Part III, March 16-19: Journey to Bamako
March 16-17: Our Cave in Mopti
There’s not much to say about Mopti. Lonely Planet’s West Africa 2006 edition says that over 100,000 people call this place home, but it feels like Bohicon (but dryer and hotter). It’s dirty, people constantly harass us, and we only want to go outside for essentials, namely water sachés and food. Therefore, we turned our dark, ventilated room into a sort of PCV cave. We slept and watched movies all day and tried to avoid contact with the outside world. We left for Djenné on the morning of March 18.
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| The early-morning view across the river from Mopti's taxi gare |
March 18: Djenné
We got up early to try and get a 6:00am taxi from Mopti to Djenné. When we got to the taxi gare just before 6am, it was empty, save for a few drivers wiping their cars off with dirty rags. The taxi gare in Mopri has a sort of hierarchy, or pecking order, which determines which cars leave first. The taxi gares in Benin are complete anarchy; when a taxi is full it leaves. In Mali, however, there is a chef of the gare who has a list that determines which cars leave first. The downside to this is what we were facing today: the first vehicle on the list was a van that held 25 people, so we had to wait a long time. If we were in Benin, we could have persuaded a few people to join us in our taxi and we would have left within an hour.
When we finally left, all 25 of us (including 4 children) were smashed in the back of the van, plus 2 or 3 people in the front with the driver. The route was supposed to take 2 hours but we stopped a few times to pick up people or drop them off, and we even got a flat tire once—the tire was completely shredded—so the trip took more like 3 hours. At one point we had to pile out to get on a ferry to cross the Niger River, which starts in Guinea and meanders around West Africa in a big semi-circle and empties into the Atlantic in Nigeria, to continue on a few kilometers to Djenné.
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| Inside our van |
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| Fixing the flat |
On our short ferry ride we met a man, Yousuf, who offered to let us sleep at his house for 1500 cfa each for the night, meals and tour of the market included. We thought that we would give him a shot, but then we saw his house and met his family. Without going into details, we decided not to stay at his house but told him that we would give him 1000 cfa each for lunch and a tour of the town, and we would stay in a hotel instead.
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| Djenne's mosque |
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| Detail |
He fed us rice with sauce and showed us to our hotel, where we dropped off our things and left with Yousuf on our tour of Djenné. The city is famous for having the world’s largest mosque made out of mud, and it is pretty impressive. The outside of the mosque has wooden beams sticking out which serve as structural supports as well as built-in scaffolding for repairs, such as once a year when a new layer of mud needs to be added to the mosque before rainy season (why they do it before, and not after rainy season, is beyond me).
We didn’t go in because it costs 10,000cfa each to see inside, but we made do with the pictures. We checked out a little market and some artisans, one of which sold us a few things and invited us back later for tea.
March 19: Djenné Marché Day and Ségou
Got up early to check out the weekly market in Djenné, then jump on a bus to Ségou, which was “scheduled” to leave at 10.
We thought that the marché would be just dirty, African marché. Well, it mostly was, but there were some kinds of specialty things that we hadn’t seen in other places and it was located in a big square in front of the giant mud mosque, which was kind of interesting.
We got the hell out of there on the 10am bus that left only 45 minutes late. The bus had air conditioning at some point in its life but those times were long ago and, since the windows wouldn’t open, we were in for a long, nasty ride.
Once again, Lonely Planet 2006 failed us again. We now know that only the maps were up to date. We ended up staying in a Catholic mission for 2000cfa each, and that on the advice of a PC Mali volunteer who we ran into while leaving one of the recommended hotels that is now very much out of our price range. We ran into him again later (and his squeaky-clean friend who just arrived on vacation from America) when we went searching for food.
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| In front of the market with mosque in the background |
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| This kid really wanted a picture with Craig |
Thankfully (or maybe not so thankfully), the bus stopped every 10 minutes or so to pick up/drop off people or to check in at a police checkpoint, so the doors would open briefly, but when the doors opened a cloud of dust would come in and cover everything inside with a thick red layer of laterite.
Ségou was not so bad. We quickly figured out transport. There were a lot of taxis but the better, cheaper, and more pleasant option was to take a moto-taxi—essentially, a rickshaw attached to a motorcycle.
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| The Niger River in Segou. The trash comes standard. |
Ségou was pleasant and made for a good stopping-off point for a night to avoid the really long haul all the way to Bamako. It felt sort of homey, kind of like Bohicon but with less trash and no big trucks.
Off to Bamako.
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