Janina's work with the village is in the field of Water &
Sanitation. Her work encompasses various tasks, including teaching the virtues
of hand-washing etc, but her main project includes training a local worker,
Drisa Coulibaly, to repair wells. In this picture, I'm trying to look nonchalant
while standing on a fine example of a newly-repaired well.
Janina's village of 1500 people is located on Mali's main road. This is quite
convenient in terms of transport, yet a wait for a bus can still involve hours
spent in the bus shelter: 
(Note that the left
side of the bus shelter houses a radio repair workshop. In this picture one can
almost make out the charcoal burner with which the soldering iron is kept
warm...)
Here are a couple of local kids who came around to stare at
the crazy toubabs... 
What
to do with binoculars...
After a few days in Wakoro, Janina and I went on to the Bandiagara
Escarpment, home of the Dogon people. This area probably ranks as Mali's top
tourist attraction, and is swamped with tourists by Mali standards (Even the Paris-Dakar Rally has been through here;
hundreds of motorcycles, cars and trucks raced along the road seen in the
picture below at well over 100kph. Madness!). With a local guide, Abdullah, we
spent four days going from village to village along the spectacular Bandiagara
escarpment. Some of these villages are spectacularly set into the escarpment
itself: 
The Dogon villages are renowned for their architecture. Probably the
most distinctive element of the villages are these small buildings, evidently
too small to be houses, which are in fact granaries. Not only used for storing
grain, they are used as general cupboards, being used for other foodstuffs,
spices, and personal belongings such as jewelry etc. According to our guide,
there is traditionally one granary per family - for the man - plus one smaller
granary per wife.
These pictures were taken at Ireli, a village
very spectacularly set into the cliffs... 
Most of the cliff villages themselves are now uninhabited; the villagers
have moved down to the foot of the cliffs now that they no longer need the
defensive advantage provided by the cliffs themselves.
This photo, taken out of a car window in Bandiagara shows a woman in a
typically colourful West African bubu (and an atypically deep scowl! Yikes!) She
is standing in front of a toguna, another fascinating element of Dogon
architecture. They are used by the men of the villageas meeting places in
general, and specifically as venues for settling disputes. Accordingly, they are
all built with low ceilings. Thus, conversants must recline; if a heated
participant attempts to stand up he will hit his head...
Another
quite renowned architectural feature of Mali is this distinctive style of
mosque, built of mud. (Mali boasts the largest mud building in the world, the Grande
Mosque at Djenne).
The
Dogon practice many arts, including brass casting, wood carving, and textiles.
Here is an example of bogolan cloth, a style practiced widely in Mali.
The vibrant colours are achieved using different varieties of mud.
There are hundreds of Dogon villages spread around this area, yet virtually
all tourists come to visit some of the two dozen villages which lie along the
Bandiagara escarpment. With good reason: most of Mali is exceedingly flat, and
views like this are rare...
After our trip in Dogon country, I set off on my own, and flew to Timbuktu
(or Tombouctou, to use the French spelling). Timbuktu is - an interesting town.
It was very wealthy in the distant past (13th-16th centuries), when it was the
seat of the Mali and then the Songhai Empire, and boasted palaces and a
university; now it is a mere shadow of its former self. Due to its position on
the edge of the Sahara, near the northernmost point of the Niger river (click here for a
map of Mali), it served as a trading post for salt caravans coming out of the
Sahara (a trade which still continues today). However, where Timbuktu's economy
once centred around this trade, it now centres around foreign money flowing in
not only from the tourist trade but from the dozens of aid organisations which
have set up offices there. 
The main
road west out of Timbuktu.
When I arrived, there was a dearth of tourists - only 10 or so - compared to
the huge numbers of full-time guides and the many would-be guides. So Timbuktu
was not a place to hang around. I immediately set out for the desert, with my
Tuareg guide - Mohammed ag Attaher - and two of his camels: 
My trusty
camel and I.
We set out from Timbuktu to my guide's family's camp in the desert, which
consisted of two tents and the wind-shelter below - which served living room,
kitchen, lounge, and guest bedroom (I slept here for two nights). 
Mohammed
was trying to sell me his turban ... five metres long and soaked in indigo...
I then left Timbuktu on the 19th December, and spent the next nine days travelling overland to Dakar in stages. The first major stage was a three-day trip up the Niger on a cargo boat. I didn't manage to get a good picture of it, but it was very similar to this one:
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The Boulkassim Tigampo III - commandeered by the boat-owner's younger
brother, Yaya Tigampo, who looked dashing in his ex-Russian army overcoat and
reflective silver shades - made its run slowly upstream, making lengthy stops at
the villages of Dire and Danga for their weekly market day. As a result, quite a
few of the boat's passengers were market traders, going from market to market.
Thus it was a fantastic, relaxed trip; I made many friends in the boat, and I
could hang out with them at their market stalls when we stopped at each village.
The number of passengers (and, correspondingly, their cargo)
climbed steadily. By the time we left Dire, we had an incredible number of
people on board. I asked the ticket-taker how many, and he just shook his head
and said he didn't even know. 150, I guessed? Even more, he said, perhaps 200.
This picture can give some idea of the crowds on the top deck; the bottom deck,
needless to say, was quite something... 
The fellow in the
foreground, making his Lipton tea, was one of my fellow passengers, Ibrahim
Toure. A tailor, he was taking his cast-iron Singer sewing machine into Mopti
(the biggest town of the region) for repair. I had ripped my cheap sleeping bag
while demonstrating the hood feature - never having seen a sleeping bag before,
my fellow travellers were intrigued. I then had the luxury of having this fellow
sewing up my sleeping bag by hand, while I was still sitting in it! An
unforgettable experience.
There were many different cultures represented on the boat, from the
relatively light-skinned Berbers and Tuaregs (often in turbans and sometimes
carrying metre-long swords) to the Songhaï, the Dogon, the Bambara... The range
of languages spoken on the boat was correspondingly diverse! With this
cosmopolitan crowd, and without the bumps and dust typically associated with
African transport, it was a very relaxed trip; the boat was a great place to
lounge around and talk. And there were some great characters on the boat. This
next guy, for example, had left home when he was young and ran away to Ivory
Coast, where he became a Rastafarian, dreadlocks down to his waist, playing
guitar in a reggae band. After several years of this, he'd returned to Mali; he
now bought lots of prescription drugs in Bamako (virtually all medicine is
available over the counter in Mali) which he then peddled in market towns along
the Niger at a 20% markup (Along with medical advice. Would you take medical
advice from this man?): 
Then there was Zumana Traore (from Yangasso!), selling calabash spoons:
And Dramane Traore, a civil servant in Timbuktu, with whom I hung out
quite a bit. He was returning home on leave and was taking his father a huge
slab of solid salt (120 cm x 50 cm x 3 cm!) which had been mined in the desert
north of Timbuktu. He'd studied Psychologie at University, and worked every day
in French, so we could have much more extensive conversations than I could have
with some other passengers...
A crowded pirogue on the Niger...
After the river trip, I made my way by bus to Bamako, via Wakoro (remember
Wakoro?)... And then I took the colonial-era 'Chemin de Fer du Senegal au
Niger', the Bamako-Dakar Express. Of which I don't have so many pictures (it was
cramped, I felt more self-conscious, etc etc.); but it too was an experience...
(My train
is the one on the right)
One highlight of the train trip, though, was celebrating Christmas on the train. The were several other tourists on the train: I shared the bottle of champagne I'd bought the day before with Karen, from Seattle (USA), and her boyfriend Mustafa. Karen was in Senegal and Mali for the third year in a row, buying fabrics and having clothes made to sell at summer festivals/markets in the Washington/Oregon area.
Which brought me to Dakar - where I had almost three days to chill out before
my flight home to Edinburgh on the 30th of December. And chill out is what I did
- at this idyllic beach house which Karen and friends were renting.
And then back to Edinburgh, for a New Year's Eve second to none...
And then back to Oxford for more work...
19 January 2000
