Dogon Country now consists of maybe two dozen small villages of Dogon people. Nearly all of them are divided into three neighborhoods: Animist (the old beliefs), Muslim, and Christian. The Muslims eventually did get to the people, particularly as they moved down from the cliffs to farm and slowly began converting. Apparently, the Christians came in the last 50 or 60 years, and do well in increasing their numbers when there are droughts or other catastrophes. We were there on the Saturday before Easter, so the Christians were busy preparing for Easter feasts. A variety of monkeys was on the menu. Also, note that they still decorate their homes with monkey skulls like the animists. Old traditions die hard. If monkey isn't to your liking, you might also try the wild cat or the giant monitor lizards on the menu. Also, at the bottom you can see the muzzle of the gun used to hunt these. I wish I had a better picture because it looks just like it is out of a museum.

Here is a picture of us together looking out over the plains where the Dogon do most of their farming. You might note that we look hot and sweaty in this picture, so let's talk about the heat for a minute. During the day, it was generally well above 120 degrees. We can't say how much hotter because our thermometer only went to 120 degrees, but we think it was quite a bit hotter based on it topping out the thermometer. Fortunately, it is very dry, but that does not change the fact that it is really hot. At night, it falls to maybe 80, but most of the mud buildings then emit heat and make it hotter than that inside the rooms.

This is the fruit of the baobab tree. We will save the details for the food post, but it is a really fun fruit. We also learned that the baobab tree has both male and female trees, with the male being much smaller and having fruit only once per year while the female is huge and fruits twice per year. Yes, I am a nerd who actually cares about such things.

Some great rock formations exist in the cliffs where the Dogon live. This is a good example.

We don't really take enough people pictures because we are always afraid they might object. Starting in Dogon, I decided that I didn't care and we would delete pictures if they complained. In this case, the kid was asleep, so he couldn't complain. Call me immoral if you like, but I think it's a good picture.

Tara tried to capture me as I gave back this boy's shoe, but the most important part is that this boy was actually riding around on a cow. For those thinking about trying it, they don't really seem to go in a straight line. It reminded me a lot of the cow racing game for Wii.

Here is a long distance shot of some cliff dwellings. This gives some perspective on how large the cliffs are. You can see how the Dogon had to climb up all the rocks to get to their houses in the cliffs.

One of the Dogon villages that we visited was called Ende, which is also what every single person in Dogon Country thought my name was when I said Andy, so we took a picture of me with my "namesake" sign. Incidentally, Ende will also be the sight of a huge mask festival that takes place every 60 years to elect the new religious leader of the Dogon animists. This will occur in 2027, so buy your tickets now. Space seems limited. We didn't get the full story about how the new religious leader is elected, but at least part of it seems to be a drinking competition, with any man who passes out being disqualified.

The animists have their town hall meetings in these short little covered areas called tagundas, or something like that. This is so that if they get angry at another person and try to jump up they will hit their head and look stupid. So, instead of being able to get angry, they now wear funny hats that they turn to face someone if they are angry at the person.

This is some kind of bird that the guide didn't know the English for and that I don't remember the French or Dogon for. However, they migrate from Europe and they come just before the rainy season (ie the hot season). They are very fun looking birds.

This picture is from inside the ogon's home. The ogon is the religious leader chosen every 60 years, but once he dies, the new one isn't elected until the next 60 year party. (If by some miracle the ogon is still alive after 60 years, the party gets cancelled and everyone is disappointed.) This scene depicts a man on the left, a sacred crocodile in the middle (sacred because it leads people to water), and one of my favorite aspects of Dogon mythology on the right, the Sigi, which is a powerful beast with the ability to give man much power. If you find it, it will promise to give you tons of power if you don't kill it. You are suppose to accept the power and then immediately kill the Sigi so that it can't come and get back its power when you aren't watching. Asked to describe a Sigi, the guide described it as "like a big cow".

This is a close up on some dwellings. First, note the littlest places up at the top. This is where the Telim pygmies lived before they decided to leave. Some are burial areas where they hoisted bodies up with ropes to bury them and others are where they lived. The areas below that are where the Dogon lived. These buildings have been abandoned for hundreds of years, but are in decent shape. The buildings sitting up on wooden platforms are granaries for storing food and grains. The others are homes.

The kola nut is the center of much social life in Dogon Country. We had to buy a huge bag of them to hand out to people that we met. They look like the picture below and are mostly loved for their high caffeine content. The taste and texture is almost exactly likely a slightly rotten raw potato. People love them and it is common to bring some as a gift when you visit people's homes.

Adding a new form of transport to our list, we got to ride on this cow cart for a few miles. A cow cart was not actually high on our list of transport we would like to take until we saw one, at which point it came close to the top of the list. Now at the top of the list is riding an ostrich.

Local women in both Dogon country and elsewhere get together to pound whatever needs to be pounded. In most cases, that is manioc, the starchy root vegetable that is a main part of the local diet. They all pound together and apparently gossip a lot (according to our guide). Note the baobab trees behind them.

Getting to Burkina Faso from Dogon Country proved difficult. Our driver dropped us in the town of Bankass (high on Tara's list of favorite city names), where we waited about 5 hours for a minivan to come and take us to the border. In defense of transport, a previous shared taxi driver had offered just as we arrived to throw out two other passengers and give us their seats if we would pay four times the fair price, so I guess we could have waited less. In any case, we then waited for another 45 minutes and apparently they had overfilled the van and we were the extras because people were about to riot that we were taking seats that we shouldn't have been given. So, they pull us out of the car and say they have a better solution. Voila! We rode to border in the back of an ambulance that was going about 80 miles per hour down the dirt road all the way. If you needed an ambulance in Dogon country that day, sorry, but we were already using it.

Sadly, by the time we got to the border, it was closed, so we got stuck in Koro, Mali. Not really a town you want to get stuck in, but we at least made it the following day. Dogon country, despite being hotter than the sun, was culturally interesting and asthetically pleasing. We recommend a few days there if you happen to be passing through Mali.

Mali (not Bali)

I was able to call my mom on Skype for her birthday from Bamako, the capital of Mali. She asked where I was, and then said "You're in Bali?!"

No, mom, not the tropical Asian island of Bali, but the landlocked West African one of Mali. Though I can understand the confusion. If you'd asked me a year ago where in the world Mali was, I'm sure I couldn't have answered. Or I might have confused it with Malawi (also in Africa, in the south).

But over a recent 10-day stretch, we learned plenty about Mali. It has some famous sights--like Timbuktu, for instance, that dusty, end-of-the-world trading town in the Sahara. Unfortunately, a combination of bad roads and possible rebel banditry (yeah) took that off our itinerary, but there were tons of other interesting places to visit besides.

Just getting to Bamako was an adventure of its own. To get there from The Gambia, we had to cross back into Senegal, then into Mali, then travel about 600 kilometers to reach the capital. When we left Georgetown, our last stop in The Gambia, around 10AM on a Saturday, we stupidly hoped we might make it to Mali in one day. Ha. What we ended up doing was taking no less than seven forms of public transport just to get to Tambacounda, Senegal, a town less than 200 kilometers away.

Highlights of this journey included the ferry we helped pull across a river along a cable with hands (photo in Andy's Gambia post)... waiting two hours at a police checkpoint for a minibus because the last Saturday of every month is "environmental cleaning day" in The Gambia, in which roads are closed to be cleaned (no wonder The Gambia looks so much cleaner than Senegal!)...waiting another two hours for a covered pickup truck to fill up with about 20 people before it would drive us across the border...and negotiating in the dark for a shared taxi that would take us to Tambacounda along with a spitfire Senegalese girl who really, really wanted to visit her boyfriend there that night. Oh, and endless military checkpoints and roadblocks, yay.

The next day, it was a shared sept-place taxi to the Senegal border town and an extremely hot walk across the border bridge with all our stuff, to where a bus (wow, a real bus!) was waiting to take people to Bamako. One person told us it would take 22 hours, which we thought sounded crazy, but he hardly spoke French so we thought we misunderstood. A man who spoke English and worked for the company said it would be 10 hours, which we thought sounded much more reasonable for a 600-kilometer trip.

20 hours later, bathed in our own sweat (no AC on Malian buses!) we rolled into Bamako. We have since learned to double all transit times that are told to us or that we read in the Lonely Planet, and that out to be pretty accurate for transport in Mali.

The bus ride was really interesting. It was filled with people from many different countries, as I guess that Bamako is a transfer spot for buses to places much farther east and south. Our favorites were the large gaggle of middle-aged women from Niger, who had huge hoop earrings and brightly-colored headscarves and seemed to be traveling with every single one of their worldly possessions (there are a lot of nomads in Niger, we later learned, so this is actually a distinct possibility--you just don't think about nomads taking the bus, do you?). They didn't seem to care much about the bus rules, like the fact that you are only supposed to board when your name is called, and it was kind of funny to watch them defy and argue with the conductors.

We were the only white people on the bus (well, heck, we're usually the only white people wherever we go), and ended up being something of a magnet for the few English-speaking Africans around. We chatted for a long time with a man from Liberia, who now lives in Mauritania, and was spending four days traveling on buses to go visit his cousins in Cote D'Ivoire. Kind of put our two-day trip in perspective! Also met a Nigerian man who confirmed that it may be hard for us to get a visa to visit there...

The highlight of that epic bus trip was when we stopped around 1AM and everyone piled off the bus and went to sleep in the dirt at the side of the road. Andy and I were used to overnight buses in Latin America and Morocco actually, like, driving through the night, so this was new to us. But, it was MUCH cooler out there, so we tried to do as the Africans did and follow suit. Andy succeeded in sleeping under the stars, but I ended up getting back on the bus and curling up in my seat. We both got some sleep, and four hours later, the bus resumed its journey for another bazillion hours or so.

Oh, the other cool thing that happened on the bus was that we found this crazy bug on my bag. It was all white and had little claws like a lobster. You never know when you're going to get to see cool wildlife, I guess!
So we pick up with some pictures in Bamako, where we spent a couple of days. It was 110 degrees in the shade and as traffic-filled and dusty as any other African city we went to, but we found a nice hotel and had a few very good meals and enjoyed the experience overall.

Bamako has a few monuments, like this one. Since it's at the Place de l'Independence, I assume it has something to do with independence. I think that Mali is currently celebrating 50 years of independence from France, actually.
Bamako is on the Niger River, and we walked across it one day on a somewhat precarious bridge. Looking down over the side, we noticed this car that someone apparently dropped in. Oops.

But most people in Bamako get around by mobylette (motorbike), not car. This picture doesn't begin to do justice to the crazy swarms of mobylettes at every intersection and roundabout. But you can see that a few decided to take over the sidewalk to get around traffic...

Those are apparently the only non-food pics we have of Bamako. It's not the most beautiful city, but it's not a bad place. We were able to walk around a little at night without feeling too unsafe, and it was the last place we had fast internet for a LONG time.

But next it was off to Segou, an artistic town further east along the Niger River. I really liked Segou, and not in the least because we splurged on a motel with a pool and...air conditioning!!! Our one night there was the last multi-hour stretch of time I spent not sweating continuously for about 10 days.

The Niger is a little more tranquil and less poluted in Segou than in Bamako.
We tried to take some pictures of typical architecture and people in Segou and beyond, since we feel like we haven't done a great job of documenting that so far. Here you see some mud-bricks drying in the sun. Most houses in Mali are made of mud-bricks, but it's a complicated multi-month process producing them, as we learned later. First you leave mud out on the riverbank for a while, then you mix it with rice husks, or sometimes a shea-butter-like substance (beurre de qualité in French), then you can finally mold the bricks. People need to do repairs on their mud-houses every couple of years once they're built.
Much to Andy's delight, Segou (and the rest of Mali) had some very large and colorful lizards.

Segou also makes a lot of pottery, and there is a fun pottery market at the edge of town.

OK, my favorite thing that we did in Segou was visit the bogolan, or mud-cloth workshop, where we learned all the steps of how this traditional cloth is produced. You start by going through a hobbit-hole into the building...

Then you learn about all the different natural materials from the earth that they use to make the different colors, which are then applied to the cloth in fun geometric patterns. We also got to see some cloth being woven by local artisans--it can be made of cotton or wool.
At the shop on site, you can see some of the finished products. We saw lots of other bogolan at toursity markets, but the stuff here was the nicest. I wish I'd been able to buy some pieces to decorate the home I do not have...
This is the bogolan workshop from the outside. Looks like a castle!
And this is the huge pile of trash right next to it. Nice trees, though.
Our next stop was Djenné, an island town in the middle of a different river that is known for having the largest mud-brick mosque in the world. What, you haven't heard of it? Yeah, we hadn't either, but it is pretty much the biggest tourist attraction in Mali.

And it is impressively big, and fun-looking, kind of like a magic sand castle. A lot of restauration work is being done on it at the moment, as you can see. Non-Muslims can't go inside, but we took an interesting historical tour of the town with our new friends, Jen from Britain and Estephania from Ecuador, with whom we would later continue to Dogon Country further east.
People carry a lot of things on their heads in Africa, and every time we think we've seen the biggest load possible, someone else comes along and blows us away carrying a couch or something on their head. OK, maybe not a couch, but we have seen some enormous loads. This one is pretty modest in comparison to some.Djenné is also famous for having a huge market every Monday, but unfortunately we were there on another day. They still have a pretty busy "Petit Marché" with lots of foodstuffs and other items for sale. You can get the idea here.
At the entrance to the Petit Marché were people selling little frozen bags with juice and bissap (sugary hibiscus juice, which I love) for about 5 cents each, and Andy and I supported the local economy by buying about 10...have I mentioned that Mali is hot?

OK, that is the first half or so of Mali! Andy is going to write about our adventures in Dogon Country, further east in the country and a very different and fascinating place. Stay tuned for that, and for our far future posts on Malawi and Bali, both of which we plan to visit before this trip is up.