For those of you who don't know, Dogon country consists of a number of villages on, above, and below a long escarpment that runs for more than 200 km in Southern Mali. The people who live in this area have a very strong set of animist beliefs, and a particularly vibrant and complex culture built around them.
I'm not going to go into too much of a detailed of the Dogon themselves, as there is an awful lot on the internet, and to be honest I don't think I could do it justice here - I'm jut going to write a few of my impressions / experiences and leave it at that.
The most famous part of the Dogon country are the villages right on the escarpment (either at the top or on the slopes at the bottom of the cliffs). It's one of those places with a sense of mystery and power about it, particularly because of the numerous small mud dwellings built into cracks in the cliff itself (somewhat similar in feel to the Anasazi dwellings in the Southern U.S. I guess). These are often in places where the only way it seems possible to get to them is to abseil down from the cliff tops, using modern climbing gear. Why anybody would want to build dwellings in these spots (and how they managed it) is still a mystery that nobody really has an answer for, although Dogon legend attributes them to a tribe of very small people called the Tellem, who could fly. Anyway - enough on that - as I say, you can look it up on the net if you want to find out more about it. Suffice to say that despite the number of tourists and all the crap that goes with the tourism industry (guides, hangers-on, beggars, hassle etc.) it's still a pretty special place, and one I'm glad I've been to.
The living conditions around the falaise are pretty tough - lots and lots of rocks, with very little water - and it was constantly amazing to see how the Dogon managed to scrape a living in these surroundings. They even manage to grow a range of vegetables like onions and tomatoes, which they water by hand from wells, and in some places the little arable land is also terraced off into rice paddies, which are irrigated during the brief rainy season. (In fact they grow so many onions that the result - large balls of onion paste - can be seen being traded up and down the Niger river, and are even exported overseas.
The first days trek was pretty much a taste of what things were to be like for the next few days - a hot and sweaty hour or two's walk to a village (no more than about 6 km), a walk around to see some of the sights / fetish houses / hogons (meeting places), then a long wait in the shade somewhere for lunch, another wait after lunch until about 3, when the heat had subsided, and then another hour or so of walking to the campement where we would spend the night - not exactly physically demanding, although the heat and lack of any breeze during the middle of the day were pretty uncomfortable.
Accommodation was usually a mattress on the roof of one of the huts - not as bad as it sounds, as it was a lot cooler than inside. The only time this proved to be a problem was one night when I noticed a chicken sleeping in a corner, only to discover the next morning at 4 a.m. that it was in fact a rooster, when it started crowing about 2 metres from my left ear, and wouldn't stop despite numerous stones being thrown at it, and a brief chase which resulted in it merely scuttling off to another corner of the roof.
The first night, Christmas Eve, I was the only one in my campement apart from a couple of French families (including kids) who didn't speak a word of English and pretty much kept themselves to themselves. I bought Hamadou a beer (although he's notionally a Muslim he still drank), and then, missing my family in New Zealand quite a bit, climbed up onto the roof to listen to my minidisk player and to go to sleep. It turned out, however, that the French group had paid for a mask dance that evening, and at about 10 p.m. the whole shebang started up in the clearing right next to the hut where I was sleeping - I sat up and had a really good view of the proceedings by the light of the moon as the whole village turned out for the fun. Much later I nodded off to sleep with the sound of drumming still going on outside.
The villages that we visited usually had a number of campements, with varying degrees of luxury, but one thing I hadn't realized was that because I was Hamadou's only client, his profit margins were quite small - as a result, he tended to cut costs a bit, and we ended up staying in the more basic campements. (Note that when I say luxury here I'm not talking electricity or fridges - I only saw one gas powered fridge on the whole trek - just places that were set up nicely, with quiet well shaded areas, and accommodation that was a bit more spacious / secluded etc., with nicer furnishings etc.) I'm not sure if you're organizing a trek how you can make sure that you stay in the better places, other than asking others who have just finished a trip, and specifying any recommendations you've been given in your contract - basically though, after talking to some other people, it seems that if you really squeeze your guide when you negotiate a price, he's probably going to try and recoup the costs in some way - provided you're not paying a sucker's price, it seems you generally will get what you pay for.
You may be wondering at this point why I was even bothering with a guide, as it wouldn't be too difficult to find your way between the villages yourself (you just follow the cliffs - though finding the routes up and down them can be a bit more tricky). The reason is that the Dogon beliefs are so strong, and their rituals all-pervading, that its very easy for a tourist to blunder through some ritual or sacred area and thereby contaminate it. When this happens the poor Dogon often then have to perform new sacrifices and rituals to get everything back to normal, and a sacrifice of a goat or even a chicken is extremely expensive in their terms.
In fact I met one couple a few days later who wanted a romantic evening on Christmas night, and decided they wouldn't stay in the village where their guide wanted to, but would find their own spot to camp overlooking the escarpment. They duly did so, leaving their extremely worried and upset guide behind, wanting nothing to do with it, and walked off into the dusk to find a spot. (We actually joined up with these guys and their guide for the last part of the trek, as their guide - Abdullai - had once been a porter working for Hamadou, and was now a guide in his own right at the age of 23. In the end I actually became quite friendly with him, as he was quite a bit more lively and less cynical than Hamadou - I took to nicknaming him 'Speedy' for the speed at which he walked, which left Hamadou a bit miffed as if it should have been his nickname by rights)
The next morning it turned out that they'd found a spot, started a small fire, sprinkled a dead branch with tinsel as a Christmas tree, and had just given each other their presents, when an extremely upset village elder turned up with an interpreter. It turned out they were camping right next to a sacred burial ground - to make matters worse, when he spotted the 'Christmas tree' the elder nearly went ballistic, convinced that some sort of magic was being practiced. The interpreter managed to calm him down a little, and they were then moved to another, non-sacred spot where they spent the rest of the night.
On the whole though, the Dogon seem to have somehow pulled off the trick of maintaining their beliefs and society while still incorporating (and benefiting from) a tourist structure into it. The campements also seem to give you a good taste of Dogon life, but somehow still keeping you from being too much of an intrusion as the villagers go about their daily lives, and it's quite easy to see the improvements in the way of wells, schools and clinics that the tourism seems to have brung.
Anyway - whenever we got to a village Amadou would disappear off to buy supplies and organize the cooking of lunch or dinner, which normally consisted of a chicken or goat stew of some sort, with huge amounts of couscous or rice. (Breakfast each morning was pretty basic - a couple of bread rolls, jam, and a cup of instant coffee.)
The food was OK, and seemed to be safe enough to eat, but 2 days before the trek ended, and after a nice chicken stew and a couple of beers with Hamadou and Abdullai, I was woken up in the dead of the night with, without exaggerating, what was to be the worst case of the trots I have ever had in my life - vomiting, diarrhea and the whole bit.
The walk out over the next two days was pretty grim - the heat combined with exhaustion from being up all night, as well as being weak from hunger, meant that it was an exercise in endurance. Luckily it wasn't actually that far, so by lunchtime two days later we were in Songho, where we got a lift to Bandiagara where I could rest up for a few days.
All in all though, it was a great trip - the tenacity the Dogon show in being able to live in their environment, the views from the top of the escarpment, and the atmosphere and mystery of the Tellem houses halfway up the cliffs really left an impression that I'm not going to forget in a hurry.
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