Mali
Welcome to beautiful Mali! This is where our 3 days of bad car luck began. First the wheel carrier on the back of the car broke so we had to put the second spare wheel on the roof of the car, (Milan’s shoe broke as he was trying to climb on the roof), our roof shower got torn off by some trees somewhere, and a part of the chassis joined with the suspension disappeared as well. We were lucky to have bush camped close to a dam by Manantali and by the time Milan figured out what was wrong with the car, after having Louise drive up and down corrugations for about twenty minutes with Milan running on all fours trying to see where the noise was coming from. We slowly drove back to Manantali and asked for a mechanic. Luckily the dam has a garage (Eskom) and they were more than happy to help us fix the car which took a quick 3 hours. We carried on very carefully this time and found a bush camp a little up the road.
Our next stop was Bamako which would serve as our base while waiting for our Burkina Faso visa. We stayed at Le Cactus which is run by a very cute old Canadian man, with basic facilities but excellent food which is all we needed after our bad luck the previous days. After a few days of rest we headed towards Djenne which was quite spectacular to see in real life. It’s much smaller than what we expected but Phillip the magnificent, our guide, took us around the very dirty village for a few hours which was well worth it. We carried on towards Bandiagara which would give us a good start the next morning to explore the Dogon Country. We camped at Hotel Toguna which was very nice and clean, although the food didn’t quite agree with Louise’s stomach that night.
Since we were unsure what to expect from the Dogon Country, do you need a guide or not, how many days should we spend there etc, we went to the tourist office where about ten ‘guides’ wanted to sell us tours for ridiculous amounts of money. Everyone is a guide here and in the end we decided to go up to Sangha ourselves and then decide if we needed a guide or not. We found a great lunch spot overlooking villages dug out in the cliffs and decided to carry on ourselves, but to get a guide in a village if we decide to stop. We drove past a few villages and to be honest didn’t understand what all the hype was about. Yes it is beautiful and it is amazing how they have lived and still live on the edge of the escarpment. Maybe we would have seen more or got more of an insight if we had gotten a guide. It was too hot for us anyway so we decided to take a shortcut after a few villages towards the main road at Kaporokenie-Na. This turned out to be more impressive than the previous villages we had passed through, as the locals react to you like they have not seem white people before! It was a fun drive back to the main road and we found a place to camp in Koro (Hotel Campement Koro – no fascilities, very small) which is the border town before Burkina Faso.