Mike & Sarah Visit (West of Bamako)

Mark’s cousin Mike and his wife Sarah are teachers. While they love the youth of our nation and want to help them improve themselves, blah, blah, they really do this job to support their world travel habit. Each summer they pack up their gear and hit the road to some of the coolest travel spots on the planet, from Central America, to Southeast Asia, to India and a bunch of places in between. Therefore, Sam and Mark were surprised to hear Mike and Sarah’s desire to visit Mali, one of the world’s least cool places on a number of levels. We attempted to dissuade them but they insisted. So, in the middle of the night at the beginning of August, they stepped off the Royal Air Moroc flight (often an adventure in itself) and into the West African night for a month.

They had already spent three weeks in Morocco and so were ready for the heat. The filth may have been a different case.

We started off with a trip to the zoo because everyone needs to see the decaying manatee, right? Here they are in front of the rotting carcass which, during the rainy season, sits in a pool of standing water that acts as a sort of racid stew, marinating in its own putrefaction. See if you can imagine the smell just by the forced smiles on their faces:




We spent a good deal of time at the zoo, more than intended actually owing to the turtle sex show we were mesmerized by. How long would it last? Turns out turtles copulate much longer than we would have guessed. So long that we had to give up on it. A later check of the internet (the most authoritative news source ever devised) revealed that we well might have been there until dark watching those two. There is video but you will be spared.

After the zoo we headed northwest, to the tourist hotspot of West Africa, Yelimane. People line up to see the sites, which include but are not limited to: Sam and Mark’s old house, Mauritania, the millet and peanut fields and the egg sandwich seller with the most flies in the region to name a few attractions.

We had a great time. Mike and Sarah got to experience the same feeling Indiana Jones feels when he enters a small village as they entered the house and connected mosque of the Imam AdoulayeAziz Ly. They got to have kids climb all over them and probably held more babies than they had ever expected to in such a short time span. They got to hang out with the famous Ablo, Kadja and their family as well as eat and drink plenty of tea with Django and his clan.

One day we went out to the fields to “work” so they could experience a real day in an African millet field. They got the whole experience, all right. It started with a five kilometer walk to the fields, followed by a snack, some actual backbreaking work (mercifully little) and then it was on to tea and nap time.











At one point, we all had a good laugh as Ablo pooped in a hole he had dug with his daba and then scooted his butt along the grass like a puppy for lack of water to wipe himself. We all walked back except for Ablo, whom we left sleeping alone under the tree out in the field.







On our last day in Yelimane Sarah and Mike made an absolutely unbelievable proclamation. Mark came over to them with a kid named Solo, who they declared the most beautiful kid ever.



(Bear in mind that, at this point, Sam and Mark had agreed for months already that Solo was the ugliest kid in Mali so they were dumbfounded by this.) For the rest of the trip they made allusions to Solo as the best looking child in Africa. Not sure if there are any Muppet fans out there but if there are let us say we had always thought Solo looked like a Doozer from Fraggle Rock. Suffice it to say he is not the cutest kid in Mali*. We think they know they got it wrong but just stuck to their guns out of stubborness.

We headed to Kayes next and got out of town the next day after a pre-dawn pirogue ride across the Senegal river. It was certainly a different experience than the average Boston morning commute they do. It was a fun trip out west, where tourists only go when they are completely lost.



* Mark pictured with the actual cutest kid in Mali...