Da Boat

The Niger River is the lifeline of Mali. It provides water for drinking and crops and baths, serves as the major thoroughfare for transporting goods and people, and is the hunting ground for hundreds of fishing villages throughout the country.

Most relevantly for us, the Niger River was our route from central Mali to the fabled city of Timbuktu. We left the dusty junction city of Mopti on Monday night, armed with a case of bottled water and a quarter kilo of kola nuts (for the elders, ya know) and headed up the river on a four-story passenger/cargo ferry.

Julienne even swapped yellow rhinestone sunglasses with Osmane Bah (self-proclaimed "Mr. Good Price") for some Mopti trinkets before boarding. Look for this kid on a trading floor in three years.  He's gonna be a star.

The rusty boat had everything we expected it to have (except life jackets): overloaded cargo holds of charcoal and vegetables, flooded bathrooms, grungy bunks, unaccompanied minors, and inexplicable depressions in the flooring. We were staying in a small double-bed cabin with a window to the river, and a hole in the boat's hull for a toilet.  All in all, the makings of a long three days afloat. Our emergency plan for when the boat capsized was to swim away from the onions and start yelling for each other in English.

The boat carried about 80 passengers, and while the moms did mom things, their kids played with us. At one point, a young girl started petting Julienne's arm and then reached to touch her eyebrow, quite amazed at the simultaneous similarities and differences between the two of them. We then taught them how to complete a New York Times crossword puzzle.  Clue:  four letter word for "French Sudan, formerly." Answer: M-A-L-I.

The slow float along the Niger River was about as tranquil as one could want, with Bozo fishing villages, pirogues, and mud huts dotting the shore. We passed rice fields and millet fields. The sun set and the sun rose, and the river just did its thing with us on its back.

The tranquility of the boat trip was punctuated only so often when we would near an isolated river village, at which point the heavy cargo load became the reserve stock for a floating mobile market.  At midnight on the second night, a mix of Celine Dion and Salif Keita burst from the boat speakers, calling just about every village resident to the dock to meet the boat's load of bananas and bed mattresses.   

In a matter of 20 minutes, we watched in genuine amazement as a completely empty dock morphed into a thriving market of 300 people in the middle of the night. Women pulled baskets off the boat for small sales while men swapped lumber and major commodities.  In some sophisticated accounting routine that we don't understand, we didn't see a single bill or coin change hands. And then as quickly as we arrived, the boat sounded a horn, and all was packed and ready to go again.

Three hundred kilometers later, we arrived at the dusty port of Timbuktu, Pearl of the Desert.

Four Days of Hiking, and man, are My Dogons Barking

At the end of the trek!

We’ve just finished scrubbing the orange dust out of our ears after a gorgeous 33 km trek through "Dogon Country" in rural Mali.  We loved it and have a good 200 photos to prove it.

 Dogon Country is a string of more than 100 villages along a 500 meter high, 150 km stretch of red rock cliff (the Falise de Bandigara) that divides a flat metamorphic plateau to the west and sand-filled plain to the east.  In this terrain, the Dogon cultivated the flood plain for millet and green onions, and maintained a pretty exclusive life from the rest of Malian society. The Dogon resisted the Islamization of Mali, and in order to keep their own religion, language and architecture, they built villages into the cliff to protect against slave raids.

 

As you can see in the slide show above, our hike followed the curve of the Falise, as we descended the rock face the first night, walked along the base of the cliff for three days, and climbed back over the cliff on our final day. We started hiking each morning at 6:30am or 7:00am, about 3 hours after the donkeys started hee-hawing to wake the roosters. We stopped for lunch at 11 am at a village campement for a huge plate of rice/couscous/spaghetti with palm oil sauce. After lunch, we waited for hours until the sun had cooled enough to begin the day's second hike to the next village.  There we slept on the roof under the stars (and under a mosquito net).  It was about 103 degrees during the day, and down to 63 at night.  For Mali, this is the “cool period” as evidenced by a few folks in winter coats and hats.

Kola nuts for the elders.

Assigue Dolo, a member of the Sangha village, was our guide and essential to our understanding of the rich Dogon culture. Growing up in Dogon Country, Assigue talked about his community with pride – from the Dogon creation story to burial rituals, fetish sacrifice to the importance of the baobab tree, the diet of the Hogon spiritual leader and how to greet your neighbor properly (lots of "say-ow"s).  For each elder we came to, he had kola nuts for us to offer them.  He found us homemade millet beer, a yeasty drink that wasn’t half bad.

This trek was as intellectually stimulating as it was geographically stunning. As we walked through village after village of mud huts and shook hands with nearly every dust covered child under the age of 15, we struggled with questions such as, how to preserve culture in an economy so reliant on tourism? and how does a community hold on to the ways of the past while making room for human progress and technological advancements?

The women's menstruation house

Assigue offered us a multi-faceted and often contradictory view of a young Dogon professional. He left his community to go to college and work in Bamako. He now acts as a guide (in part because he's waiting for the university to end its strike and reopen) but looks forward to the day when there's enough opportunity to work in "a proper career", like in an NGO doing women's health work.  He spends his free time and extra money building a house in his home village, directly across the road from the sacred ground where a fox provides answers to life's important questions, which he hopes to turn into a hostel for tourists. He is writing a Masters dissertation on Dogon death rituals to prove that the Dogon religion is similar to and different from Islam, though he considers himself neither a true believer or a non-believer of either faith. Assigue gets slightly annoyed when his clients complain about hole-in-the-ground toilets--"this is Dogon Country, not Europe!"-- and charges his two cell phones each night on a solar-powered car battery that serves as the only electricity source in the village. 

We ended the trek with more questions than answers and more photos than space on the blog.

Next stop...Tombouctou (Timbuktu).