26 January 2009 – San, Mali to border with Burkina Faso. 21,518 km
It was getting late when we arrived at the turn-off the main road to Djenne so we looked for a wildcamp spot. The following morning we all piled into the Landy for the few kilometres to Djenne, it was easier than trying to drive the Mog in to the small town. When I say ‘all piled in’ I actually mean that Jon drove, with me in the passenger seat and Oz and Joe clinging to the roof in true African style!
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We caught the tiny ferry across the river which seemed to have more people on it trying to sell us stuff than customers! |  |
| Jon wistfully looked over the side and declared, “I think we could have forded this as it doesn’t look too deep”... hmm... we certainly could have crossed in the Mog but I didn’t fancy pushing the Landy across so I bought return ferry tickets!! | ||
Djenne has the world’s largest mud mosque – I suppose it has to be somewhere! We parked in the small square in front of the mosque and we instantly surrounded by people saying they were guides, beggars, the omnipresent snotty nosed kids and other assorted personages trying to sell us stuff. Fending all these off we walked towards the mosque and collectively decided that we didn’t need a guide as we were directly in front of the thing we’d come to see! We walked round the building and became totally lost in the smelly backstreets, jumping carefully over open sewers and avoiding piles of rotting rubbish we eventually emerged at the other side – which, for anyone planning on visiting the mosque at Djenne, looks exactly the same as the front!! We visited the library containing ancient Korans and were allowed onto the roof to photograph the mosque. I wanted to buy some mud cloth which is made locally so we caved in and asked one of our hanger’s on where we could go ... unsurprisingly his cousin made the cloth so, after a quick coffee stop, we headed to her house. We were ushered into the house and up to the roof where they were drying rice. We eventually made our way into a tiny room filled with cloth of various patterns. After chatting for a while I made the woman an offer for a piece of cloth and she looked totally horrified that I could offer so low! I explained that not being either gullible or American I was not going to pay the hugely inflated price she was asking and would go elsewhere... naturally she then dropped the price a bit. After extended haggling and confusion I did manage to secure a piece of lovely cloth at a price somewhat lower than the Malian national debt! The thing I’ve found time and again here in Mali is that everyone seems so surly when you do eventually agree a price. Even as you hand over the money they don’t seem at all happy that you are giving them what we both know is too much for the item... it really makes you reluctant to buy anything. They expect you to give them gifts constantly but don’t want to actually work at selling you anything and you never receive a smile or any recognition from them. In a similar vein, if one person in a household manages to get a job then all the others in the family don’t bother finding work and live on the one income. Moussa, the President of Mopti, was supporting 21 relatives with his one job – the others sat around in his compound watching television! If the people of these countries suddenly decided to get motivated and stop sponging from their relatives then maybe a lot of the problems in Africa would be sorted out.
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Images of Djenne (clockwise from top left - click any image to enlarge)Mud architecture is held together with supporting wooden posts. The mosque has to have major repairs each year after the rainy season with up to 1,000 volunteers working on it. Ancient Koran lie in the museum. Small boy recycles a bike tyre into a toy. View of the mosque from the museum window. Different styles of mud architecture, this is the museum front. |
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We decided we’d had enough of Djenne so made our way back to the Landy where Jon was asked for money for parking – again no surprise there! I asked for an official receipt and the guy disappeared, returning with a hastily scribbled piece of paper which he’d torn out of a passing child’s exercise book! We said that we would only pay if he produced a proper receipt and he said he was going to call the police... we laughed and told him to go ahead and call them, then drove off to him shouting at us! Back over the flimsy ferry and in our respective vehicles we headed to Mopti, after which the guys were heading north to Timbuktu to attend the Festival of the Desert and us east to Hombori.
We stopped at Mopti to meet up with the President, a really nice guy called Moussa. He invited us to his house and we ended up parked in the street for the night. Joe slept on Moussa’s roof with the rest of us in our vehicles. The kids ran riot around us and the noise of the televisions and radios kept us awake until Moussa went to bed then peace was restored. We headed for the supermarket and Jon and Joe for Timbuktu but we found them a little way out of Mopti with Jon ominously lying under the Landy... his universal joint on the front propshaft had broken. He located his spare only to find that he’d been sold an incomplete one in a new packet, hmm... not a Land Rover dealer in sight! The boys piled into the Mog and drove off to find scrap yards and someone with a grinder while I guarded the Landy (I actually sat in it and read for a very pleasant few hours but I’d like to think I was guarding at the same time!). All too quickly it was too late to move on so we camped in the open by the road. Very early the following morning Jon and Joe left for Timbuktu as they were now running late to attend the Festival of the Desert. We were suddenly approached by some guy demanding to see our passports and vehicle papers. Oz asked him who he was but he seemed not to understand and kept asking if we spoke French. He was very cross that we didn’t and asked us why we thought it was ok to visit a French speaking country without being able to converse in the local language... I resisted the urge to ask if he had ever been to China!! After telling him our papers were in order (but not showing him them) he left in a huff – we can only assume he was some sort of policeman trying to get a bribe out of us.
After a quick lunch at Douentza along with filling up with water at a most obliging man’s tap, we headed along the road to Hombori. The scenery changes dramatically here and we found ourselves in a John Wayne style film set with towering pinnacles appearing from the savannah scrub. Stopping for the night at a spot right under one of the cliffs, we awoke to find someone sitting on a rock watching us – how long he’d been there we had no idea but it was clearly better to watch a deadly still Mog than anything else he could have been doing that morning! Surprise, surprise he asked for food and money!
Oz had been asking to see an elephant for ages and he was just in the middle of asking again when I screeched the lorry to a halt and pointed into the bush exclaiming, “There’s your elephant”. He leapt out of the window and climbed onto the roof so he could get a better look. I climbed out of the lorry, grabbing the camera and wandered into the bush. We watched as the young bull elephant took a dust bath, scratched an itch against an obliging tree and generally hung about looking like he didn’t really know what to do with himself – bit like the youths who hang about on the corners of most streets in the UK!! The Mali elephants have the longest migratory route of any African elephant, covering over 1,000km each circuit. Unfortunately their numbers have been reduced to between 400 and 700 and their migration corridors are under increasing pressure from agriculture and population growth.
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This lorry never made it's destination - shame as it was carring medicine. Packets of headache tablets and painkillers were scattered all over the area, the writing was in English so we wondered if it was an aid lorry as the medicine in the shops are all in French. Click on any image to enlarge. |
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We drove back to Mopti and then turned south to visit the Dogon region. This region is the most visited area in Mali and we weren’t at all surprised to find ourselves ambushed by ‘guides’ when we pulled into Bandiagara for lunch. We drove on down a really, really bad road passing through the amusingly named Djiguibombo which is pronounced Jiggy-boom-bo, to finally arrive at Bankass for the night (N14,04.530:W03,31.601). By then I was feeling very poorly and that night registered a temperature of 101 degrees. After resting for a day we decided that we really should see what all the fuss was about the Dogons so hired a guide and set off on a horse and cart for the 10 kilometres to the escarpment. The first village of Teli was very pretty and contains Tellem houses and Dogon granaries. The village is split into quarters with a mud brick ‘factory’ in the first quarter. We were taken to meet some of the village elders and had purchased some kola nuts as gifts for them. Kola nuts are chewed by the older men of the villages in the region and are said to give a slight hallucinogenic effect and keep the chewer awake... although I suspect it’s more from the extremely bitter taste than anything else!
Our guide wasn’t very good and we ended up walking from the first village about 5 km to what looked like a market garden area next to a pool of water with two mangy crocodiles – apparently this was a sacred lake but nothing about it said ‘sacred’, dirty, over-used and smelly were all words that did spring to mind. We walked back to Teli and by then I was feeling very unwell again. Our guide had said that we should leave the campsite at 7am but didn’t arrive until after 8am and then faffed about for over an hour giving the cartman the wrong instructions so all in all we had ended up walking 10 km in the mid-day sun. After a rest we walked on to the next village of Ende which was very pretty, and had a late lunch of yummy rice with beef and peanut sauce. We climbed up the falaise to the abandoned village balancing precariously on the cliff rocks. There are two kinds of architecture in this region, the Dogon and Tellem, the latter being a pygmy race. High up in the cliff and inaccessible today, the Dogon believe the Tellem could fly - it was the only explanation for the pygmies to be able to reach their homes and grain stores! The Tellem buried their dead in the highest caves and the caves are still full of the ancient bones.
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Views of the Dogon Region click any image to enlargeMud brick factory. View from the road - a bit different to the Mog! Dogon villages new and old with the Pygmy houses tucked higher in the cliff face. Oz tries his hand at weaving but immediately breaks the thread much to the amusement of the weaver!! |
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We wandered about the higgledy-piggledy buildings poking our noses into rooms and marvelling that they had to bring not only all their food and water up but also the wood, mud and stones to construct the buildings. Back on the horse and cart we headed to the campsite in the increasing darkness. Back at the campsite it was obvious I needed to see a doctor and have a few days rest so we decided to push on to Burkina Faso and stay in the capital of Ouagadougou – where we needed to get our visas for Ghana anyway.
