TIA, man. TIA.

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I'll be honest, Bamako isn't a city I feel the need to go back and visit again. The main road is wide, decorated with Christmas lights at night, and there are some nice statues placed around the city (my favorite is the giant hippo with his mouth open), but the rest of the city is cramped, dirty, and hard to get around. Even the taxi drivers don't know where things are!

Despite this, we ventured out for dinner because the guidebook listed a restaurant that has kora music on Thursday nights. Turns out it's closed during Ramadan. We asked our taxi driver if he knew of an inexpensive restaurant in the area, and he started talking about one called "Luxe" (does that sound inexpensive to you? We didn't think so either) We ended up at a patisserie that was completely empty besides us. The place filled up as we waited (forever) for our food, and everyone got served before us. Interesting how that happens. We decided that since we were at a bakery and it was our last night in Mali that we should order a birthday cake to share. Malian birthday cake, sadly, is very heavy with very thick, buttery frosting, and we had a very hard time eating it!

Our flight on Friday didn't leave until 6pm, so we decided to explore Bamako a little more. We took a taxi to Point G, which is set on a cliff overlooking the city. Again, we ran into a taximan who didn't know where the botanical gardens are, so he decided that dropping us off at the hospital was the same thing, haha. Garret had read about caves that you can explore, so we set off trying to find those. Doctors at the hospital pointed us to a path, which ended at a collection of satellite dishes and some huts. The men there showed us where the path picked up again, so we walked and walked and never found the caves! Instead of roaming the cliffside forever, we decided to make our way down to Medina Market, which looked much better from above than when you actually got there. We saw the Almost Olympic swimming pool in Bamako...it was intended to be olympic-sized to compete for a bid, but they forget to take the size of the tiles into account, so it falls 1cm short of regulation and was never filled with water. In the end, we went to the airport early since Bamako was not working out for us. African airports are really strict about check in times (you are not allowed to check in earlier than two hours before take-off), so we sat in the deserted VIP lounge and pretended to be very important for several hours.

In very un-African style, our flight took off a half hour EARLY. Can you even do that? It was a connecting flight from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, so the plane was already half full when it arrived in Bamako a half hour early. We made it through the very lax security and were shocked when we started to taxi a full half hour before scheduled take-off. In any case, it didn't matter because we got back to Dakar earlier, though that time was lost while we waited for a customs officer to show up and stamp the international passengers' passports.

It was a bit disappointing to get back to Dakar. I LOVED Mali...we had such an amazing time. Mali is much more African than Dakar is, and it was a very nice change of pace and scenery for a week (it was really great to escape the polluted air for a bit).

And now to the title of this entry: TIA. For those of you who haven't seen the movie Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio's character says this several times, and it stands for "This is Africa." The six of us kept a running list of all the TIA moments we had in Mali, and the list is well over 30 (and those are only a select few of the many). What is a TIA moment, you ask? Here are some examples:

1. On our drive back to Bamako, we learned that honking your horn means "get the hell out of my way, I'm coming through." You can use this to alert people, vehicles, and even animals apparently. We came across a herd of goats crossing the road at one point, and our driver laid on the horn, but one goat didn't get it and kept walking. There was a sickening thud, and we looked back to see the little boys who were shepherding run to the now dead animal. We all had horrified looks on our faces, but our driver just shrugged, as if saying "well, he didn't get out of my way!"

2. Driving to Djenne, we realized that our driver put the key into the ignition to turn the car off. When we asked Salif, our guide, about this, he said the key won't stay in the ignition while driving. He was then shocked that it doesn't work like that in the USA...

3. (and this might be the best one) Our 4x4 driver put a cassette tape in and, lo and behold, it's Celine Dion. The five girls sang along to "That's the Way it Is" while Garret and the driver just rolled their eyes. The next song, however, was "My Heart Will Go On" and all seven of us belted out the lyrics with the windows down as the Malian landscape rolled by.

4. We got pocket knives and Dogon knives through security in our carry-on luggage. Not only did we get it past the x-ray, but our bags were also personally searched before we were allowed on the plane in Bamako. There was also no concern for the litres of water or bottles of shampoo we were carrying on either...

5. We were sleeping on a rooftop in Dogon Country, and we finally asked what the distinctive buildings are made out of. Salif tells us that they're made from a mixture of earth and dung. Fabulous. So, it turns out that the bump on the rooftop that separated Sarah and I at night was nothing more than a dung barrier, haha.

6. There was a man in Ende carrying around a ribcage from some animal. He stopped, threw it on an exposed tree root and started hacking away at it with a machete. We're still not sure if that was our dinner or not...


Also, my mother has requested that I post more photos of myself. I will have to steal them from my friends' facebook accounts because I think I have two pictures with me in them from my personal collection. Here are the links to the entire collection of Mali photos:

Album #1
Album #2
Album #3
Album #4

The fourth album is not done yet (my internet here is slow, and it's taking forever to get my pictures, and there also aren't captions yet for any of the albums. Hopefully soon! Maybe after lunch today...?

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Comments

[katie]

I almost died laughing when I read that your driver just mowed that animal down! Poor shepard boys... What are they going to tell their village?! lol.... And, hey, I have no qualms against eating machete'd rib cage! :P