Mali
Trip Start
Nov 02, 2004
1
6
8
Trip End
Ongoing
Segou,
Mali
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
The harmattan started suddenly at night in Niamey and blew for two solid weeks, tangling the air all in a misty dust. Children begging for food at the edge of visability, perpetual light oif early morning, sand creeping into everything.
Spent my last night in Niger in a town called Ayorou, staying in a once four star hotel that had been sacrificed to the elements: swimming pool filled with rocks, giant catering kitchen inch-deep in dust, sand blowing through empty courtyards, everything a relic, filled with dust.
Nightmare vision in Ayorou, wind storm at night, voices of laughing children echo and are filled with wind and sand. Passive face of a mule lit by the erratic blue light escaping from the bars of the welders hut, momentary loss of psychic bearings, searing dislocation.
Niger/Mali border crossing takes 15 solid hours, me paying extra to sit in the front seat of a 4WD while 27 Mailians share the back. The road is an insane series of potholes, soft sand and featureless scrub. Malian border officials demand bribes from everyone in the car. After everyone pays up we move 200m to customs where the inspector claims that our roofrack is unsafey overloaded and that we can't go on. What he actually means to say is "Bribe me substantially". Despite the fact that these words are never said aloud, everybody in the car understands whats being said, and a collection is taken up, everybody chipping in to feed this uniformed asshole's bank account (and ego). Despite our payment he keeps us waiting until dusk. We drive all night. At one stage we drive through several villages that are undergoing a plague of locusts (as if God wasn't satisfied enough with their poverty already). We wind up all the windows and hundreds of giant insects smack into the cars body like bullets, making a satisfying smacking sound. It's night so we can't see the villager's decimated maize fields. I chew kola nut to keep me awake. The tire blows, we stop and fix it. We finally arrive in Gao at 3am. The people who have homes walk to them, those who don't (me and two Malians)lie down on the rubbish filled sand in the lorry park an fall asleep almost immediately, exhausted. 30 minutes later I wake up with an intense burning pain on my leg and in my armpit. I have chosen to fall asleep on top of a fire-ant nest and am now experiencing their welcome. I curl up in a ball and pretend I'm in a fur-lined coffin with a good sound system.
Anyway 4 days or so later: Hombori, a strip of highway surrounded by giant rock formations, invisable behind thick grey dust still being kicked up by the harmattan. 2 or 3 days there, mostly wandering across the rocky plains, mostly lost, mostly trying to let the vast silence of the rocks eat my bones.
Later I was in Douenza, attending some kind of party thrown by a whole lot of Bella people. Slow sinuous dancing to a supremely distorted 3-stringed lute, the smell of Guavas, more begging children, arguments with taxi drivers...
6 or 7 hours by 4WD across the Sahel to Timbuktu (yes, Timbucktoo), a town which is such a total waste of time that I'm not even going to tell you about it.
Left for Mopti, 3 days down the Niger river on a public goods boat, endless delays, rice, dried fish and dirty water - the river snaking across the plains, banco mosques, bozo fishing villages with their reed huts and painted canoes. Watching the world slide past and not saying a thing.
Mopti then Djenne then Mopti again then Ségou. Rivers, architechre, elderly french package tourists with phallic cameras that require two hands to carry, guides everywhere, rip off arists, souveineir salesmen etc.
The capital, Bamako is next.
I notice I tell you a whole lot about what I'm doing, but not so much about what I'm thinking.
"No ideas, except in things."
- Jack Kerouac
