ken paprocki dot com

Chapter 3: Kita to Manantali, 21-23 December 2010

2011-04-14T14:28:00.001-04:00

A ride From Hell Would’ve Been Better … not to Mention Faster

Once in Afghanistan I was in a helicopter flying from Morales Frazier, a small FOB (Forward Operating Base) to Bagram Airfield, the main military base in Afghanistan. Morales Frazier is a bumpy 90-minute mountain-pass Humvee ride from Kabul but only 10 minutes by helicopter. That evening as we boarded the helicopter the temperature on the ground was pleasant. Very quickly, however, as the helicopter rocketed up into the starry black sky, the rotors pulsating wildly over high mountains, the temperature in the unpressurized cabin dropped to nearly freezing. Completely clueless, I was only wearing a T-shirt and light hoodie under my flak jacket.

I had never been so cold, ever. As my core body temperature got lower I kept telling myself that I could handle this. ‘You’ll be OK,’ I told myself, ‘at the very most it’ll take 15 minutes until we land.’

Well, unbeknownst to me, due to air traffic, which is always heavy around Bagram, the busiest airport in Afghanistan, the helicopter kept circling over the mountains. I was sitting behind the open door, being blasted by arctic air. Even if I had been somehow able to loosen my safety harness, my bags were secured on a pallet in the back so impossible to try to retrieve a warm jacket.

The cold I felt reached the level of disbelief. How long will this last? How much can my body endure? How can it be so fucking cold in the nighttime sky when on the ground it’s piping hot? I shut my eyes and tried to go to a happy place. I thought about hanging with the Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers earlier that day baking under the sun, firing off big weapons on the shooting range. As I was about to go into hypothermic shock, the lights of Bagram’s airfield came into view. Alleluia.

Until Mali that helicopter adventure ranked highest on the Worst … Trip … Ever! scale. It was about to be displaced with my Malian voyage from Kita to Manantali.

When Rollo and I purchased our bus tickets for 2500 CFA ($5) each in Kita, the man who gave us our scrap of paper with a barely visible purple stamp on it mentioned that the bus might actually be a “camion” since one of his busses was down. I convinced myself that he couldn’t mean a truck truck. He probably meant a military-like transport used to move refugees, where there’s a big wooden bench in the middle of the truck bed and people sit with their backs to each other, their possessions in front of their feet.

When, however, an actual truck truck rolled to a stop in front of us, I tried my best to stifle a Joan Crawford, No-it-can’t-be! gasp like in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane when she hesitantly picks up the silver lid to discover a dead rat on her dinner platter.

With no choice, I started moving with the crowd towards the truck. One of the cargo gates in the back was opened. Cargo was being loaded on the wooden boards of the truckbed. After two large transport carts were upended on the truckbed and scooted towards the driver’s cabin, people started to board.

Like the previous transport, the young men elbowed everybody out of their way and boarded first, choosing the most comfortable spots. There were some women and some kids, an old lady and even a baby. They were helped up by the more mature men. As the women meekly sought space in the truck bed they reminded me of small forest mammals looking for a meager pile of dry leaves to bed down in for the night.

Rollo and I went to the front of the truckbed just behind the front cab. In the corner were a few enormous Chinese synthetic bags. I was about to step on one to get a better vista of the outside when an alarmed, thin man stood up and spluttered, “There are tomatoes in those!” I shook my head. Does this guy really expect his tomatoes to not turn into ketchup in this crowded truck?

Once everybody was settled in, the driver closed the back gate and the truck began to ponderously roll forward.

We drove exactly four minutes before the driver grinded to a halt in front of a warehouse. How are they going to pack more cargo and passengers in this truck? I asked myself.

They found a way.

It was like that scene in Star Wars when Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Hans Solo and Chewbakka are in the garbage compactor of the Death Star and the walls start closing in.

Like I did in the helicopter in Afghanistan, I mentally went to a happy place. I also took pictures, lots and lots of pictures, to distract myself from the discomfort. Standing on a wooden handle of one upturned cart, I had a good vantage point at the front of the truckbed. I used the ginormous bag of tomatoes for balance.

I was glad to be underway again when the truck cranked into first gear, but five minutes after leaving the warehouse, we stopped again, this time at a lot where young men and boys were working on automobile body parts.

While I was snapping away, I heard some shouting. Rollo tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out a woman who was yelling at me. Apparently she didn’t want her picture taken. In Muslim countries taking pictures of people is often frowned upon because devout Muslims think by capturing someone in a picture or painting them you’re taking away their soul, that’s why you rarely see depictions of people or animals in mosques or Moorish/Islamic temples and palaces.

How presumptuous, I thought, that this woman would think I was taking her picture. She had been standing on the sidelines. I was focused on the men loading more shit on the truckbed. I didn’t even see her in the lens frame. Nevertheless, I put the camera down for a while.

The screaming woman proceeded to board the truck, climbing over the sidewall into the truckbed. She tried to stare me down but I paid her no heed. Rollo said he overheard she was the daughter of the driver. As my sister Jill would say, Grrrrreat.

Whoever she was, she’d done this trip before. She brought along a blanket, a pot of stew, water, warm clothes and a light. A bark leapt from her throat whenever someone tried to encroach on her claim of space.

More passengers scrambled up into the bed, then oil drums that said USA on them were loaded on the back end before the gate was again pushed closed. You could smell the gas fumes coming from the barrels. The only way to get out of the truck now was to either climb over the greasy drums or clamber over the tall wooden truckbed walls. Some men in the back lit up cigarettes. If this truck doesn’t blow up it’ll be a miracle.

In Kita, as we waited for the truck to arrive I had asked an authoritative-looking guy in an orange boubou and saddle shoes how far Manantali was from Kita. He said 130 kilometers. “The first 30 are paved, the rest is dirt,” he explained ominously.

130km = 72 miles. That’s like from my hometown of Columbus to the Nebraskan capital of Lincoln. I figured that at most it’d take three hours to get to Manantali if we ever got underway.

Though the truck had pulled away from the Kita bus stop at 4:30 PM, or as they express it in Mali, 1630, it took an entire hour just to travel the few miles to reach the highway. Five minutes after riding on the blacktop we stopped again, this time for a checkpoint. Another 20 minutes. The soldiers manning the checkpoint wore blue fatigues and were as pompous as you read about in books and see in movies. The sun was deep on the horizon when we continued on our way down the highway.

The blacktop was pristine. It looked brand new with a solid white line in the middle and white dashes on the side to designate the wide shoulders. It was odd how this beautiful road had practically no traffic. Besides our truck there were only a few other vehicles. How could such a lovely road, bordered on either side by trees and some rock outcroppings, lead to such misery?

The Twilight Zone is Exactly 104 km Long

At 6:30 PM we turned off the highway onto a dirt road. “Manantali 104 km” an arrow-shaped sign proclaimed. It had taken two hours to get from the bus stop to this corner, a total of 40 km/24 miles.

The truck pulled to the side and cut the engine. Most male passengers crawled over the truckbed walls. The woman who screamed earlier followed them without a problem. The other women waited for the driver to open the back gate and then were helped over the gasoline drums. At this junction, where the dirt road to Manantali met the highway from Kita, were a few round thatched mud houses that resembled chocolates in straw hats.

There was a cleared-off lot that had a dozen roughly hewn thick tree branches pounded into the earth that served as columns to hold up a dry-grass roof and some walls made out of weaved reeds. You could say that this was rural Mali’s version of Burger King. But there was only one thing on this menu.

Over a grill made of red mud bricks, blackened by smoke, a man was cooking up sinewy cuts of meat then hacking them into pieces with a crude knife. He sprinkled rough salt over the greasy pieces of meat and wrapped them in brown paper.

There was a mad scramble to this primitive fastfood shack. You snooze, you lose, is the mantra in Mali. By the time I got to the grill it was swamped. Oh well. I don’t like gnawing meat off bones anyway and I hate having greasy, sticky hands. I peed behind a tree then heaved myself onto the truck wall and climbed back into the truckbed.

While there was still some light and I had a weak signal left on my phone I sent a text message to the Manantali number that our new friend in Kita, Sidibé, gave us. I typed out the sms in French to a person named “Baba”: “Bon soir, I am a friend of Sidibé Bakary, my name is Ken, I am coming with a friend to Manantali in a few hours, hopefully we can meet! Ken & Rollo.” Shortly thereafter I heard a beep on my cellphone. The text read: “ok.” Well at least I knew there was someone connected with this number.

So far I had remained optimistic. This was adventure right? … Rrrright? How many Americans would travel like this? How many people get a chance to travel with Africans in the back of a cargo truck? This’ll make a great topic of conversation at dinner parties, surely.

The story began to change once the sun set and we entered the fourth hour of this odyssey. The dirt road was not grated and was very narrow. The driver, in order to not to burst a tire, drove as carefully as he could around the bigger potholes, which often meant barely rolling forward.

I started doing the math in my head. This dirt road was 100 km long, which equals 60 miles. From one end of Manhattan to the other is 15 miles, so that would be like going back and forth two times, which you could do in 4 hours without killing yourself. Well I could definitely bike faster than this truck. There weren’t really stones or rocks in the road. It was just red dirt with a layer of dust and deep ruts and indentations caused by rain.

I’d been standing the entire time since we’d left Kita, but now branches from trees, which tightly bordered the one-lane road, were strafing the sides of the truck. More than once, when I wasn’t paying attention, the skinny Tuareg man next to me wrapped in a cinnamon-colored head scarf and wearing a butterscotch robe, pushed the branches out of the way before they hit me. I thanked him each time, noticing that he had a ring with large red piece of glass on his righthand finger. I liked these Tuaregs, they were so mysterious, so Raiders of the Lost Ark, their faces hidden behind their scarves.

The fourth time branches almost took me out, I decided to sit down.

Rollo had been sitting for quite a while. He was on one end of the upturned cart handle. Another person was sitting on the other part of the handle. I scrunched my butt on the few inches of free handle – there was nowhere else to sit. Turned out the handle had a big hook screwed into it. So to add to the discomfort you had to avoid the hook while sitting. Ultimately I forgot about the hook and when I suddenly stood up it tore the back of my pants.

It was official: I was no longer in a good mood.

The truck rarely traveled more than a few minutes at a constant speed. It continually slowed down to maneuver the holes in the road, and the driver often stopped so he and his compadres in the truck cabin could go pee and stretch their legs, which seemed to be every 20 minutes.

I noticed that although there were towering powerpoles and massive powerlines following the length of this road, none of the little mud villages below them had electricity.

Two hours on the dirt road turned into three then four then we had mechanical problems and didn’t move for another hour. We traveled another hour then the truck stopped in a village. It was one in the morning. You’d think everybody in an unelectrified village would be in bed, or in mat, but there was a group of men moving about in the darkness. I squinted and saw below us two huge wagons loaded with watermelons. These were all loaded into the truck. Nobody could accuse this truck of wasting space.

Another hour passed. I set my camera on something stable and snapped pictures in the dark. I then jumped onto the dirt to see what was going on in the world outside the truck.

There was a group of young guys standing on the sidelines watching the watermelon action. I struck up a conversation with a tall, strapping teenager. I asked him what the name of this town was. “Tomadjima,” he replied. “How big is it?” I continued. He wasn’t sure, but replied “big!” I enjoyed talking to this good-looking guy. He must’ve felt kind of special because he tried to tell me about the village but the more nervous he got the louder his voice rose.

His name was something like Funeke Dumbeli (or was it Funky Dumbbell?). Here in the seeming middle of nowhere, in a village constructed completely of round huts (rondevals as they call them in southern Africa) and pens of animals, was this young guy who apparently was educated and was wearing an immaculately white T-shirt. It reminded me of when I was in Afghanistan and you’d go to some godforsaken little village located off some dusty road where there was no running water or electricity and the men would be wearing unblemished, pressed white shalwar kameezes (long dress shirts) and matching flowing pants (which the soldiers called man-jammies because they looked like pajamas).

I then turned towards a rail-thin older gentleman with gray hair, white beard and a simple Capuchin-monklike brown robe with a hood. He had a calming, wise demeanor like Morgan Freeman. I asked him how far Manantali was from this village. He replied, 27 kilometers. I asked him why his town wasn’t electrified when there were powerlines right above it. He explained that Tomadjima wasn’t important enough to receive electricity. Then we began discussing politics. I assumed this wise man, Adama, was a professor. He told me he was a farmer.

I could’ve sat and talked with Funeke and Adama all night long but the driver tooted the horn, which meant we were getting ready to roll. I shook the hands of my new friends and scampered back into the truck. I should’ve photographed those two guys. Well, maybe I’ll return someday.

It was now very chilly. Only 15 miles to go till Mandalay (the name I used because I couldn’t remember Manantali). But the trip didn’t go any faster. We stopped off at another village to let off passengers and pick up a few heavy-lidded ones. Finally, we saw the bright lights Manantali’s famous massive dam.

It was exciting to see these bright lights appear out of the black as the truck labored up a steep incline on a narrow twisting tree-lined road. I didn’t know what to expect of this town. By the looks of the large round dirt plaza where the truck circled to a park it wasn’t much. A few crude lightpoles lit up this small sleepy town. I had sent a few texts to Baba during the trip when I had a signal but never heard back.

I looked at my phone. It was now 2:30 in the morning. Now what?

Trampled by a Herd of Wild Elephants! … (almost)

I jumped out of the bed of the truck and Rollo handed down the backpacks. The thin Tuareg man who had several times along the dirt road saved my ass by pulling me away from unseen strafing tree branches, was struggling in his robes and sandals to get down with his walking stick. I put out my hands and he handed me his prized cane. I carefully set it on the ground. He was no able to use both hands to get down.

Standing in the quiet plaza Rollo and I tried to figure out our options, which were few.

We could try to find Baba Cissé’s place, which our friend Sidibé vaguely mentioned was a hotel/restaurant called “Pierre de Coline.” We could attempt to find some type of accommodation that might be open in the middle of the night – sounds crazy but once in a little South African shithole town called Steinkopf, which was immersed in blackness, we found a hotel with a light on in its office; it was like seeing the celestial lights from the gates of heaven.

Another option we had was to bed down by the truck like several passengers were doing. They only had thin blankets. We had sleeping bags. But the lights on the few poles in the plaza were very bright, plus it would be soon be very loud as the locals got up with the chickens. In a few hours there’d be donkeys and carts and people setting up their little stands to sell their wares.

So Rollo and I decided to venture away from the square and see what we could find.

One thing I quickly noted about Manantali was how unnoteworthy this town was. The buildings seemed to be all low-slung, dingy mudbrick affairs. Now why is this town supposed to be special again? We staggered into the darkness, exhausted, lost and hungry.

I squinted, spotting a light inside a little clapboard hut. Like two moths, we flitted in the direction of the flame. Illuminated by a fluorescent cylinder were two young guys sitting on metal-framed chairs outside.

I think they were as surprised to see us, two white faces popping out of the night, as we were to see them.

“Bon nuit,” I began hoarsely. First I asked if they knew a guy named Baba Cissé. They shook their heads, slowly chewing mentally on the name. Then I asked if they knew of a hotel/restaurant by the name of Pierre de Coline. One guy shook his head and the other seemed to recall something by that name.

“It’s up the road about a kilometer away, I think,” the shorter guy named Karim said, pointing vaguely in the dark.

Under different circumstances I’d be up for a walk but not in the middle of the night in a place we know nothing about, not sure what we’re looking for. Not to mention I’d about reached the end of my rope physically. “So is there a hotel or something around here?” I continued, knowing I was grasping at straws. The slow shake of the head and lost look was expected. Nevertheless I experienced momentary pangs of panic. Now what!

“Maybe we can sleep over there?” Rollo suggested, pointing towards the dirty back stoop of some business along this quiet dirt thoroughfare.

I sneered. I was too tired to remind him that it was 3:00 in the morning, that the owners would probably arrive at the crack of dawn and who knows how they’d react to strangers sleeping on their property. I pictured some crazed barking dog bearing its fangs dripping with saliva as it strained a makeshift leash, which was held by an owner debating whether he should let go.

“Well is there any place we can just lay down until the morning,” I asked, struggling with my French.

Karim thought a bit, then said he knew of something. “Suivez-moi,” he said quietly.

We followed him to the end of the dirt street, up a blacktop, through some tall dry grass, down another road then saw an outdoor bar that had some lights on. It was surrounded by a few bungalows. I hoped maybe someone would be around to pay for a bed, but Karim pointed to the concrete benches covered with old cushions and the metal chairs with weaved elastic-netting which Malians seem to prefer.

Karim disappeared into the night. Rollo and I looked at each other for a second then pulled out our sleeping bags. It was chilly. I was exhausted but also wound up. I didn’t like the idea of sleeping in the open. What if some thief snuck up on us and made away with our stuff while we were sawing logs. All my money was on my person. If that got stolen I had no Plan B.

We decided to sleep in shifts. Rollo was swaying on his feet about ready to pass out so I let him take the first shift sleeping. I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway if I knew he wanted to.

I pulled a chair in front of his bench, placed my backpack behind me, put on my coat and my sleeping bag, and kept guard. I shut my eyelids to rest my eyes, but couldn’t sleep. I’d hear a branch crack in the dark or some strange monkey howl (just like in the movies).

At one point though I did drift asleep. I know I did because I was suddenly ripped out of a dream by the thunderous, confusing noise that was rumbling nearby. It sounded like a truck or train engine. In the distance I could see dust being kicked up by a line of blurry, fast-moving animals. Holy shit! Was it herd of elephants or wildebeests? I couldn’t tell because I couldn’t find my damn glasses.

When I finally located my glasses and put them on, I squinted into the darkness. The stampeding hordes of wild animals turned out to be ten donkeys running down a nearby road. Damn donkeys!

I then glanced down at Rollo who had also woken up but had been in a much deeper sleep. His mouth was agape, his eyes were wide open. He slowly turned towards me dazed. The donkeys were gone before he fumbled to put on his glasses. He gave me a What-in-tarnations! look.

What a picture that would have made.

The only look I’d ever seen comparable to Rollo’s was a girl in high school who was a sweet-hearted stoner. During P.E. on afternoon we went bowling and when she wasn’t looking I pressed her manual reset pinsetter button. As she slowly released her bowling ball down the wood, the automated pinsetter apparatus came down and swept her pins into the back gutter. Her ball hit the protective leather strip and began to slowly roll backwards. The look on her face, mouth agape, eyes wide in disbelief were exactly like Rollo’s. (I never did fess up to that girl who never figured out what happened.)

Rollo asked if I wanted to sleep and he’d be the lookout. I couldn’t picture him staying awake so I told him to go back to sleep, I’d remain vigilant. Well again I rest my eyes for a little bit, I was becoming acclimated to the ambient sounds – dogs barking, donkeys braying, birds chirping, roosters crowing – and they lulled me to sleep. I was mentally back in the truck, bouncing around endlessly not knowing whether we’d ever get off. And then again I was startled awake.

This time it was a human.

If this had been America there would’ve been two menacing black metal barrels of a shotgun pointed towards our heads. Instead it was a wide-eyed slight black man holding a staff. Try explaining in French at 4:00 in the morning after barely resting for 20 hours and nearly being crushed to death by a pack of crazy stampeding elephants (… or mildly aroused clopping mules) that you couldn’t find a hotel because you arrived so late into town and you were led to this bar by a merchant who said it was OK.

It was clear by the way this guy vigorously shook his head that we were not going to be allowed to sleep here. We started to collect our things. We motioned towards the vacant-looking bungalows behind us and asked if we could sleep in one of them. He nodded his head sheepishly. We asked how much. He paused a moment then blurted out: 5000 CFA!

That worked out to $5 a piece. Though by U.S. standards that’s crazy cheap, for Malians that was a little pricey. The outside of the bungalow looked much better than the inside, which was dusty and unswept. There were two single bedframes that held rotting mattresses and torn sheets. But anything was better than being outside in the elements.

We didn’t bother to take our clothes off, we just slid into our sleeping bags.

Before we passed out from exhaustion, Rollo murmured in his slight German accent, “And the royal family upon arriving in Manantali is escorted from their gold-leafed carriage by the state ministers to their royal suite where they find featherbeds and satin pillows stuffed with the softest of down.”

Juxtaposing the picture Rollo painted with our actual, sad current conditions made me erupt in laughter. The more I thought of his regal portrayal of our trip and how we traveled like cattle in that truck for nearly 10 hours and now were penned in these shabby digs sleeping on flopbeds like two bums, the more I laughed. Tears were streaming down my cheeks. I hadn’t laughed so hard in years. “The royal family is met by the royal courtier at the gilded gates of their summer palace after their royal journey from the capital of the empire,” I gasped between fits of laughter. “Children sprinkle rose petals before their golden shoes.”

It felt good to laugh, at first.

All the stress I’d built up regarding this trip melted away. But then I couldn’t stop laughing. I hoped Rollo realized the exhaustion was the reason behind my hysterical chortling, but then I feared he might think I’m nuts, because I was fearing the same thing. I tried to reign in my laughter. I tried to not think of Rollo and I as royal hobos. Little paroxysms of tittering laughter would escape, like Chief Inspector Dreyfus on the Pink Panther after Inspector Clouseau drives him insane.

I felt a little déjà-vu and was reminded of a memoir I’d read the previous summer by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind. She wrote about her experiences as a political prisoner for 20 years under Stalin. She ended up in Siberia and was compelled to cut down trees in the deep snow with another woman equally as unskilled in manual labor as she was. They were on starvation rations and could barely handle the saw but they were able to make jokes to keep their spirits up. As they dragged themselves home in their filthy rags, stooped over double, with skin peeling off their weather-beaten faces, eating snow to remain hydrated, they made up stories about themselves from the society page of an imaginary Western journal. "A gay troop of Amazons returned the other afternoon from a delightful promenade into the woods to visit the latest chic lodge where they enjoyed an exquisite répas of lobster bisque and crème brulée with a surprising garnish of fruits de bois!”

I drifted off into a deep sleep, still smiling at the thought of the royal family.

Couch Potatoes, Malian Style

We’re shaken out of our slumber by a banging on the door.

It’s the little night watchman. “You must go now, the boss is coming!” he says urgently in French. “You must leave immediately; if he finds you here he will charge you double!” I look at my watch. 8:00 AM. The Royal family is awoken by harp music as courtiers prepare a bountiful meal; orange blossoms perfume the morning breeze.

Having spent about five months in Afghanistan with the U.S. military and having to hustle at a moment’s notice, I was packed and ready to go in a matter of minutes. Rollo was still sluggishly stuffing his sleeping bag into its pouch.

“I’ll wait outside for you,” I said nervously, not wanting to rile up this little African any more than he already seemed. The watchman kept on staring at the bungalow across the courtyard, then at me.

“Ou est ton ami!” he demanded.

“He’s coming, he’s coming!” I replied, not knowing what was taking Rollo so long and what this guy’s burning desire to get us out was all about. I wasn’t feeling too hot. I was hungry and tired and had no desire to deal with this right now. I didn’t want to leave my bag untended but this guy was about to blow his aorta.

“Rollo, you gotta hurry!” I panted as I ran in and out of the room. He was still stuffing his little backpack – the only piece of luggage he brought. I was relieved when he finally appeared in the daylight. The guy not only wanted us out of the room but off the property.

“My boss is coming! You must go!” he implored. Rollo, who’s an editor at a small newspaper in DC, decided at that moment to sit down and check his Blackberry messages. Now my aorta was about to burst. I tried to stall the watchman by saying I had to go to the bathroom. Rollo nabbed the toilet paper from the Bamako hotel we stayed at, something I had failed to think about. Thank you Jesus!

I used my first African hole toilet. You have to be careful how you position yourself. I was proud I didn’t splatter on myself … I think. When I came out, Rollo was still immersed in his Blackberry.

“Maybe we can find a place to eat and you can check your messages there,” I suggested. “This guy seems really jonesin’ for us to leave.” Rollo shrugged and started to walk while still engrossed in his phone. Now I know why they call it Crackberry.

It was weird to see the same landscape in the day that we stumbled through last night. The town was definitely nothing special. No great architecture or buildings of note, nothing over one story. We crossed the blacktop in front of the hotel and proceeded up the dirt road towards the only place we knew of: the stand last night where we met Karim who led us to the hotel.

Different guys were working. They had no idea who Karim was. I hate confusion. I then asked the two new guys if they knew of a guy named Baba Cissé or a hotel named Pierre de Coline. Their eyes glazed over and they shook their heads slowly. OK, next topic: food. “Is there a restaurant or something around here to get some breakfast?” I asked half-heartedly, looking around not seeing anything even vaguely resembling an eatery. Again they shook their heads, but pointed to something around the corner saying it was some type of café but no food.

I was irked. Why did we come to this town in the first place? Sidibé had suggested it but didn’t go into any details and we took him at his word. Maybe we’d make a mistake.

We lugged our backpacks to the little café that the guy indicated. There was a rickety bench and a couple of old wooden chairs in front. A severed goat’s head was lying on the ground next to its hanging carcass at the other end of the patio, which was under a straw roof. Inside the little ramshackle hut was another wobbly bench with some guy eating an egg. Aha! Food!

The big stocky owner reminded me of the towering voodoo priest Damabala in the James Bond Movie, To Live and Let Die. We asked if we could order some eggs as well. He said of course. So we each ordered two scrambled eggs. People came in the little shack intermittently to buy baguettes, which the owner kept under some brown paper on the plank of wood that served as a desk and table.

Although this place couldn’t get any more rudimentary – the owner was stooped in the corner holding an old skillet above a fire of branches –my mouth was copiously salivating like Pavlov’s dog. I was so hungry that I didn’t even mind when the owner, scrounging around for utensils, handed me the fork of the guy sitting next to me who had just finished his meal.

In fact I thought it was a good thing to take his fork.

I had brought along with me from New York a lot of articles that I hadn’t had time to read in the States. One New Yorker article, entitled ‘Nature’s Spoils,’ by Burkhard Bilger talked about bacteria, fermentation and health. I recalled it saying that humans had grown “suicidally dainty.” That our ancestors were rough beasts: hunters, gatherers, scavengers, and carrion eaters, built to digest any rude meal they could find. That fruits and vegetables were a rarity, grains nonexistent. The human gut was a wild kingdom in those days, continually colonized by parasites, viruses and other microorganisms picked up from raw meat and from foraging.

I felt I could do with a little bit more bacteria in my gut. Americans like Howie Mandel were doing themselves more harm than good by lowering their resistance to germs because they avoided them so much. I wiped the fork off with my handkerchief and proceeded to use it to devour my eggs and baguette.

Mali may be very rough around the edges but their bread is fantastic. Somehow the recipe and ovens for French baguettes survived French colonization. I would hazard to say that although South Africa has exquisite food, their bread isn’t nearly as good as the bread in Mali. (That may be due to the Dutch influence in South Africa. The Dutch have remarkably tasteless white bread even though they’re bordered by Germany and Belgium, which have some of the best bread in the world.)

“Your bread is so good here in Mali,” I told the owner. “But where do you get it?”

“Il y’a quattre fourniers dans la ville!” the owner replied. Four bakeries in Manantali? Where I wondered.

I noticed the owner used bits of chicken bouillon when preparing scrambled eggs and I gotta say they came out scrumpdilicious! He had coffee as well. Instant packets that we poured into two unwashed plastic cups. The water was heated on some bricks over a fire of sticks next to the grill.

Feeling refortified and a thousand times better, we asked the owner, if he’d heard of Pierre de Coline or Baba Cissé. Negative on both. I kept on texting and calling Baba’s phone but no answer. I even called Sidibé to ask if he knew anything. He said he’d contact Baba. If I hadn’t received his “ok” text yesterday I’d doubt his existence.

In the meantime we chatted with the owner. His name is Mamadou and he’s from Guinea. He sleeps in the back of his shop, which he opens up at 5 AM and closes at midnight. (Anyone who says Africans are lazy can step into Mamadou’s shoes – or rather sandals – for a day.)

We told him about our arrival last night and about the strange little watchman of the bungalows. Mamadou chuckled saying that guy was known as Kapi le Petit and that he definitely wanted us out before his boss came to he could pocket the money. “He probably charged you double the normal rate,” Mamadou said in his deep voice.

We then went out front and sat on the chairs thinking of Plan B. Perhaps the royal family would have to return to the imperial palace of the previous night.

A roundish guy pulled up on his moped and entered Mamadou’s for breakfast. For shits and giggles, I asked the guy if he perhaps knew a guy named Baba Cissé.

“Oui! Je le connais, il est mon ami!” the guy responded. Paydirt! This guy not only knew him but was his friend. He proceeded to send a text to Baba, which was immediately answered. Hmmm. “He’s coming right now,” the friend, whose name is Mohammed Aré, replied.

Mohammed explained that he was a construction manager, currently working on eight buildings. He’s originally from Bamako, as was Baba, which is where the two met. Then, speak of the devil, Baba pulled up on his moped.

The only thing we knew about Baba, who appeared to be in his early 30s, was that he was a friend of Sidibé’s. Baba knew even less about Rollo and me but nevertheless had Rollo mount his moto. I got on the back of Mohammed’s moped. It wasn’t too far to Baba’s.

I was expecting some type of freestanding building, something that said Pierre de Coline. Instead he lived in a long building that connected five separate homes. In front of him was another similar building. The toilets and showers were in buildings at either side of the complex.

Baba was however not poor. In fact he’d probably be considered upper middleclass. He had cushy furniture that looked like it was made in Pakistan or China, a big TV and a prized satellite dish. Rollo and I left our shoes on the front stoop before entering Baba’s livingroom.

Baba gave a girl some money. Five minutes later she returned with a plate with several skewers of cooked meat and some raw chopped onion. I was starved but since I noticed Rollo eating slowly I curbed my appetite instead of quickly gobbling down the meat.

I noticed a sticker above the screen of the Samsung TV that said ‘BABA CISSE TECH OPERATEUR ENERGIE MANANTALI.’ “Tu travais chez la barrage?” (You work at the dam?) I asked. Oui, he responded though it was unclear what exactly he did there or why he wasn’t at work that day. The dam of Manantali is a big thing for Mali he explained.

The hydroelectric dam was built on the Bafing River between 1981 and 87. There was a 13-year wait while a loan with the World Bank was worked out to install five turbines. The first megawatt of electricity was produced in 2001. It’s one of the most important economic developments in West Africa. It lights up Bamako, 300 km to the east and provides hard currency from Senegal and Mauritania who buy the electricity to light up their capital cities of Dakar and Nouakchott. (Never mind that villages only a few km from the dam have no electricity.)

“Could you maybe take us to the barrage later?” I asked. Baba assured us he would, then returned to his TV. Baba and a friend were trying to adjust the satellite dish.

It was 9:30 in the morning. Rollo and I wanted to inquire about our room but didn’t want to sound pushy so we waited for him to bring up the subject. After sitting on the couch for an hour watching him and his friend fruitlessly fiddle around with a control box to get rid of the static on the few channels they could pick up, Baba paused for a moment, turned to us and said our room would be free at noon.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I was confused. What room was he talking about? Weren’t we staying in this place? Again we didn’t want to be too inquisitive, lest we get under our host’s skin.

Baba went back to the TV. It was a gorgeous day and I wanted to be outside, doing something, exploring.

A pretty young thing came sashaying in. Baba introduced her as his second wife. (He’d explained earlier that his wife and two children (aged 10 and 4) lived in Bamako.) The second wife was from Côte d’Ivoire. She made clear that she didn’t want any pictures of herself when she saw my camera. She set a bunch of bananas on the carpet in the middle of the living room. As with onions, Rollo doesn’t like bananas so I ate enough for the both of us. Baba motioned towards the carpet, murmuring to toss the peels on the floor.

Noon came and went and we were still sitting on those fucking couches, watching TV. The big event in the news was Côte d’Ivoire’s contested elections, where one man won and the other refused to step down. They broadcast a crude video of the president explaining why he refused to cease power. He was flanked by two burly, intimidating dudes that looked like New York bouncers. Baba, his friend and second wife kept on tsk-tsking the TV set, moaning. One domino falls, the rest will soon follow.

At 12:30 Baba heaved himself up from his marshmallow couch with effort and beckoned for us to come with him but told us to leave the luggage. I thought we were going to the room but instead we did a circular tour of the town. I think he did it more to impress the townsfolk with his white guests than to show us anything.

Baba’s sexy young second wife served up couscous with meat when we got back. By the two small pieces of meat on my plate I could tell she didn’t like me. Baba’s plate was spilling over with meat, but I guess that’s fair. Afterwards some neighbor kids came in and everybody watched a Filipino soap opera, La Longue Attend (The Long Wait), dubbed in French. Baba explained the before school classes resumed at 3 PM the kids liked to drop by his place to watch the show.

The soap was so bad that I fell asleep on the couch and I never sleep during the day. I wanted to astroproject myself to somewhere, anywhere that didn’t have a TV.

When Dr Jeckyll gets Hungry Mr. Hyde Appears

I was o.d’ing on TV by the time Baba finally hauled his ass up from the couch at 3:30 PM.

We walked to a building a few dirt paths away. Our room, painted institutional-developing-world-green, had a closet and two mattresses in it and that was it. Our Ritz Carlton. An a/c unit had been built into the wall but no air-conditioner was ever installed. Instead there were bricks inside the metal casing. There was however a fan, which was good because there was little ventilation otherwise.

Although I’d been pent up all day I input notes in my laptop while Rollo slept. It was nice to have a little mental time to myself. I was about caught up when Rollo roused to consciousness. He took a 30-minute long shower and came back bleeding. I thought he should’ve left his beard; it looked good.

While Rollo was slathering on mosquito repellent – he’s always checking his arms and legs for bites – I head out to take a shower. I was confused. There were two buildings. One seemed to be for toilet use, the other for showers, yet they both could be either. Since there were no porcelain toilets, just holes in the ground it was hard to tell.

I really had to go and was mortified when the hole I decided to use was either clogged or super shallow. Panicking I used toilet paper and threw the brown ball in another hole which turned out to be a water gutter. I feared Mr. Hankie might roll out into the courtyard, so I hurried, dried myself off and hustled back to the room.

Rollo and I left the room at the same time, but he seemed to want to do his own thing.

I passed by Baba’s to see if he wanted to hit the dam. But he was in the middle of eating something that looked like a fat burrito, so I headed towards some baobabs, a tree that mystifies me and took pictures of them and some kids, then head in the opposite direction towards a rocky outcropping. I wanted to capture the sunset.

I climbed up to a ledge and took pictures. In the valley I could see in the distance several streams of smoke swirling phantasmagorically straight above into the windless evening air. I got a good view of the dam to my left. It was immense and there were several pick-ups and cars going back and forth on the road that led to it.

In Mali I think it’s not easy to be alone because two curious boys followed me up the rocky cliff. I kind of wanted to be by myself and think, but if you can’t beat them, join them. So I turned my lens on the two boys. They liked being photographed, a trait I adore in people. They told me that most everybody with a car in Manantali worked at the dam. On the way down they pointed out their mother down the road who was walking behind some lumbering cows with impossibly huge horns. A fat gendarme on a bike glowered at me as I left the boys and headed back to Baba’s.

When I got back to the room Rollo still wasn’t there, so I ventured towards to the center of town. At Mamadou’s there was a butcher outside his place who on a table was hacking a side of meat into bite-sized bits. I didn’t know how you were supposed to purchase them so I asked. He put his hand over a length of meat and said 500 CFA, then moved his hand further out and said 1000. 500 seemed sufficient, so I gave him the money and he chopped me up some pieces of meat. He salted them and I sat in front of Mamadou’s with my meal.

The meat turned out to be very gristly and bony. There was deceptively little meat on the bones. I was disappointed. I don’t like gnawing meat off bones. While I was struggling with a piece I see Baba ride up on his moped, order some meat then disappear behind the building. I wasn’t sure if he saw me.

“Baba?” I called out cautiously, as I tossed away my gristly bones and sought him out.

“Ken!” he exclaimed half-heartedly. I got the impression he didn’t want to be bothered, which is fine. I can understand how you can feel obligated to take care of people you don’t want to host. Baba was one of the few overweight Malians I saw. Now I knew why. He had a pile of meat in front of him which he was demolishing. This must’ve been his fourth big meal of the day and the night was still young.

“Have you seen Rollo?” I asked.

“Yes, he’s at my place,” he replied. I slowly head back for his place. I stopped off at a little Catholic rondeval (round building) that we visited earlier during our quick tour of the village.

Joseph, the caretaker, was inside the church. I called out his name so he wouldn’t be startled. He turned towards me, beaming a benevolent smile. The inside of the church was brightly lit. On the back wall was a crucifix is with an African Jesus.

Joseph, a stout, centered man spoke with a nice soft French accent that was soothing to listen to. He had told me earlier that he had translated the hymnals in the church from French into Bambara, the main language of Mali. He, his wife and seven children lived off the money he got from parishioner donations and the archdiocese. I can’t imagine how little that must be.

Joseph told me that on Sundays he gets 20-40 people. That’s pretty good for a country that’s only 5% Christian. Joseph isn’t an ordained priest but holds services most Sundays because the priest only comes for big festivals – the biggest one of the year being in two nights, Christmas Eve.

There was another rondeval in front of the church, a guesthouse that also served at Joseph’s office. He had some old nonworking computers in one room. (Imagine trying to have a computer in a country that’s hot, dusty and has no service to turn to if the computer breaks down.) I thought if I ever came back to this village it’d be nice to stay in the guesthouse. That was one of the few things I had heard about Mali before leaving the U.S., that here most Christian places had guesthouses.

Before I left I prayed this trip would go well. I also prayed for my future, my family, my sexlife, love, money and Africa. I hoped I’d see Joseph again as he waved goodbye while I continued down the dusty road to Baba’s.

I stopped in the now cool darkness to listen to the Muslim call to prayer. The guy who was doing the chanting over the speakers had a gorgeous voice. He sounded young, and … sexy. I looked up at the full moon and the dazzlingly bright stars and thought I wouldn’t mind living in a place like this, at least for a while, and be able to experience these things every day.

When I found Rollo he was in a black mood. He was sitting in Baba’s patio, hungry and thirsty. He had been under the impression that we were all going out to dinner then having drinks. I don’t know where he got that notion but I told him I’d just seen Baba at Mamoud’s pigging out on meat and that there surely would be no meal tonight with him.

Then Baba appeared. “Ken, can I talk to you inside?” he asked in a very serious voice. Oh, oh. Here it comes. He’s gonna hit me up for money. I followed him inside and sat on the couch.

I was happy to be wrong.

Baba reported sternly that his father was sick and that he had to leave the next day to care for him. I felt honored he consulted me in such a reverent manner. (Between Rollo and I, I was definitely the elder agewise.) I saw where Baba was going with this. He was worried about taking care of us. I told him he had been too kind and hospitable already, being somewhat sincere, and said that he needn’t worry about us because we planned to leave early the next morning.

Baba smiled. He then came out in boxers and flipflops, carrying a towel. Before he took his shower I noticed he actually had a pretty good body. Rollo and I hung around, sitting on the couch watching more TV. It was some terrible US movie full of violence and drugs. It was in English but had Arab subtitles. The people in the living room – two chums of Baba’s, the young Ivory Coast wife, a few kids – understood neither.

I murmured to Rollo we should go to Mamadou’s to get something to eat before it gets too late. Baba was coming back before we left. I told him where we were going. He waved good-bye then quickly grabbed a beer from his unlocked outside refrigerator.

Rollo was taciturn, practically snarling. There were two young guys hanging outside Mamadou’s when we arrived, one was a barber from Guinea, the other from Burkina Faso. The barber from Guinea said I looked “sage” (wise) and he could tell that between Rollo and me, I had obviously been the one to spend more time in Africa.

I didn’t say anything. I just nodded my head smiling. Rollo however countered, saying that in fact he had lived in Africa longer. He followed his statement with a flinty-eyed scowl towards me. Inside Rollo and I ate scrambled eggs – the only thing on the menu at Mamadou’s – then head back to our Ritz Carlton digs.

I didn’t know what to say. He was in such a foul mood that I decided to say nothing. He then spoke up. He revealed that his forehead was warm and he wasn’t feeling good. “I’ve had malaria before,” he said. “If I have it again it won’t be good. I don’t know what the next step would be.” I thought he was really saying, I’m not having fun with you, I think we should part ways. I began to bloat with self-doubt. My chest felt tight.

I reached for his forehead to feel if it was hot. He jerked away. This guy’s a little extreme, I said to myself.

As we continued to walk and the food began to work its way into his system he slowly returned from the Abyss. He began talking again in his more typical gentle way. In the room I lit one of the mosquito coils I’d brought from South Africa with matches we got at Mamadou’s. I plugged in my charger to juice up my camera battery, set my phone alarm for 0545 and lay my head on some rolled-up clothes that served as a pillow. The pleasant incense-like smell of the smoking mosquito coil filled my nostrils.

The quiet swoosh of the overhead fan lulled me to sleep quickly. My last thought: What a day.

Chapter 2: Bamako to Kita

2011-03-16T22:44:00.004-04:00

First Bus Trip with Concomitant Developing World Chicken

I’m holding my $5 MandeTrans bus ticket to Kita when the guy who took our money steps out of his little booth in the station and walks towards the backdoor of the bus. He holds a sheet of paper. In an instant, passengers who were milling about in the dusty lot mob the bus. I’m holding Rollo’s backpack. We were told we had 45 minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave, so he went to go track down some bottled water and food.

Bad timing.

Note to self: In the future, regardless of posted time, be ready to leave at a moment’s notice when taking public transportation. It seems that once every seat is sold determines the time of departure more than the stated timetable.

When we bought our tickets the guy at the little plywood counter wrote down our names. Now I see it’s a roster and whoever paid first theoretically gets to board first and have the first pick of seats. If only it were that organized.

Young men push to the front of the crowd, point down at their names on the roster while waving their tickets in their other hands and shove people to board the bus. This bus doesn’t look big enough to accommodate all these people so I start pushing towards the front as well. Obviously I’m important, I feel, because I’m a white tourist with a lot of luggage!

The guy holding the roster isn’t much of a policeman because, like the guys before me, I point to my name and step inside the bus.

I don’t see Rollo. What if he strayed away from the area and the driver starts the engine? I’ll have to get off then we’ll miss the opportunity to get out of Bamako that day. By now all the seats were occupied and people were eyeing the seat next to me with the backpack on it. Then I saw Rollo with a surprised look on his face making his way to the bus. I was relieved.

These passengers didn’t travel light. Stuffed between the seats on the floor and in the aisle were enormous bags of vegetables and grains. Bundles of clothes. Large boxes.

“At least there aren’t any chickens,” I commented to Rollo.

“Du hast doch falsch gelegt,” (You spoke too soon), he replied pointing to a dead chicken I’d missed two rows ahead of us. It had to be I guess.

Before we left Bamako, Van, the driver from the hotel we stayed at, wrote down two phone numbers of people in Kita. How he knew them I didn’t quite understand. In fact I could barely make out the names. But we were traveling blind not having any idea what the town of Kita was like or where we might find lodging, so this little shred of paper served as our continually flickering Olympic flame of information that was lit when Van picked me up from the airport.

As the bus heaved out of Bamako at 5:30 I thought, if push came to absolute shove we had sleeping bags and could perhaps find a bush to sleep behind. (Just forget about wild animals, thieves and machete-wielding murderers rampaging the pitch-black streets, I thought.)

Although my backpacks were scrunched between my legs, I was fairly comfortable. Looking out the window during the hour of daylight we had left, I could see why this part of Mali was not on the main tourist trek. The land was flat and featureless for the most part. The villages weren’t very interesting and the terrain looked like an endless scrubby gamepark you might find in Botswana.

At 7:30, 20 minutes from Kita, I began texting the numbers Van gave me to say we were arriving. I don’t like calling people out of the blue. With a text the people can respond or ignore it. But when we were pulling into the city I changed my mind and called the numbers. The first number turned out to be disconnected. Someone picked up when I called the other number but I could barely understand him. It didn’t help that I didn’t know who I was talking to since I couldn’t read the name above the number. In my rudimentary French I stressed the words: ami, Van, ici, Kita, faire visite, la gare du bus.

The guy understood me about as well as I understood him. I was afraid he’d hang up the phone in frustration. If that happened Rollo and I would be up a little shitcrick without a paddle. Finally the guy said, “Viens!” (I’m coming) and ended the call. Well at least I think he said he was coming.

A Glowing TV & McDonald’s

Rollo and I were like two dazed chicks that had fallen off the back of a farmer’s pick-up. We stood across the road from the bus station and peered into the darkness to see if we could make out anything vaguely resembling an “encampment,” which in Mali is a place with very cheap lodging. We saw nothing.

10 minutes after the phonecall a nice black Mercedes passed us then circled back around. A young man stayed behind the wheel as a short, fit older gentleman slowly got out on the passenger side. The good thing about being the only white people in town is that you’re not hard to find.

The older guy turned out to be the brother of Van’s mother and the young driver was his son. I shook his hand and explained that I was a close friend of Van (although I’d only met Van two days earlier). I introduced the uncle and his son to Rollo. I tried to explain as subtly but wink-wink-nudge-nudge as possible that we were searching for a place to stay the night, hoping he’d offer up his palace.

The uncle and son put our bags in the trunk and then began to drive us down a dusty dirt road perpendicular to the main road. As the car kept on passing block after another, Rollo and I shot each other nervous glances. We didn’t know if they were taking us to their house or to a hotel but we didn’t want to seem annoying by asking too many questions so we just sat back and tried to think of things to talk about in our bad French.

The car ground to a halt in front of a painted mudbrick gate. A hotel. This was worrisome because it seemed liked we’d ventured more than a few kilometers from the main road, a long way to backtrack with heavy backpacks.

The uncle and son seemed confused as they asked the plump manager for a room. The rotund manager looked Rollo and me up and down then declared he only had airconditioned rooms left and that they cost 15,000 CFA ($30) each.

Hell no!

When we shook our heads, the manager told our now wearying hosts of another encampment. We loaded our bags back in the trunk, apologized for the trouble and returned thankfully to the main road.

Turns out that just down the road from the bus depot was an encampment behind metal gates. We would’ve never known about it because it wasn’t advertised, but the uncle knocked on the gate and the caretaker came out. The price was 10,000 CFA for the room which turned out to be $10 each, which doesn’t sound like much but Rollo had told me we’d be able to find lodging for a few dollars a night. At $10 a night my meager budget would become mighty strained.

We took a quick peek at the room and chirped yes so our heavy-eyelidded hosts could get back into their black Merc. I told the uncle and son that I’d call them the next day to invite them for a beer. The uncle informed me that neither he nor his son drank alcohol. I forgot that we were in a Muslim country and that outside Bamako things would logically be more conservative, so I swiftly followed with an offer of tea.

I wondered if we were the only guests in the hotel. It seemed very quiet. Our room was one of four in a building behind the back courtyard. There was a TV on in one corner of the compound. Two people were sitting silently in front of it in the dark. The set cast an eerie glow over the entire courtyard. It was like a surreal shrine or altar. Very Steven King.

By the time we dropped our stuff off in the room it was only 9:30 so Rollo and I decided to see if we could find a beer. Again, this was not Bamako.

Whenever we asked the locals about a “bar” they gave us perplexed looks. A bar? Yeah, like a place where you can find a beer.

We were pointed in a lot of directions but found nothing. There was some little shacks with people sitting in front of them, but we didn’t know if they were businesses or homes, so we avoided lingering by them. One shack had eight guys seated in front of a TV outside. There were several crates of eggs on a table. I didn’t understand what the deal was. (Later I’d discover that eggs are a big part of the diet in Mali. They would rescue me many times in the upcoming weeks from starvation and an awful stomach bug.)

It seemed the only building of note in Kita was an ornate colonial two-story affair called “la Maria” behind a wall and garden. In front of the wall was a little park that had a red shack in the corner. The shack had two yellow arches painted on the front. It said McDonald’s. McDonald’s? I don’t like fastfood but I at that moment I could’ve done some serious damage to a Big Mac and chocolate shake.

As with all commercial ads in Mali this shack was crudely painted and as we got closer it became obvious that a Big Mac and order of fries would not be found at this unfranchised franchise. The owner, a young guy of 20 or so, got up from the chair he was sitting on in front of the establishment and stepped behind the counter to service us.

No beer. “I’m a Muslim and do not drink alcohol,” he informed us in French.

Yeah, well what about all the Christian tourists who really need a brewskie … and for that matter, what about chicken McNuggets?

Rollo and I were tired of searching for a pilsner, so we ordered soft drinks and joined the four customers seated in front of McDonalds. A thin guy with a pleasant face began to talk to us in Spanish with slow and deliberate diction. My español is rusty but it’s a dozen times better than my French. The guy said his name was Amady.

I explained to Amady that we were staying at a hotel by the bus station. I said we’d just arrived and we planned to check out the town tomorrow. He offered to show us around. Awesome.

We also mentioned we’d like to explore the low mountains at the edge of town. Amady said we could climb up there tomorrow too. Before we made our way back to the hotel Amady said he’d pop by in the latter part of the morning.

“How cool is that?” I asked Rollo. “We’re in Kita for two hours and we already have our first friend.”

From the hotel courtyard the mystical glow of the TV, which now had two empty chairs in front of it, helped us find the hole in the door for the key. We lowered the mosquito nets and were both out in a matter of minutes.

If I Survive This Shower I Can’t Wait to Explore Kita

I hoped I wouldn’t get electrocuted as I shut the bathroom door and turned on the shower. The wires of the water heater were exposed and I wasn’t sure how well-grounded the plug was in this open shower.

Rollo, still jetlagged, was dead to the world when I got up. Luckily I’d been acclimated to the African time zones during my week in Cape Town. Mali is the same time zone as London, so 5 hours ahead of New York (South Africa is 7 hours ahead). The night, filled with the braying of donkeys, had been a cold one (luckily my new sleeping bag passed the warm test).

Well I didn’t get electrocuted from the shower but it did take some fine maneurvering to find the water temperature between scalding hot and ice cold. I failed to realize how fortunate we were to have a western toilet in our bathroom, the last I’d see for a while.

Once Rollo arose we ventured into the courtyard and found a little arbor and garden that workers were tending. I was startled when I saw a rock move towards one of the papaya trees. It turned out to be a tortoise. One of the workers stood on it and I thought, That poor tortoise, what a miserable life he must have.

We were headed towards the front gate to go find a place to eat, when I noticed a wrought-iron cage in the corner of the davenport. Inside was a monkey that I assumed was out of its mind, because I surely would be if I had to live my life in a little cage instead of being out under the jungle canopy as nature intended.

I was snapping a few pictures when the caretaker reported that the owner wanted to talk to us immediately.

Shit. What did we do? Was I not supposed to take pictures of the monkey? Did Rollo shortcircuit the water heater in the bathroom?

We were ushered into a very blue room where president Obama was staring down from the wall at the hotel owner. We discovered that this guy actually owned the entire building, which also contained a small grocery store and restaurant. His name was Dr. Cissé Fodé and he wanted to find out who we were. He was very excited to have such far-flung tourists staying in his establishment (he didn’t however give us a break on the price). His wife came in and offered us bread and tea in a cat-shaped thermos.

Cissé asked us if we’d like to visit a vocational school that he built. Of course, we replied. In his Mercedes – the Malians with means seem to love Mercs – we found out Cissé is almost like a mayor in Kita.

It was an important part of this trip to visit students in class and talk a bit with them. But what fascinated me above everything was a shed that held an abandoned car with Belgian plates. Inside the car a dog’s nose peeked out the window. I approached the little white pooch and saw it was tied to the steering wheel. I wanted to pet it but per my Cape Townian doctor’s advice I refrained lest the animal have rabies.

I then noticed a little monkey jumping around on the other seat, and I’m not talking about my brother Greg, but a real monkey. He was all excited to have company and was scrambling in and out of the car window, as far as his rope tied to the armrest on the passenger door would allow him. I definitely didn’t want to get too close to this animal. I’d recently read that monkeys are the biggest reservoirs of viruses and nasty diseases, with only bats being worse.

I walked over to a dovecote filled with pigeons and saw that it was made out of an empty crate and divided into little chambers with wooden boards and cardboard. A baby goat was hobbled nearby with a rope. A mother hen flapped past us, her wings pushing her brood forward. I hoped the little menagerie of collected animals was for agriculture purposes and not dinner.

Before we left the school, Cissé presented Rollo and I with green school uniform shirts. On the shoulders were 4 strips of cloth that I thought were epaulettes. In fact they were scholastic markers. Every time a student passed a school year he or she got one of the strips cut off. The final one would be cut off at graduation. If my shirt had fit me somewhat instead of looking like a burlap potato sack I might’ve worn it later in Mali.

On the way back to the ranch our car got a flat – the first of many, many, many to come down the road. As people on mules and bikes rolled past us they seemed to give our Mercedes pompous glances, as if saying, You got what you deserve driving that fancy car, next time bring your donkey.

I’m So Hungry I Could Eat A Horse … or is that Donkey?

Amady was waiting for us when we got back to the hotel. We told him we were starved so he took us to a little eatery he knew of.

In Mali you have to expand your definition of a restaurant. The place we went to didn’t have any name or signs to let you know it was a restaurant. We went through a door and stepped into a courtyard in the back that had some makeshift tables and old chairs underneath a simple thatched roof in the corner.

There was of course no menu. There were only two things offered. Rice or rice with meat sauce. We opted for choice #2 telling Amady to eat with us. He was so skinny and surely penniless and hungry, but as most Africans are, too proud to ask for anything or to show any discomfort.

Three heaping plates of tomato rice arrived five minutes later with a questionable chewy meat on top. It was some type of liver or tripe. Rollo pushed it to the side of his plate. (Later I’d find out Rollo didn’t like peanuts, bananas, tomatoes or cheese, basically 70% of the Malian diet. I was grateful for my goat-like qualities.)

Amady and I took Rollo’s portion of meat and put it on our plates. I didn’t want to know what the meat was, I barely even chewed it because it was rubbery and gross, but I wasn’t eating for gourmet reasons here, I was eating for sustenance. (I always felt I would’ve been a star on Fear Factor because I definitely could’ve eaten anything that was shoved in front of my face on that show. Ask my sister Jill or my ex Matt, they’ll testify to that.)

It was buh-lazing hot when we left the restaurant. We walked along dusty streets heading for the bluffs at the end of town. Rollo had a thing for foosball, so at one point Amady pulled him towards one of the many foosball tables in the street and they joined a group of little kids who were playing. It was pretty cool because some of the kids were like, Who the hell are these dudes, while the others giggled and ran around puppy-dog excited.

Rollo and I were getting a crash-course on Mali.

There seems to be no garbage collection here. Not even trashcans. A lot of garbage consists of plastic bags, something that South Africa addressed by charging a fee for plastic bags, which quickly solved that problem.

Besides official traffic signs, there are no paper billboards or metal signs that herald businesses here. Everything is handpainted, either on signs or on the little shacks or buildings themselves which house the shops. I found these simple paintings extremely aesthetic and endearing.

There’s not a lot of traffic in the streets. Mainly people travel by motorbikes, bicycles, mules or walk, often balancing stuff on their heads. Donkeys roam the streets freely and consume any edible garbage tossed on the side of the road. How those donkeys don’t get run over and manage to find their way home is beyond me.

The streets are filled with a buzz of activity. People wash their clothes there. They shell harvested peanuts. They stack produce – watermelons, bananas, tomatoes, peanuts, whathaveyou – in a free spot and sell their wares. They make tea in crude little portable metal ovens that look like Catholic incense burners. They hang out.

Amady was taking us to a market when a guy wearing gold-framed glasses – you don’t see many people wearing glasses in Mali – yelled out to us and turned around on his moped. He parked next to us then briskly walked up to us introducing himself with a big smile.

“Hello! I am Sidibé! How are you?” he said in English with a very labored accent. He was relieved when we began to speak French with an even more labored accent.

He was extremely pleased that we came from America. He explained that he was the organizer and director of a big cultural festival in this region and insisted on seeing us later that evening. We told him where we were staying and said we’d be back there after our hike. He said he’d find us. With a huge, victorious grin he got back on his moped and sped off.

Amady, Cissé, Sidibé. It was true what I’d heard about Malians. They were in fact exceedingly friendly.

Scratching the Surface

Although only in Mali a brief time, I couldn’t wait to get into nature. I was happy to finally reach the edge of town and eagerly began scaling an escarpment. There were trails everywhere, on the rocks, in the dirt, thus lots of ped traffic, perhaps for gathering wood or palm leaves, or going between neighboring villages.

We began to scramble up some boulders. Amady was agile even though he was wearing yellow flipflops. Rollo’s heavy pair of hightopped hiking shoes were slowing down. I looked below us and noticed that his white German face was becoming very flushed in the heat. Again, I was acclimated to the beating sun after my week in South Africa. Rollo though had come out of the Washington DC freezer and landed straight in the Malian frying pan.

We didn’t stay out in the rocks too long which was unfortunate because I would’ve liked to have spent several hours picking around the nature. But I guess it was for the best, because I had long ago finished my water.

As we walked along a trail back into the city I wanted to set a good example regarding trash disposal, so when I found a tin drum filled with rubbish I placed my water bottle in it. I started to walk off when Amady approached the drum, fished out my empty plastic bottle, asked a guy nearby if he could fill up the bottle from his pump then rejoined us.

That made quite an impression on me. It’s the same impression I got over and over again in the townships of Cape Town.

Sometimes things look so normal in Africa that you forget how abject the poverty is here. You look at Amady and see a snappy dresser in his cool T-shirt and jeans (which by the way probably arrived in the market from clothes donation boxes out of Europe and American vis-à-vis churches and non-profits). He’s a young man so bright and competent that he taught himself Spanish from some books Spanish tourists left behind in Kita. But when this intelligent fellow pulled the water bottle out of the garbage I realized he must’ve been seriously thirsty but being proud he didn’t say anything and I was too dense to ask if he was thirsty.

The reality check then reached the booster rockets.

Rollo and and I followed Amady into a courtyard. As we stood in the red dust, Amady said in his Castellano, “Ese es mi casa.” Then he pulled a thin woman in a headdress and a boubou robe towards him and said fondly, “Ese es mi mama.”

His mother smiled and shook our hands with her bony fingers then told us to sit down. In the empty courtyard was another old lady in a boubou, three young boys, two babies and three young women. His family. The two boys were playing cards with a deck that had Obama on them. The mother offered us tea. We looked around and, seeing how poor they were, declined lest we take their final supply.

The mother came out with the only noteworthy thing she had, two pictures of her nieces in the courtyard. I was very touched. These single snapshots were the only things these young women had to prove that they could be beautiful given the chance. Their hair in the pictures was combed and set, their bright faces were made-up, their clothes were clean and fashionable. In the courtyard their unruly hair was combed straight back, their clothes were riddled with holes and stains, and they looked exhausted.

Then the mother, beaming as I continued to study the pictures, pulled me into her doorless bedroom off the courtyard. There was a mat for a bed, a pile of clothes in one corner, and stacked crates in another corner. She pointed to the only adornment in the room. On one of the cracked, red mudbrick walls was a gold-framed black-and-white portrait of a beautiful young lady. “Ma mère,” Amady said, looking at his mother. She just gazed at the picture a bit embarrassed by the attention we showered upon her, then she walked back out into the courtyard.

One of the women in the photographs asked us again if we wanted tea, but we said we had to be on our way.

We walked past the railroad station to see what trains were available. The answer: just one. The station must’ve been quite nice when Mali was a French colony, but it was now on life support. I wondered how France could at one point colonize this country, then kind of just them in the dust when they gained their independence. It would be an interesting subject to study. In any case it looked like Rollo and I would be bussing it to the next destination, wherever that may be.

To show our gratitude to Amady for giving us the Kita tour we bought a watermelon and then we three ate it in the hotel courtyard. The monkey in the cage was going apeshit as we slurped the red watermelon in front of him, so carefully I handed him a big rind. He loved it. He licked the juice and sucked in the seeds, which he didn’t swallow but instead keep in some cheeksacks which gave him a bizarre appearance.

After the watermelon Amady went home and Rollo and I went to the room to sleep off the oven-hot heat that was baking Kita. Rollo was out in a few minutes but I couldn’t sleep. So I grabbed my camera and went exploring. I walked to the back of the hotel and followed a trail to the train tracks then head towards the train station. I ran into students who were studying along the sides of the tracks (probably the only place they could find solitude in a country where people are always on top of each other), then into a bunch of kids who were playing.

I love kids. They’re always excited to do things and eager to show stuff and teach you. In French I asked these kids the Bambara words for tree, rock and sky. I of course forgot the translations the second they uttered them but it was fun to see how enthusiastic they were to share their knowledge and culture with a stranger.

A poignant moment came after I passed the train station. I was taking pictures of the full moon and the sunset when a very tall, handsome older gentleman pedaled up to me on his bike and started talking to me. He was with another guy who began beating his chest in a gesture that said, “Take my picture.”

The guy on the bike felt obligated to explain that his friend couldn’t speak. I told him that was no problem at all as I stepped back and took a picture of the duo.

The man on the bike was talking about roasting meat, I think, but I couldn’t understand what he meant so he finally gave up and pedaled away. The mute guy, asked me with his gestures if I’d take one more photo of him. He squatted down on his haunches and I took the picture. When I lowered the camera, he walked off into the darkness, smiling broadly.

What Makes Traveling Great

Walking back to the hotel I was also smiling broadly. I thought that a few hours earlier I had ventured out of the encampment, timid and wary of my surroundings. But now I felt completely at ease in this homely but comfortable little town.

As Rollo and I ordered dinner at the restaurant, Sidibé, the organizer of the music festival who had stopped to talk to us earlier in the day passed by. We quickly finished our meals and head to a bar so we could talk over his ideas of spreading the word of his festival to other visitors. Amady joined us. As with most places here we only found the bar that eluded us the previous evening because we were with locals. The bar turned out to be tucked away between some buildings hidden from the street.

Over some refreshing beers Sidibé, who’s from this region of Kayes where Kita is, told us that he needed to publicize his music festival, which was one of the biggest events west of Bamako. This Festival Culturel du Fansane is only a few years old, but Sidibé sounded very organized and he certainly was enthusiastic. Rollo and I said we’d do what we could to spread the word of this event where local artisans and folk musicians get together for three days in February to display and share their culture.

Sidibé then asked us where we were going next. We confessed we didn’t know.

“You must go visit Manantali, Mahina and Bafoulabé!” He exclaimed. “Bafoulabé is where the festival takes place!” He proceeded to write down names and numbers of people that lived in each of those towns. He stressed how beautiful and unique each place was. They were all scenic river towns.

“I haven’t traveled very much,” Amady admitted, “but my school once took a trip to Bafoulabé and it was very nice.”.

It was decided there at the table over a second round of beers that Rollo and I would voyage the next day to Manantali. We toasted this sudden turn of events.

The next morning our new friends Sidibé and Amady joined us for tea. Sidibé said he was heading for his home after he left us. I said we’d see him in a few days. Rollo and I packed our bags and called Van’s uncle and cousin before we left the hotel to say good-bye. The two came to the hotel courtyard 30 minutes later. They mainly just sat on their plastic chairs and remained quiet. I struggled to think of things to talk about. I had a feeling that they expected money for picking us up that night and driving us to the two hotels. If I had more funds I would’ve given them some rubles, but I didn’t so they had to settle with tea.

After they drove off, Amady walked with us to the MandeTrans bus station where he had a cousin who was employed there. The cousin informed us that there were no busses that day for Bafoulabé. Rollo and I were now mentally set to leave. The cousin then recommended that check out the other bus station. He thought they might have a transport to Manantali that day. Lucky Amady was with us because Rollo and I would’ve never found the other “gare” which was near the train station.

Wooden poles stuck in the dirt, an old tarp, and a cobbled-together broken-down table comprised the bus stop. We were told that there was in fact a bus for Manantali and that it would arrive in an hour. An hour? That’s not long! We retrieved our luggage, paid our hotel bill, then waited with Amady for the bus.

After an hour of waiting and the non-appearance of the bus Amady said he was hungry and was going home. Three hours passed. A truck finally churned to a stop in front of us. People started standing up. But this was an open-bed truck, not a bus. It was a cargo truck used to haul 100-pound bags of grain and machinery. This couldn’t be our transportation.

But it was.

Oh well, I thought, I’d been in similar vehicles in Afghanistan. What followed would be one of the most memorable journeys of my life. It definitely wasn’t the most pleasurable.

Mali Adventure - Chapter 1: Cape Town to Bamako

2011-03-14T18:57:00.008-04:00

Where in the World Am I?

Imagine a place with no toilet paper, yogurt, magazines or garbage removal. A place with no washing machines, dishwashers or microwaves, not even stoves, just burning sticks under heavy metal pots. Most creature comforts that people in the developed world take for granted like fresh milk, water faucets, orderly public transportation, dental floss and often even electricity are nonexistent.

In this land, privacy doesn’t exist except for the few brief minutes a day you relieve yourself over a concrete hole in the ground or when you take a bucket of water into a primitive stall and wet, lather and rinse each part of your body for a bare bones shower. Here there’s not the concept of living by yourself. You’re unmarried, you live with your family.

Here the word “family” is a loosely applied term by American and European standards. A childhood friend or a long-time coworker can be referred to as a “brother.” Family pervades everything in this culture. Extended families live together in compounds, often numbering two dozen or more. The number of people who eat meals and sleep together is fluid and changes daily. Visitors pop in and out of these homes throughout the day and evening. Recall your favorite cousins growing up, the ones you had the most fun with, then imagine seeing them every day for your entire childhood. That’s what it’s like here.

In this world everything is communal and people tend to think along those lines rather than in personal terms. If someone begs for food or money it’s not only for them but also for their siblings, friends, kids, parents or spouse. Often there are not enough utensils, plates or cups to go around in the eateries here, so as soon as someone is done with their meal the owner will take the utensil and quickly rinse it or just simply hand it to the next person.

In this place you’ll have to redefine your ideas and perception of hygiene.

The only cleaning product you’ll find in most households is a primal white bar of soap used to wash everything, from dishes to clothes to skin to hair. Forget about Dawn dish detergent, Clorox bleach, Lysol toilet bowl cleaner, Mr. Clean, Windex or Tilex. Water is the primary cleaning agent here. But water usually must be retrieved from deep wells, one heavy bucketful at a time then carried, often great distances, in plastic tubs on your head or in twin metal pails attached to the ends of wooden poles balanced upon strong shoulders. So often when something is “dirty” it’s simply wiped off. Since the majority of people in this country eat from communal bowls with their hands and pass around collective cups, there isn’t a stigma about germs like in the West.

You are in Mali.

Ah, Mali. Wait, Mali?

Mali, the home of legendary Timbuktu, is a bizarrely shaped, landlocked country in Western Africa surrounded by a buttload of countries – Algeria to the north; Mauritania and Senegal to the west; Guinea, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso to the south; and Niger to the east. Mali is steeped in history. Three ancient empires ruled here and controlled the trade of gold, salt and slaves throughout the Sahara for centuries. Mali is where black tropical sub-Saharan Africa meets the dry northern desert with its nomadic tribes. Half of Mali’s 15,000,000 inhabitants are under 15. Women have on average more than seven children each. Half the population lives below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day. Illiteracy hovers somewhere around 40%. Malaria, cholera, TB and malnutrition are prevalent. What little infrastructure that exists – trains, busses, public buildings, paved roads – is mostly frozen in time. 1960 to be exact, the year Mali, formerly French Sudan, got its independence from France.

On the positive side the HIV rate in Mali is 2%, the lowest in Africa. Crime, gangs and brutal thuggery are very low; a complete contrast to the developed sub-Saharan country of South Africa. Mali has had no civil wars in modern history so the ethnicities and religions get along for the most part. Those peoples comprise the Mandé (includes the Bambara majority and Bozo people famous for their fishing) 50%, the Fula (the Fulani or Pël shepherding people who dye their lower lips purple; the men crossdress during festivals and the women where large gold earrings) 20%, the Voltai 10%, the Tuareg (the northern Arab-looking traditionally nomadic merchants) 10%, the Songhai (the former slaves of the Tuareg) 6%, and the Dogon (the agricultural animists who displaced the ancient Telem hunters) 4%. The religious breakdown is 90% Islam, 5% Christian, and 5% Animist, the people who revere natural objects like trees and rocks.

True there are some ethnic tensions. Many Bambara claim that the Tuareg of the sparsely populated northern desert regions of Tombouctou, Kidal and Gao are using their oil reserves and ethnicity to forge strong relationships with Libya and al Qaeda so they can eventually secede from Mali and form their own country. But these are more hushed verbal rumblings than anything else.

Also Mali has some of the best art and music in all of Africa. The photographers of Malian people, Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibe are world-renown. And there’s a long tradition of music in Mali, from the slaves who were brought to the Americas giving rise to rhythm and blues then rock in the US, to the traditional Griots/Jeliya who sing the verbal histories of nobles, to the Festival au Desert which is a culmination of all the country’s different musical influences performed by such various artists as the blues guitarist, Ali Farka Touré, to the Afro-pop of Amadou et Mariam.

So this is Mali in a (pea)nut shell.

Mali can seem like a chaotic mess to Western eyes, but there’s a magnetic beauty to the land. Adjectives that come to mind to describe its people are gregarious, welcoming, trusting, relaxed. The land is equally alluring, from lush slow-moving river basins, to red-earthed scrubland reminiscent of wild game parks, to the stark escarpment of the mystical Dogon country, to the rolling desert dunes that open up north of Timbuktu and are inhabited by conical animal-skin dwellings that would be right at home on Luke Skywalker’s planet of Tatooine.

In Mali time slows down and eventually begins to blur. You wonder what day it is. You even lose track of the week. You don’t see newspapers, the internet is sketchy and though there are TVs, there’s only one national channel in Mali and the chances of you being somewhere when the news is on is slim. So you become disconnected with the outer world. Your focal points of life become finding clean water and food, avoiding mosquitoes, maintaining body and clothing cleanliness, and trying to keep dust out of your possessions, especially cameras and cell phones.

What follows are my experiences and observations of Mali where I traveled with a German friend, Rollo, a journey that began on 16 December from Cape Town, South Africa and ended on 9 January 2011.

• • •

Help! I’m Going To Mali and I Don’t Know Why.

Mali. Mali? What the hell am I going to Mali for? What am I going to do there? Those thoughts kept assailing me as the jet got closer to the capital of Bamako.

Fundamentally I was looking for some adventure, but maybe I bit off more than I could chew. I was flying to this unknown country very unprepared. No guidebook. No map. No local contacts. Just a few scribbled notes I’d garnered off the internet. Years ago I’d written off tourist guides. After several trips where I’d brought them along I found them cumbersome and ultimately unread by the end of the trip. Now, however, I wanted a guide on Mali badly, if anything as a security blanket.

What am I going to do when I get there? Where will we travel to? How will we get around? How much will things cost? What if you can’t find food or bottled water? Is it true that even if you take anti-malarial tablets you can still come down with malaria?

These bowel-loosening thoughts hadn’t crossed my mind several months earlier when I’d agreed to travel with a German friend living in DC to Western Africa. After a process of elimination we decided on Mali. We’d discounted Senegal (I’d been to Dakar twice as a flight attendant plus it’s really a small country) and Mauritania (little public transportation, lots of al Qaeda). Also a friend of my Belgian ex, Jean-Edouard, had spent two years in Mali in the Peace Corps and talked about it only in the most glowing of terms.

I then did a wee bit of “research” on Mali.

On one blog I found two Nigerian women who took a bus to Lagos from Bamako complained about the rude chauvinism of the men. In another blog a woman who was trying to take the Bamako to Dakar Express complained about the stress of getting a ticket in the First Class compartment then waiting almost 24 hours for the train to depart in a tale that reminded me of Julio Cortázar’s 1964 short story “The Southern Thruway” in which a traffic jam outside Paris ends up never moving and the people form packs and go into survival mode. The woman eventually walked over people sleeping on the train platform and head for the airport.

Luckily the Bamako to Dakar Express wasn’t something I’d have to consider since it fell into such disrepair that in 2009 it was retired. And I chalked up the experience of the two Nigerian women as inter-African chestbeating.

When I decided to purchase the ticket I wanted to use air miles but couldn’t find anything to Bamako or Dakar. There was however a flight to South Africa. Except for the few weeks in early 2010 I spent for friend Erika’s wedding, I hadn’t really experienced South Africa since 2004 when I lived there. With the blessing of my good friend Cor in Cape Town who I’d stay with, I got the ticket to Cape Town then found a fairly reasonable ticket ($1200) with Ethiopian Airlines from Johannesburg to Bamako. I’d done a photogig before leaving on this trip but knew I was traveling on a woefully restrictive budget.

I left New York the day before the 69^th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor, on December 6^th, at 6:30 PM. It was a typical cloudy, cold, dull, East Coast winter day. While being pistolwhipped by icy winds on an outdoor subway platform, awaiting the JFK-bound A-Train, it was hard to imagine that in 22 hours I’d be seeing palm trees and the turquoise waters of the Atlantic.

The next morning when I changed planes in Amsterdam, it was foggy and cold. Two hours later I was off for an 11½-hour flight to South Africa. My KLM flight landed in Cape Town at 11PM which is good because if I’d seen the sun I would’ve wanted to head directly to the beach instead of bed. The warm smiles of my friends Cor and Marinus temporarily made me forget my upcoming excursion.

For the following week my only preoccupation was preparing for this Mali trip. Top on the list were all the inoculations I needed as well as antimalarial tablets. Prices in South Africa were one-third to one-fourth the price in New York yet still the total came up to $230. You must have proof of a yellow fever shot upon entering Mali, but there are so many other diseases you need to get vaccinated for since Mali seems to breed them all: meningitis, pertussis/whooping cough, hepatitis A & B, tetanus, typhoid, cholera, rabies, measles/mumps/rubinella, chickenpox.

By the time I left the doctor’s office I was a walking bag of vaccines. As far as Mali went, I felt physically invincible. Now all I had to do was get there.

First Leg of Journey to Bamako: a Complicated Start with a Splattering of Barf

The day I head for Mali, it quickly became apparent that like most things this wasn’t going to be easy.

On the early morning of December 16^th Cor kindly dropped me off at the beautiful refurbished Cape Town airport before heading to work. My large 65-liter backpack was disappointing. It was bigger than I’d expected. Also once I’d stuffed in my sleeping bag, 8 shirts, 3 pair of shorts, 1 pair of pants, underwear, socks, toiletry bag plus several cans of sardines, a kilogram of oats, a few bags of raisins and pistachios, teabags and empty Ziploc bags, the size didn’t seem adequate. Plus it was bloody heavy.

I told myself though that I’m a scrappy dude and I like exercise so I could handle the weight and exertion of lugging this bag around Mali. I’d traveled around Afghanistan for three months with a backpack just as big and heavy, plus a helmet and flak jacket. (Although we did have Hummer, truck and helicopter transports.) Anyway, I thought, as I’d consume the food my load would get lighter. I tried to forget about my smaller but weighty backpack that held a laptop, my camera equipment and important things I’d need on the airplane.

When I got to the check-in counter in Cape Town I was informed that my flight to Joburg was delayed 75 minutes! FUCK!

I stressed to the agent that I had a flight leaving from Joburg to Ethiopia in 4 hours that I couldn’t miss because there wouldn’t be another flight for two days. I was put on a jet that was only 60 minutes delayed.

I touched the tarmac of Joburg’s OR Tambo airport 90 minutes before my flight to Ethiopia was scheduled to depart. Joburg had just been swamped by a downpour. Gauteng, the province where you find Johannesburg, has completely different weather than Cape Town. It would stay bone-dry in Kaapstad until May.

In Joburg I had to collect my baggage and run to the Ethiopian Airlines check-in counter where I found a block-long line snaking to the end of the terminal. It never ceases to amaze me how much baggage people can heap on their luggage carts. What the hell are they transporting? My nervousness dissipated when I discovered that this flight was also delayed. This is, after all, Africa.

Once I boarded the plane, I founded the Ethiopian flight attendants all thin and exceedingly beautiful with thick, voluminous hair. When I heard them speak English I kept thinking of a woman I used to work with at the UN in NYC by the name of Tsion. The only Amharic word I remember that Tsion taught me is ‘ngist’ which means queen and isn’t very useful aboard a plane.

The passengers on the 5½-hour flight were very chatty. Since there was no movie or screens behind each seat people actually talked to each other, as in the days of yore. About the only person who didn’t talk was the phantom girl next to me who didn’t utter a peep the entire time. The noneventful flight was followed by a heaping share of chaos once we deplaned.

Ethiopian Airlines had scheduled an overnight stay in Addis Ababa before my flight would continue to Bamako. They provided a hotel voucher that included dinner and breakfast. First though I had to find the line that offered the voucher. It turned out to be a long, slow-moving line.

Then I had to get a boarding pass for the next morning since I’d failed to be given one in Joburg. There was a roped-off area that was supposedly a line for the window that provided the boarding passes. There was no rhyme or reason to the line but finally a woman took my passport and my itinerary as I waited among the nebulous cloud of people in the cordoned off area.

10 minutes later the woman walked up and handed me my passport and boarding pass for my flight the next morning. There were a few passport lines. I got into a line that was vaguely pointed out to me by the boarding pass woman. It was moving glacially slow. I couldn’t see the front of the line nor determine which window the people were going to. As I tried to figure out what was going on, a guy three people ahead of me began retching. He puked on his luggage and all over the floor. Lord only knows what he ate but it was ochre-colored, plentiful and supremely putrid.

The Addis Ababa airport just became the lowest common denominator in air travel.

Revolted I fled and stepped into the other line that was longer but moving faster. I heard one woman with a big moustache talking about visas. I looked off to the side and saw an office with a sign outside that said visas were available there. ‘I’m only overnighting here, I’m sure I don’t need a visa,’ I assured myself. A few paces forward and I wasn’t so sure. I opened up my passport to check my Mali visa and discovered to my horror that this was not my passport! Inside was the picture of a black man. I about shit my pants in the south of France.

I forged past the awaiting masses and marched straight up to the long counter which handled the boarding passes. I imagined some impoverished stranger running out of the airport jumping for joy with his newly accrued white man’s U.S. passport.

While the person behind the desk sluggishly began to look around for my passport, I berated myself, as always, for not being more careful, for not thinking ahead, for not being on top of things. ‘And if they can’t find it? What will I do? I don’t have passport pictures on me, don’t have money for an emergency like this, don’t know how I’ll get to Mali or back to South Africa.’

I became drenched in nervous sweat. The guy behind the counter now enlisted a female slug to help locate my passport. I scanned the anarchic office. Then, on top an ancient computer monitor, I spied a passport with familiar-looking stickers. I pointed to it and alleluia it was mine.

Now I was really fed up.

I asked a guy who looked like an airport manager, for a definitive answer: WHICH line do I wait in! He pointed to the barf line. O…M….G. The puke was still all over the floor. People from other African countries were complaining how in their respective countries a worker would’ve long ago come out and cleaned up that abominable mess. One woman who wasn’t looking stepped right into the middle of the splatter. My stomach did a somersault.

As the line inched forward I struck up a conversation with the nice-looking black guy in front of me who had a pleasant US accent. He told me he lived in Cleveland but started off in Kentucky 13 years ago and was now going home to Cameroon for the first time in six years. It was hard to hear him because next to us three men, one from the Ivory Coast, were animatedly discussing politics.

In the back of my mind I kept thinking about the backpack I’d checked in. I prayed it would still be by the luggage carousel. With the confusion that reigned over this airport it’d be easy for a stranger to walk off with it. Or maybe I wouldn’t be allowed access to it since I was in transit and it would be in a quarantined zone of the airport. I was really detesting this confusion.

The reason for the long in-transit line became evident when I finally reached the front of the line. There was only one person stamping two long lines through his window. The only thing more unbelievable that that was that my bag was still there. It had been circling around on that belt for over an hour.

An airport employee was checking luggage zebra codes, but I just grabbed my bag, went around him, put my bag on an x-ray machine to go out of the airport and proceeded to search for the ground transportation for the hotel I had a voucher for.

Just like in New York, when strange drivers approached me to offer their services I brushed them off. Nobody in the airport had a clue where the “Crown” hotel was nor what I was to do with my voucher. I was initially hesitant to leave the safety of the lit airport terminal and venture outside into the darkness, but finally I said Fuck it. As fate would have it, a thin man spotted the voucher in my hand and beckoned me to follow him. There waiting near the front of the terminal was the shuttle van to the fabled Crown hotel. (Much later I would discover that all the people in the van had been waiting for over an hour as the hotel driver frantically searched the airport area for the final passenger (me) before heading to the Crown which was located several dozen kilometers away.)

By the time I got to the hotel, ate a late dinner then waited an exorbitantly long time for the water misting out of the showerhead nozzle to become somewhat warm, I had 5 hours before the alarm would go off to prepare to head back to the airport and continue the second leg of this journey.

Second Leg to Bamako: I’m Beginning to See the Light

The next morning my little complimentary water bottle was empty so in order to take my second malaria pill I popped my first water purification tablet, bought in Cape Town, into the bottle filled with tap water. I had a quick breakfast then waited outside in the cold … I was surprised how frigid Ethiopia was. I’d forgot I’d crossed the equator and had gone from summer in the south back up to winter in the north.

The sun was rising over a hill in the distance and illuminated crucifixes of a Christian cemetery as our shuttle bus hustled us to the airport.

In contrast to confusion the night before it was a painless check-in process at the gate. My eyebrows arched when a stout African woman ahead of me opened up her carry-on rollerboard at security and sported several full-sized dried fish among her garments.

Looking around the plane I noticed that I was the only white person. There were however a dozen Chinese on this 7½-hour flight to Bamako, which kind of surprised me. During most of the trip an arrow on the front screen pointed towards the holy black shrouded Kaaba box in Mecca. I was fascinated by the exotic looking passengers. One guy wearing a sleeping eye mask over his mouth. Later I noticed a mother change her baby’s dirty diaper on the mid-galley counter top (luckily it was after the meal service). I watched a line of men in their long boubou robes and wondered how exactly do they go to the bathroom in those things with the tiny confining lavs.

It was very old school how the passengers clapped when we landed in Bamako. The airport ran very smoothly. I was surprised.

I didn’t expect much when I walked out of the airport into the glaring tropical sun. Before I left Cape Town I had made reservations with a hotel which said they’d send a driver but I said to myself, Yeah, right. Yet, when I got outside I saw a handsome guy holding a sign with my name on it.

“Hi, my name is Van,” the guy said after I introduced myself. Driving to the hotel in his weathered Mercedes he informed me that he gave tours, knew all of Mali and spoke seven languages. He would later help me change money (he called a money changer that came to the hotel), get me a Malian sim card for my phone, contact a friend who could be our guide to the Dogon country and offered to pick up my friend Rollo that night when he arrived from Washington DC for 10,000 CFA (Communauté financière d'Afrique) francs ($20).

From total mental confusion on how to get situated and what to do in Mali, I suddenly started to feel grounded. Van, the font of information, became my Virgil.

Driving the dozen miles from the airport to the hotel my first impression of the capital city of Bamako was that it’s a typical sprawled-out developing world mess. No urban planning. No organized public transportation. Dirty air, acrid with smoke and pollution. The low-slung, colorful, dilapidated buildings, constructed mostly out of mud-bricks reminded me of Kabul. Everything seemed to be coated with a fine layer of dust and soot. The red earth seemed like it hadn’t absorbed a raindrop in eons. The vehicles in the streets seemed like bumper cars with wheels, almost all of them had multiple dents and scratches.

But every street corner offered had 1000 scenes to shoot. From the moving car I snapped an inordinate number of pictures of women carrying food and wares on their heads as they walked, something that will never cease to amaze me.

Although he looks very youthful, Van informed me he was 30, had two kids, aged six and four, then mentioned his wife was currently in the hospital sick with malaria and about to give birth to their third child. By the time Van parked in front of the hotel, picked up the hood of the Mercedes and used a stick to cut the engine I was feeling very hopeful about this trip.

The hotel, La Tamana, is owned by a Parisian named Ben. He opened the place over 10 years ago. It’s obviously very well-known because the palm-tree lined courtyard with a pool was filled with people, or more exactly Europeans. Smoking, beer-guzzling, chatty Europeans. It was a very laid-back atmosphere and best of all it had a high-speed free wifi connection.

I crawled under my mosquito net early that evening so that when Van picked me up at 1 AM to take me to the airport to collect Rollo I wouldn’t be a total zombie.

When we got to Senou International there were lots of people waiting for the Air Maroc flight. I noticed several white girls with black men. Who were they I wondered. The plane was delayed an hour, finally rolling in at 2 AM. My heart sank after everybody had left the terminal and Rollo wasn’t there. I made a very expensive call from my cell phone. Turned out he’d changed his flight and would be arriving the next morning around 4:30 AM. Ugh.

The following day I sat for a while at a little outdoor bar across from the hotel and marveled at the streaming river of humanity that passed me on the narrow road – motorbikes, cars, bikes, pedestrians, women balancing bananas, manioc tubers, watermelons, buckets filled with beans on their heads, men carrying large wooden boards with several rows of sunglasses stuck in them. Three sunglass men passed me. I wondered how many sunglasses must they sell in a day, a couple at most? Hard life.

In the evening I was headed out of the hotel to get a bottle of water when Van called out to me. He wanted to take me somewhere. We walked some blocks away from the busy main thoroughfare next to the hotel. A thought flashed momentarily through my head as we headed into the unknown blackness: What if he was taking me to some dark street corner where a group of guys was waiting to ambush, mug or kill me.

Instead we walked past a group of dolled-up women sitting in the dark on chairs outside a rundown bar. The inside was painted that institutional mint green color that the developed world seems to love. Spain vs Barcelona was being broadcast on a raised TV. Van mentioned he wanted a drink then paused. I quickly pulled some CFAs out of my pocket and bought him a Flag beer.

François, the diminutive barkeep, seemed overeducated to be working in such a lackluster bar. He told me that he used to work at a goldmine for a Canadian firm. He was the manager of five people. One day two years ago one of the laborers stole a gold nugget. The cameras caught it. François was held responsible and fired after working there for five years. As we were conversing I noticed a heavyset Chinese man continually coming up to the front bar and silently checking the cash box. He’d disappear for a while then come back. Van strolled off to talk to the women out front. I guess he wasn’t too worried about his upcoming new baby. And talking about birth, I may have been born at night but I wasn’t born last night so I asked François about something that was on my mind. Yes, he said, confirming my suspicion, this was a brothel.

Flag beers are 500 CFA, so $1. A woman in a little cabine (cubicle) is paid 5000 CFA ($10). I didn’t inquire whether that money was for a certain amount of time, a BJ or something more intense. Walking back to the hotel I thought how amazing it was that in an economy as sluggish as this one in Mali, you have enterprising Chinese merchants coming in and squeezing money out of it. As Spock would say: fascinating.

At 6 AM Van knocked on my door. He informed me that unfortunately Rollo wasn’t on the plane when he went to the airport to retrieve him. I was like, Fuck. Then Van began to smile and pulled Rollo from behind the door. I was relieved. Rollo was exhausted. He sawed logs until noon, then we had breakfast.

Rollo suggested we begin our trip by heading west, away from the usual tourist routes in the east. Anywhere was fine with me as long as we got away from this very nice but very expensive hotel. An hour later Van drove us to the bus station and Rollo and I headed to the town of Kita, the principal city of the Kayes province.

Our Malian adventure was about to begin.