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Published: January 4th 2003
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Hello and a Happy New Year to everybody!
We had a big New Years Eve at a free camp outside of Sevare (near Mopti) shared with the 40 or so people travelling on two Economic Expeditions Trans Africa trucks we met up with. There was plenty of eating, drinking and making merry, including some fireworks.
Before that, we had a day trip on a pinasse along the River Niger from Mopti. Nine of us organised this ourselves on one of our free days. The boat only just held the nine of us, we were a bit squished. We poled (rather than rowed) along the river for a few hours until we came to a village. I'm not sure why we stopped at that particular village, but it was interesting wandering around with our guide, no-one hassling us. The next village we stopped at around lunch time, the local kids surrounding us as we ate under a tree. The third village was a boat making one, with loads of boats in various stages of construction. All these villages were of the Bozo tribe, people who live by the river and for whom fishing is the major activity.
We also
had a drive to a village called Konna, which according to the LP had a beautiful mosque. The village was nice enough, and we were left alone until the mosque where we were mobbed by hoards of kids.
From there we headed off towards Burkina Faso, driving back through Dogon Country via Bandiagara, Bankass and Koro. Crossing the border was the easiest yet, no more than 20 minutes for each side. The Mali offical was drunk (midday) and started stamping entry visas rather than exit ones, but he was stopped after the first 5 or so passports.
Burkina Faso seemed immediately different to Mali. There were more trees, more vegetables and they were much better quality, everything was cheaper too, beers were half the price we were paying in Mali. Mali, Burkina Faso and several other countries in West Africa all use the same currency, the CFA, this makes price comparisons easy, and saves us from having to worry about how much money to change and using it all up before leaving the country. There were also hundreds of vultures everywhere, village, town and country. Mali and Mauritania could have done with some of these vultures to clean
up some of the cattle and goat carcasses littering the place. We stopped in a couple of towns for food and drink on our way to the capital Ouagadougou.
We spent a couple of days in Ouaga, camped in the grounds of a 3* hotel. You'd have thought that would be great, if we had more than one toilet to share between 50 of us, the other Oasis truck was there at the same time as us. Still, it wasnt too bad. We didnt do a lot in Ouaga except look round the artisans markets and supermarkets. You'd have thought that some people on our truck had never been in a supermarket before going by the looks on their faces! I only bought some mud cloth (from the Dogons but way cheaper here!!) and another mask.
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