Dogon Country, here we come!

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After a quick breakfast of bread, strawberry jelly, and tea, we repacked our backpacks and threw them in our crowded sept-place. We were on our way to Dogon Country! According to Lonely Planet, it is in the top 10 places to see before you die, so we were all quite excited. We were driving from Sévaré to Bandiagara to Kani-Kombolé and then hiking for the next three days.

Salif told us we were going to be switching drivers before we got to Bandiagara, but we weren't exactly sure why. It turns out you have almost no choice but to switch drivers because one of the bridges got washed out years ago and it only goes 2/3 of the way across the water. So, we pulled over once we got to the bridge and watched helplessly as a bunch of 8-year-olds grabbed our bags and threw them in a pinasse (a big canoe). We gamely got into the pinasse and watched as the water level rose significantly each time one of us climbed in. With the group of us in the boat, the water was only about one inch below the edge. One man climbed up on the back end, grabbed a huge pole and began to push us off with the help of men on the shore. The people staying behind on the edge of the river waved enthusiastically while shouting "Au revoir, toubabs!" and the man pushing our pinasse along kept directing us to shift our weight around, as we came close to tipping over several times. It turns out the river is only a couple feet deep, and our rather heavy pinasse actually got stuck on the bottom at one point. It would have been so much easier to walk across the river and just deal with having wet knees for a while!

Our second ride of the day was a really nice, 4x4 Land Cruiser. We stopped in Bandiagara (the last town before Dogon country) to buy some cold water, and then we started our foray into Dogon Country. The landscape is SO different from Senegal. We were definitely in the Sahel region (the area below the Sahara that is slowly turning into a desert), and it was also similar to Arizona. The dirt is very orangey-red, there are a lot of rock formations, and the greenery is limited to small, scrubby bushes and some trees. Dogon Country is characterized as being an escarpment (a big cliff) with plains stretching out as far as the eye can see...perfect for hiking.

We arrived in Kani-Kombolé, and dropped off our stuff on the rooftop. We left to hike through the old Dogon village, which is tucked under the escarpment. The Dogon used to live there for protection, but they relocated to newer villages a bit further out on the plain about 80-100 years ago when they were no longer threatened. A short walk through the newer village took us to the cool mosque, and some of the little girls in the village came up and held our hands as we explored. We then climbed up the rocky hillside to explore the old village. We saw granaries, the Hogon's house, the place where they made sacrifices, and the old Tellem buildings further up the cliff face (The Tellem were the original inhabitants of the area. They were very small and used vines to scale the escarpment, but were unable to coexist with the Dogon).

Since we were lucky enough to be in Mali during the off season, we pretty much had the campement to ourselves. We ran into two professors from Montana who were buying masks, but other than that, we were the only tourists in the village. Salif told us that during the high season, there can be 40 to 50 tourists staying in each village (and there are usually only 100-200 villagers living there!)

After a lunch of beef and macaroni (mmm...campement food is actually quite delicious after weeks of fish and rice in Dakar!), we hiked to the village of Teli. We hiked up to the base of the escarpment to see the old village, and we got to see the cemetery (our guide even picked up some of the skulls to pose for pictures!), along with the houses, granaries, and Hogon's house. There was one Tellem family that was able to live with the Dogon in this village, so we saw their tiny house. They were so short, that a "tall" Tellem was just over a meter tall! We definitely bumped a few foreheads trying to duck through the door frames!

We spent the night sleeping on the roof of the campement in Teli. You can pay more to sleep in a tiny, windowless, airless room, but I don't know why anyone would choose that! We laid on our mattresses for hours (the sun sets super early here in Mali because they're very far east in their time zone), and watched the night sky. I have NEVER seen so many stars...it was gorgeous. We saw seven shooting stars, and we could clearly see the Milky Way snaking through the constellations. Sadly, the moon rose a bit later, so it got really bright and we could no longer see the stars.

The one problem with really early sunsets is really early sunrises. We were awake around 5am, thanks in large part to the rising sun, but also to the amount of activity in the village. We got a bit chilly around dawn, but it turns out the temperature was just 74 degrees! Breakfast was millet beignets (but we prefer to call it "millet surprise"). Millet is the most common crop out here, so you can eat it in numerous forms. This one is a sort of millet dough that is fried in patties. By itself, it is not so tasty, but we found that slathering on some strawberry jelly or chocomousse (like Nutella) makes it more than edible.

After breakfast, we hiked the 4km from Teli to Ende (where our guide was born and raised). We had run out of water, so we had to walk into the millet field to find a pump. We tried to pump our own water, but we were outdone by the five year girl who was SO much better at it than we were. We purified it with our iodine tablets and continued to hike to the next village. When we got there, it was dangerously hot outside, so we put some Foster Clarks (powdered drink mix with vitamin C) in our water and played an intense game of Rummy. In Ende, we got to see where they dye indigo cloth and there were alleyways full of bogolan cloths, so we bought some and figured some way to shove them in our already full packs.

Outside of the village, there is an amazing waterfall, so we trekked over there and climbed up endless rocks to reach the top pool. It turns out that where you are allowed to swim in determined by your rank in the village. Therefore, the little boys swim at the very bottom, where it is a stream, and the elders can swim at the top. We were allowed to swim in the elders' pool (it helps to have a guide from the village!), and we scaled even more rocks in an attempt to make it all the way to the top (sadly, we didn't have enough time as the sun was going down). We spent several hours cooling off in the blue waters before climbing back down the escarpment to spend another night on a rooftop.

This rooftop had a "ceiling" constructed out of sticks tied together, so we were unable to see the stars. We were up at 4:30am with the roosters and the women pounding millet. After a nourishing breakfast of Nescafé and millet surprise, we set off to see our last Dogon village, Begnimata. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into...

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Comments

[Katie]

These pictures are making me so incredibly jealous. I don't think you even know...

[Steffi]

Wow, it's soooo green there right now, well, what i can see from ur pictures. I can't believe that's the same place we been in June. It looks so completly different. I think I even remember that baobab tree (no kidding, I could identify a puddle in some village last time), there was absolutely nothing around, just the piles of soil where eventually some millet gonna grow from.

[Andrea Angheben]

be aware on schistosomiasis
Nice pics, but were you aware on the risk to get schistosomiasis?