To Timbuktu and Beyond!

I apologize for the lack of spacing in the entry but blogger isn't being cooperative.

Unfortuntately, I had an entry all ready to go, and then I didn't put it up, and now I can't even remember what it was about because so much has happened since then. I am in Bamako to drop off my dad at the end of his two-week visit.

We had a great time but it was pretty arduous. We went to Timbuktu and my village, and that took two weeks. My dad definitely got the full Malian experience.

The night after he arrived was the election, so because of the time difference we had to stay up all night to get the result (at 4 in the morning here) and see Obama's victory speech. A hotel bar near the Peace Corps office stayed open all night and had a projector and a big screen playing international CNN. We went straight from the bar to the bus station to catch an early morning bus to Sevare/Mopti (about halfway between Bamako and Timbuktu). It was a 10 hour bus ride. Please refer to the map at the top.

We were intending to take a large passenger boat to Timbuktu, where my father would have gotten a cabin with either a fan or air conditioning, and Ben and I were planning to sleep in the deck (aka 4th class in Mali), but when we got to the boat company's office the boat was delayed for more than 24 hours. Afraid that the boat would be further delayed and we wouldn't have time to take a boat to Timbuktu rather than go in a car, we looked for other options.

We found a cargo pinasse. A pinasse is a very large (think 100 feet long) canoe-shaped boat with a roof and a motor. They showed us the boat, and told us we would be sleeping on sacks of peanuts, which seemed pleasant enough, and the price was very inexpensive. Things we were not told include: there was no accessible bathroom on the boat (if you didn't want to climb around the outside), they would pile extra sacks of sorghum on top of the peanuts (which is much less comfortable and meant there was less space between us and the roof), and we would sit on the boat for 5 hours before we left port. But we managed to look at the whole thing as an adventure, and it was an interesting experience. Luckily my dad coped very well. There was a cook on the boat so we had rice and sauce for every single meal (and pretty much the same sauce every time). The trip took 49 hours, so that was 7 meals. It got my dad good and used to eating with his hands.

We found that Bambara seemed to be the trade language all the way up the river, until we got to Korioume, the port for Timbuktu, when it suddenly turned all to French and no Bambara (fine because Ben and I both speak French, but eroded the "I speak Bambara so I know the real price, jerk" advantage).

Timbuktu has a pretty thriving tourist industry, so it turned out to be very easy to arrange a guide to see the city sights (which aren't that numerous or interesting), a camel ride into the desert, and our transportation back to Sevare. Our camel trip was fun -- camels are tall! Unfortunately I'm not posting pictures with this because I don't have any of the necessary appliances with me.

The way back was exhausting. We were taking a four wheel drive vehicle from the 70s. The middleman through whom we arranged the ride swore up and down that it would only take 7-8 hours. But we had to wait for three hours for a ferry across the river. First because we were the only car, and then because a bunch of trucks came, and managed to bend a tow bar while trying to get one of them on the boat. They were blocking our car, so we had to wait for them to work that out.

The driver turned out to be a !#$&$ing $%&, so when we stopped in Douentza after being on the road for 10 hours (and that's still 2-3 hours from Mopti) with no sign of leaving in the near future, I called the middleman. He asked to speak to the driver, and who knows what he said, but the driver yelled something in Songhai and practically threw down the phone. And we left immediately. When we reached Sevare/Mopti, he refused to fulfill our agreement of taking us all the way to our hotel, so I called the middleman again. Again, the driver was enraged, but he ended up taking us there. The whole trip took 13 hours.

The next day we took a bus from Sevare to Sikasso. Again, an entire day on buses. We left Ben in Koutiala, and my dad and I proceeded on. We rested in Sikasso for a day before going to my village. He really enjoyed seeing my village. We had tons of obligations about greeting different people, eating with different people, giving out gifts etc, so there was not much down time (and thus it was not much like my normal time in village!), but I think he got a pretty good feel for what it's like. We biked 8 km to go to do a vaccination and babyweighing in another village one day. We also biked to and from my village, which impressed the Malians because to them my dad is pretty old to be biking, particularly for someone who has enough money not to!