Mike & Sarah Visit (East of Bamako)

In certain circles, Mali is known as “the Crown Jewel of West Africa” for the amazingly cool stuff that can’t be found anywhere else. We took this designation with a grain of salt both because we had never been out east, where the amazing stuff is supposed to be, and because we had not seen anything for which it was worth coming all the way to Mali on a vacation yet. Considering each “Paris of West Africa” that we had visited along the coast of Africa was progressively worse than the one before (there were a number of claimants to this title, from Dakar to Conakry to Freetown), we harbored some doubts as to the veracity of this latest claim. Since the family was in from America and since we had already visited the touristically underwhelming west, we headed out east to see if those who travel in the dubious “Crown Jewel of West Africa” crowd have ever actually travelled to Mali.

Team photo:
Let's break this up into managable pieces...