1998-1999 Cote d’Ivoire – Part 2

I loved Ivory Coast. We weren’t there for long, but from what I saw and ate, and the people that I met, and most of what I experienced, I just loved it. Which is why it makes me so sad to think of the political turmoil that has been going on there since then, and the hardships that the people and the country have endured. It also makes me sad to think that their beautiful infrastructure and all the hard work that brought them to where they were when I was there is now probably significantly deteriorated. These backward steps are especially heart wrenching in a continent where every success is fought for so hard.

When we arrived in Man everything was lush and wonderful. This was so appreciated after dry and dust covered Mali. The food was tropical, which meant tons of fresh fruit and veggies! The breeze felt great. People were very friendly and open. And food and accommodation was much cheaper and nicer than Mali. We spent Christmas in this lovely mountain town, where Christian Christmas carols mixed with Muslim chanting. It was warm and perfect.

From Man we travelled to Sassandra, which is located on the ocean. Throughout Ivory Coast we ate street food from food sellers, and it was wonderful! We also ate at a number of really great restaurants. There was one young man named Bobsea in Sassandra who really inspired me. He built himself a tiny restaurant named l’Embouchure out of bamboo, and was a fabulous cook. He was from Nigeria, and he believed in Rastafari and wrote reggae songs in English. His spirit was so strong, and he had big dreams of getting electricity and a phone. I wonder where he is today.

The beaches here were unbelievably gorgeous. The non-stop crashing waves prompt solitary moments, and heighten the senses while mesmerizing them. They pull feelings of sadness and aloneness, and happiness and peace all at the same time.

1998 Cote D’Ivore – Part 1 Bus Ride from Mali to Ivory Coast

Ok, this bus ride left me seriously thinking I might die. It was hard, long, dusty, but fabulous in a unique traveller’s experience kind of way. The truth is, the bus that we ended up taking is not one that foreigners normally take… it is the bus for the poorest people who have no papers and therefore take the broken down, long-way-around, pay bribes at every stop to gun toting checkpoint men, people standing up for days because there aren’t enough metal slats for seats, sick children and chicken bus. The trip from Bamako, Mali to Man, in Ivory Coast should probably take about 10 hours on other forms of public transportation (700km trip), but on the bus that we unwittingly chose it took over 60 hours.



Taking the poorer (read: people travelling without identity cards) bus means squeezing 44 adults plus their children into a bus with 6 rows of “seats”, it means avoiding checkpoints by driving this very rickety bus through dried up creek beds and really back road back roads, it means fixing the broken axle numerous times (like every half hour) on the side of the road with just a hammer, it means lighting fires on the side of the road in the middle of the night for everyone to huddle around while the flat tire gets fixed. And then we got to the Cote D’Ivore border.

When you get to the Mali-Ivory Coast border with a busload of people who don’t have their identity cards, it means lots of waiting, and lots of paying bribes. So, because people are poor, they pay what they can, and then they wait until the price of the bribe goes down. So we waited. All day. It was evening on the second day of travel when we finally pulled away from customs. For the record, we didn’t pay any bribes. I have never paid a bribe. I did pay a lot of money to legally get my visa for Ivory Coast, so I didn’t figure I should pay any more. I don’t know how I should feel about that… maybe it would have helped the people if we had contributed or maybe it would have made things worse. In any case, no one pressured us and eventually we were on our way.

Most of the night was spent banging on the bus again, so we didn’t travel that far. And most of the next day was spent waiting in a village, for what I didn’t know. Everyone seemed sick on this bus, which made my anemic, paracitic, pneumonia inflicted self seem not very unique. However, the colour of my skin was pretty unique, which unfortunately left me not being able to pee on the side of the road like everyone else on the bus; oh no, for me there was always a kind soul ready to escort me half way across the world to find a two sided open air hole in the ground toilet for me to use. Generous, but didn’t really lend itself to helping me fit in. But I guess I didn’t fit in in the least… I am pretty sure that very few whitey’s ever pass through most of these tiny villages set out in the middle of what seemed like far far away.

The bus ride took us 3 days and would have taken much longer (and did take much longer for all of our fellow bus-riding companions), except that at one of the check stops the very nice guards (with very big guns) took a liking to us and insisted that the bus driver take a detour from their back road route to drop us off in the town of Daloa, Cote D’Ivore so that we could take a network of minivan buses more directly to Man. This was very fortuitous for us, since we were quite sick and weak by this point. So, after a trip that brought us many miles and through a whole range of emotions, we arrived in the beautiful, friendly, lush town of Man in the beautiful country of Cote d’Ivore.

A final comment about the bus ride, I want to acknowledge the amazing patience and self control that our fellow travellers, as well as almost everyone else I met in Mali, possessed. Life is hard there. The bus ride was only one illustration of the way daily life is for many people. And they endure it with dignity. They are patient, their children are good, they don’t complain – I never heard a Malian complain – they are denied comfort and often live in a perpetual state of not knowing what is around the next corner. They go without things that we would think are impossible to live without. And they save up the energy that North Americans would use getting mad and frustrated and use it to survive another day.

1998 Mali – Part 3

After Dogon country we returned to Bamako. Bamako doesn’t really feel like a capital city. Most of the roads are dirt. There aren’t a lot of tall buildings. There is tons of garbage in the street, which is miraculously cleaned up each night by the goats, chickens, etc., who roam the streets. We met some really cool people in Bamako, like Mohamed who ran Café Mohamed Ala Casa and cooked wonderful vegetarian food.

In Bamako we stayed in a Catholic convent for a few days. There is a Christian minority here. Then we moved to stay with the family of Parfum, our guide. They welcomed us into their home as guests, presumably because we had paid Parfum quite a bit to be our guide throughout Dogon country, although I don’t imagine they make a habit of having foreigners stay with them as guests. The family lives in a suburb of Bamako called, Niamakoro. The family has a nice courtyard with their own well and bathroom (bathrooms here consist of a hole in the ground that you squat over, but this one actually had four walls around it). There are two co-wives in this family. There is no electricity or running water.

It was Ramadan so the older members of the family weren’t eating during the day. They made us wonderful traditional food though, and the teenagers ate with us despite Ramadan. You eat with your right hand here, moulding the food into a walnut sized ball and roll/toss it lightly into your mouth. It takes a few days to get the hang of it, but you get a lot of street cred once you can do it right! :) Being a Canadian I said ‘Thank you’ constantly, and was constantly reminded that you don’t need to say thankyou, and you don’t need to wait to be invited to eat, you just sit down. The way things work is that if you need something you take it from your friend, knowing that when they need something they will take it from you. No exchange of pleasantries is necessary.

Final thoughts on Mali: pretty hard core country to travel in. For one thing, it is extremely expensive, maybe because usually the only tourists Mali gets are rich adventurer types. There is not a lot of infrastructure set up for travellers. People and outfits are colourful, but everything is covered with a fine layer of dust. Literally and metaphorically. Something about Mali (maybe sickness, or heat, or something else) made me tired all the time and want to lie around and stare at the wall. All in all, I was not sad to leave the country, which brought us to our 60 hour bus ride out of Mali to the Cote d’Ivore…