Blogs from District of Bamako, Mali, Africa - page 5

January 2nd--here in Bamako, playing drums everyday, learning a lot, classes in the morning and afternoon and into the night, hanging out with great teachers at the Djembe Hotel. Jeremy and Tewa have been great hosts helping us absorb the often overwhelming atmosphere of Africa. The internet has been down for a few days. We're mostly hanging out at their home; adventures outside require effort and planning. Today Kara's going to the market and I'm going to go watch a djembe ballet perform in town. We're looking forward to seeing Jack and Sharon arrive tonight. It's hard to plan everything for our journey to Timbucktu--we're trying to arrange a car and driver, etc. Sometimes it sounds like a tourist trap, but we still want to get out and see more of Mali, hoping it will all ... read more

We've finally made it to Bamako and are settling in to a new space, languages, and yummy food. We had a really long trip here, but it was very cool. After a great send off by the Liskas and Colleen and friends, just two hours of sleep, we flew to Casablanca. We arrived in the morning knowing that we had around a 16 hour layover and that there are neat things to see in town, but not sure about how we were going to do that with our packs, or if it was realistic. We were pleasantly surprised, after some confusing chaos, mysterious lines, and half french conversations, that Royal Air Maroc was providing us with a shuttle bus to town, a room for the day, and food! Voila! How totally perfect. After some waiting (I ... read more

Happy Holidays! We are in the final stages of planning for a new adventure, a new continent, a new year. Next Friday Dec 21 we leave our beloved and comfy home in Davis for time with the Liska-Rockwell's and a farewell party in San Fransisco, then early early in the wee hours on Saturday we depart for Africa. We'll land briefly, but not momentarily in Casablanca, hopefully spending the day on the town before departing again later that night for Bamako, Mali. We plan to spend most of our trip in Bamako, the country's capital at the Djembe Hotel , chez nos ami Jeremy and his family. Kevin will study drumming in its home culture, and I will play the role of observer, participant, explorer. Who knows! Perhaps we will have encounters and adventures of the ... read more

The way I see it, people do not usually come to Africa for the cities, they come to see the people, hear the music, enjoy the scenary and observe the wildlife. Having said that, we have decided that our time in the big cities is time for us to update the blog, go through our photos, do laundry, relax, and chill out away from the everyday rigours of the truck and group travel. We did not rush around seeing all there was to see in Bamako, we did, however manage to make it to the Maisons des Artisans, however trying to get there was an interesting taxi ride to say the least. The taxi driver had to ask several people for directions, and still it took us over an hour to get to where we wanted ... read more

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 ... read more