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…