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Published: February 22nd 2011
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Date: 31/12/2010
We started off this morning with singing Happy Birthday to Sam (who is not really a morning person) but she took it all in good spirit. We walked a longer distance today - mainly across the top of the rocky escarpment - arriving at our destination of Douruo by 12.30pm.
After another lunch of pasta and finding that we were the only ones staying in this village for the night - New Year's Eve - we decided to move on. For several days we had been trying to get together on New Year's Eve and make a bit of a party of it with our fellow travellers - so we were very disappointed to find just our group in this village.
Our guide arranged for a vehicle to come in and pick us up and take us to Bandiagara for the night. Bandiagara is seen as the 'base camp' for any visit to Dogon country. It is a reasonable sized town (by Dogon standards), is cosmopolitan and busy. Not that we saw any of this - and we weren't particularly worried either - as a shower and clean up was uppermost on our minds.
Our
accommodation for the night was opposite a restaurant/bar that was holding a New Year's Eve party - which was pretty tame up until about 11pm. It was a good spot to celebrate Sam's birthday, however, most of us didn't last all night. Michael managed to stay up the longest and made lots of friends - probably an open bottle of spirits on the table helped - but he did get offered one guy's wife for a drink - but he responded saying that his first wife probably wouldn't approve.
It was sad to leave the little village of Douror - as it seemed to be the poorest village we came across - and the accommodation offered was very poor by Dogon standards. We felt really awful bailing on them and hoped that our travel group still paid them for the services that they were going to provide us (as we had to cover our own expenses for changing the itinerary).
As this was to be our last day in Dogon, we off loaded all our lollies to the kids in this village - through one of the chief women - and then the kids became very friendly and
a few of us had our hair plaited; we nursed babies; played games with the kids; etc - so it was a sad end to our trip in a way.
Earlier in the day we stopped at a village called Konsogou. Our cup of tea was accompanied by music and dancing. A young boy showed us a lot of different dance steps and the owner apologised that he had only one dancer - apparently all the other kids were working out in the fields!!!!! The singer was a great entertainer and had added in lyrics to the song to welcome everyone in different languages - very touching.
While it was sad to leave Dogon country (and we were all a bit overwhelmed when we reached a bigger town - all the noise, traffic, rubbish, etc) - we were looking forward to the next section of our trip.....the Niger River.
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