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Published: March 30th 2006
Y'ello,
This journal is about Mali, about wild stuff that happened on the edge of the Sahara, but before I get to that I feel compelled to confess that I wrote my last journal somewhat frustrated and bothered and so omitted some of the positive that had a place there. I forgot to write how utterly exhilerating it was to cross the breadth of a country, of Ghana, in three days in the back seat of a station wagon stuffed to bursting with the musical instruments of Burkina Faso, instruments my friends had made, ngonis and djembe drums and bellophones. That was worthwhile. And I forgot to write how I spent most of my evenings that first week in Burkina making music with friends around a leafy courtyard, singing, mostly, because I don't know how to play the djembe. Also a great pleasure. But on to the interesting stuff.
I headed up to Mali. Mali is a large francophone country on the edge of the Sahara, perhaps most famous for Timbuktu and for Dogon country, a range of ancient cliff-dwellings along the Falaise of Bandiagara. It was towards the latter I was headed, la pays Dogon, one of the biggest
formal tourist attractions in the area. Getting there was a hassle, less upsettlingly so because I was with Madi, a thirty-year-old Malian who I had hired to be my guide (a guide is obligatory) in Dogon country. I had hired him outside of the area, in Burkina, despite what I'd heard about the risks in doing this, because I liked him, I trusted him, and I felt he was being straightforward with me. He was big, quiet, grounded. He knew the way and spoke the languages. At the Malian border an official tried to make my life difficult by giving me back my passport without a stamp - so that, Madi explained to me, when I came back to leave the country I'd have to bribe my way across. May I suggest installing showers at all such borders so that travellers can wash the slime off?
In Koro, having entered Mali, we waited hours again for another minibus to fill up. Eventually it filled, but it was too full, people were on top of people were on top of crying children, and Madi and I and a few others were told to leave. Fifteen minutes later we were loaded
into the back of a bache, a little cargo truck with an exposed mesh, and after the requisite delay began an hour-long voyage on a wooden bench down a road that was not a road, a road that was little more than a narrow, wobbly track through the bush, taken, I later found out, because our driver lacked the papers necessary to render our voyage legal and so drove well off the beaten track to avoid the gendarmerie. Also in the bache were a couple of older Muslim men obscured by turbans and gaudy plastic sunglasses, a combination that seemed to me both intriguing and stylish.
We slept at Bankass, a town towards the foot of the Falaise. I rose the following morning to find my beautiful, simple, comfortable plan of going trekking with Madi ruined by Madi's waking up sick, unfortunately - he said his heart was pounding too fast, it happens sometimes, but he couldn't go climbing cliffs, I could go with his friend, another guide, named Mutu, no problem. I asked him if I should wait for him, he said no. Had I known how things would turn out I don't know if I would've done
Me, There
I know, I know, this is vain, but it is my one true bona fide Indiana Jones shot and I will treasure it forever, so there. anything different. Maybe not. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I climbed aboard a horse and cart and headed into the hills.
Mutu seemed like a pretty nice guy, around 25, though he didn't put me at ease the way Madi did. He was big on the "No problem"s, the "Il n'y a pas d'une probleme"s, the "Don't worry"s, which tends to put me on my guard. We arrived in Kani Kombole, the first village before ascending the cliff, ate lunch, walked around the village a bit, then spent far too long waiting to do anything else. After hours and hours of sitting, resting, trying to write, obsessing, reflecting that doing nothing is doing nothing wherever in the world you are, at 4 PM we set out to trek up the Falaise to the next village, Djigibombu. It was me, Mutu, and an older grizzled guy with a stick. After about ten minutes Mutu was getting seriously on my nerves, telling me over and over to give my backpack to the grizzled guy when I kept telling him I was fine, also stopping every minute and talking to me incoherently about his feet, how he needed better shoes. After
fifteen minutes I was nervous about having to depend on him alone in the bush. After twenty minutes I was almost certain he was utterly, fall-on-your-face drunk. I said so. He didn't deny it. I said it again. He said he'd had one beer with some French tourists. I said he'd had more than one beer. He looked at me blankly. We were halfway up a cliff, we were far from civilization, I was otherwise by myself, night was coming fast, and my guide was pissing drunk. I wasn't a cool camper. "No problem," he kept saying, and I said no, there was a big fucking problem, and how was it possible that somebody who I was paying well to be my
guide was drunk our first hour out? Excuse my French, it's inelegant, but the fucking son of a bitch. I cooled down fast enough, or tried to, realizing that I was alone and still had to depend on this gentleman so that I didn't wind up stranded in the hills, but he was beyond reason, and it was difficult. "Sorry me," he kept saying by way of apology, and I kept saying, "It's fine, it's fine, it will
be fine, just leave me alone and sober up," but he wouldn't stop saying "Sorry me" for long enough for me to finish the sentence. I just wanted him to stop harrassing me by this point, for us to reach the village and be apart. Somewhere in here he decided he didn't like my attitude either, or else he was just too sauced to climb any further, because he stopped and said he was going back down to rent a moto to go to Bankass to get Madi. Knowing there was almost no chance of him actually doing this, I told him no, he was going to do what he was supposed to do, which is to lead me to the village, to civilization, from where he could do what he pleased. He was visibly wobbling. Night was approaching, maybe an hour of daylight left. I started thinking about what I would do if I got stranded up here, whether I could find my way back to where we'd started, whether the litre of water I had in my sack would be enough. We were still standing there arguing back and forth when a couple other guys, locals, came up
over the rockface towards us. They saw there was something wrong, Mutu and I took turns explaining the situation, and the older of the two guys disappeared with Mutu talking fiercely in Dogon. I waited with the younger guy. "He told me he's only had one beer," I said. "He drinks lots," the younger guy said. (In French; all this was in French.) "You can see by the way he walks." Mutu and friend returned. The older guy, Harouna, would be my guide; he had gotten the money I had paid from Mutu. Apparently much of my money had disappeared. I wonder where it went, this magical vanishing money. If you drink a bill straight will it make you sick the morning after?
Harouna was a great guide: honest, knowledgeable, sober while climbing cliffs. Dogon country is beautiful. I found my trek there quite boring. Now, granted, I'm a grouch and probably a curmudgeon in training as well, and I know that Dogon country is near the top of many people's must-see lists for this part of the world, but I just don't see much appeal in touring a place where people are living and working and going about
their lives while I stand there removed, smiling, snapping photos as though the undernourished naked little girl asking me for candy were Niagara Falls. I get it, but I don't
get it. Maybe I just instictively reject what people insist I must find impressive or worthwhile or beautiful. I don't know. But during all the hours I sat around at campements waiting for the midday heat to subside so that we could proceed - the hours when I first wrote this - I was always aware that I was an outsider, that even if I understood the language in which Harouna joshed with his friends (which I didn't), and even if fundamentally I accepted the local young guys as interesting, decent people and they accepted me as same (sometimes true), I was not one of them, I
could not be one of them, and that while I could be and was genuinely interested in their villages, in the way they lived, ultimately that interest could at best be academic. Physically, viscerally, soulfully, I could not possibly understand; I could emulate and posture, if I wanted, but I could not understand. There was plenty of novelty in sleeping on village rooftops,
Donkeys posing
I took out my camera and she gave me her profile. A pro. and there was plenty of intellectual interest in seeing ancient cliff dwellings, but actually I have a sneaking suspicion that those aspects of the experience might have been absolutely meaningless. I know that my fight with Mutu meant something. I know that because of how it sits in my gut. I'm not convinced that my spending four days in cliff-side villages will stay with me the same way. From that I got some pretty photos.
I returned from Dogon country, Madi was waiting, Mutu had disappeared, and all the guides accused all the other guides of being cheaters, liars, hustlers, or crazy. I didn't trust any of them. Madi had waited for me because we were going to head off to Mopti together, Mopti being a old nearby port city on the Niger River, and while by this point I didn't really feel like going I agreed because Madi had hung around for four days only to wait out my return. Unfortunately, once we arrived in Mopti, just about everything Madi told me he could deliver as a guide (accomodation, easy transportation) he could not, and so the interest of Mopti was again outweighed by stresses like finding a
place to stay, having spent the money I would've used for a hotel on bus tickets for Madi. Ultimately we slept on the roof of a taxi driver's apartment in the old quarter of the city where the center of the narrow street was filled with the most excrement and toxic refuse I've ever seen in one place where people live and children play as well - long story. But it wasn't much fun, I didn't know what I was doing there, and the following morning I'd absolutely, positively, and with finality, had enough. It happened like this. We were waiting for another bache to fill, this one for the ancient town of Djenne, we were waiting for six hours, we'd been told it would leave at 7 AM sharp, I hadn't slept the night before, everywhere was the smell of shit and meat and dirty river, half the time we were waiting inside the bache itself, crammed so tight between wood and metal and other people that there wasn't even space enough to wiggle a foot in the 40 degree heat, the crying baby next to me kept sticking its hand in its mouth and nose and then touching
my face, and every time I tried to close my eyes and breathe and say just hold on, it'll get moving soon, it has to, some young hawker would pull on my arm, "Monsieur, les montres?", "Monsieur, lumettes?", "Monsieur, gateau?", Monsieur, Monsieur, hey, hey, you want boisson? and after six hours of that, and thirst and dehydration because you can't drink because God forbid you should have to pee or worse while on one of those things, I said "Madi, I'm done," and he said don't worry, and I said no, I was done, I wanted out, I didn't really want to go to Djenne anyway, another mosque, some neato old buildings, let's grab my bag, please, and finally he took my word for it and we left the bache to get my bag from the roof. But the touts wouldn't bring it down. We insisted. They wouldn't bring it down. It's already tied down, they said, the car is leaving right now, and sure enough the bache started to pull out without us on it. We ran back to jump in, and I thought, okay, this is okay, as long as it keeps moving there'll be a breeze, there'll
be movement, this is doable. Then the bache stopped at a gas station. Too long. We waited, we waited, I put my hat under my butt to ease the effects of too many hours in one position on a wooden bench. We got moving, drove into town, stopped again. The driver was having a laugh with some friends. I tried to distract myself, I thought it'll move again, what stops must move, that's a law of physics, no? and more practically I thought there's no way I can get out of here. They won't give me back my bag. We drove out of Mopti. The road was again not a road. But there was a breeze, and movement. We drove like this for twenty minutes. Then, in the middle of a small town on the outskirts of Mopti, we slowed to a stop. As always nobody had any idea what was going on. The driver got out of the cab. He lifted the hood of the truck. He and several others did the local equivalent of scratching their heads, holding a wrench, and saying, "Broken? Dang." We sat there for twenty minutes. I was getting really thirsty. I had half
a litre of water left in my bag. And there was no way I was finding bottled water here, in this little town, and my filter was in the bag on the roof. It was now midday and hotter than 40. And I told Madi quite calmly, inexplicably calmly, that I didn't have enough water to travel like this, I didn't really want to go to Djenne, and if we got off here was there any way we could find transport back to Mopti? He said yes. I said let's go. We got off, demanded my bag in a way that brooked no argument, somehow found a taxi back to Mopti. By the end of the day we were at the border with Burkina Faso. I slept that night in a campement room with no light, no fan in the deadly heat, mosquitos quite shamelessly inside my mosquito net, in a bed that smelled like various bodily functions, music from the bar outside my window blarring, not wanting to leave my room because this Nigerian prostitute wouldn't leave me alone for three seconds. I went to bed at 7:30 PM that night. I believe I said, out loud, something to the effect of: "You're not out of the woods yet, Dorothy." Which sounds slick but as far as literature goes doesn't really make much sense.
And that's my story. From there I made a beeline towards Ghana and the coast, stopping for a couple days in Ouahigouya, northern Burkina Faso, because there was a thing with a girl there and I promised I'd come back, but that's not really worth writing about. We didn't get each other and she wanted to marry me and have many, many children together far too quickly for my comfort.
I'm in Kumasi in Ghana right now, about six hours from the Atlantic coast. The plan as it stands now is to stay there, on the coast, until my flight leaves in about a month from now. I am going to a little place on the beach where there is hot sand, cool breeze, a little bar, a nice Italian family-run restaurant up the road, and where I have a couple friends. I am going there to write. I am unsure whether this is the vacation part or the work part of my trip, but in any case it should be rather different from how I've spent the better part of the last two months: in frantic motion. My flight from Ghana goes to London, from which I need to buy an onward ticket. Right now my thinking is that that ticket will be to Israel, for reasons detailed in an earlier journal. I've been looking at some study programs there and things like that, maybe working on a kibbutz or just travelling. If you have any leads in this respect please feel free to let me know.
If you posted a comment on one of the last couple journals, thank you, and I've written you back underneath. Hope stuff's good where you are. Love from Ghana.
Daniel
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Kirill
non-member comment
long way indeed, Dorothy.
I've been keeping track of your blog and in a way, im quiet jealous that im sitting in my school, bored and you're out exploring the world. Right now, you lead anything but a mundane existance and i commend you for it. Speaking of which, my sister was watching some TV show the other day and you were on it. And now you're in Africa. I find that interesting...by the pictures (and your look on the show) you are a completley different person. In the show, you're the karasik I remember. Here, you're the Daniel I have yet to meet.