Senegal

After many months in Mali we managed to get out and see some of the surrounding countries. We did this because the hot season was upon us and the north Kayes region was heating up well over 100F everyday. There are only so many baths one can take to cool off before one goes crazy. We heard Dakar was cooler this time of year, so we jumped on a bus with our friends Natalie and Steve and headed for the coast!
We arrived at the border of Senegal a few hours later and then the next thing you know...

...we were sleeping on the bus at the border (instead of 100km back in comfortable beds). That was a treat! The next day we got sold off to a mini-bus, which the guy tried to tell us was better than a big bus (o.k.?) for the remaining 700km to the coast.


Did we mention that the road is mostly loose dust due to construction and, with all the windows open due to stifling heat, we were throughly caked in dust upon arrival. Thanks Gana Transport!

This is Steve and Natalie, by the way. They are pictured on our first and, besides the Air Brussells jet, best form of transport. We noticed that, no matter how good or bad the transport situation, it always seemed great during the first twenty minutes. Obviously, this photo was taken during the first twenty minutes of our trip from Kayes to Dakar. Their smiles were not quite as broad thirty five hours and forty minutes later upon arrival. They were just as dirty as us but showered first and avoided documentation of their filthiness. Fortunately, there would be plenty more chances...

What to say about Dakar? After so many months in Mali it seemed like we had been teleported (albeit, in the world's slowest and dirtiest teleporter) to another planet. It was fantastic. So modern, so clean, so electrified! All of a sudden there were great restaurants and cool little cafes to hang out in and galleries to go to, all hosted by our fantastic friend Brandon, a Fulbright scholar who swings through Kayes on occasion. Needless to say, we were overwhelmed. We'll spare you all the descriptions of our wonderment at things like trashcans and pavement and drinkable tap water. If you are a PCV you know what we are talking about, though.

A couple of highlights.

We made the quick skip across the bay to the Isle de Goree. This is a an old colonial outpost which has parleyed some cool architechture and some inflated claims of importance in the slave trade into World Heritage Site status. All in all, a really neat island which has been overrun by stray cats, hippies and tourists, in that order. Makes for an interesting day trip.


There were no cars at all on the island which made walking around and enjoying the slow pace of life really nice.




Picturesque, complete with cell tower palm trees.








The good thing about the upper part of the island being a hippy commune it is a big open air art market all the time. There were some fantastic paintings and masks on display.





The occasional surrealist found object as well...





Then it was off to an interesting (read: terrifying) visit to the Dakar zoo. Not unlike the Bamako Zoo,the patrons were allowed far too close to the animals but at least in Dakar the closeness of the animals was inadvertent.


Sometimes the cages were broken.









Sometimes they were simply left ajar.






The cage in the picture happened to be the cage of a rather large (six feet long!) monitor lizard. This was a bit disconcerting, as when we spotted it feeding on a carcass behind the pen! We were the only ones who noticed it, too. The zoo was filled hundreds of tasty little school children and the four of us. We were far from relaxed after the beast fled into the undergrowth, even less after we reported the escapee to the authorities (who seemed to be unphased, or at least well practiced, by this turn of events) and still less later when they sought us out to explain that it had been recaptured but would not allow us to see it until later in the day (we saw them blocking up holes in the walls as if to keep something in as we left!). Mark stopped short of holding small children in front of him as bait with which to distract the lizard but just barely...










Fortunately, we flew away to Guinea (in our last comfortable travel seats for weeks) later that same day, leaving the monster behind to feast on what it would.

Back from Vacation

We have returned safely from a rigorous lap of west africa. We will post some pictures from that trip soon. Just a note to let everyone know we are still safe and still at the height of fashion, as these matching his and hers "Barack Obama" sandals attest to...

A Word About the Queen

You'd be surprised how much of one's free time can be spent in the sweltering heat dreaming of the beads of condensation dripping down a PBR can (o.k., maybe Jackson Hole workers might not be surprised). At 115 degrees, the bars could be serving chilled donkey urine and it wouldn't be that bad. As the case is, its not that far off. There is only one home grown beer in Mali, Castel. This is the flagship of the Malian brewing industry. That is to say it is the entire Malian brewing industry. It will not be winning the Golden Boot at your neighborhood beer festival, needless to say.

Why fumble through a search for the right words in an attempt to describe the taste when the "Beer Manifesto" website has already summed it up so succinctly? Their review, in its entirety:

"The national beer, brewed in Bamako by Bramali, is Castel, a dark straw lager with grassy nose, porridgey, corn-like aroma, and some rotten cabbage that manages to remain unobtrusive."

Finally, someone has captured the essence of this nectar. Let's take a look at that beauty:


Looks tempting, does it not?

She is known as the "Queen of Beers," although the glory of her reign is greatly diminished, if it was ever glorious at all. The Queen is a fickle mistress who does not suffer a glutton lightly. She has been known to exact her revenge on her subjects the next day in the most offensive gastrointestinal fashion. Sometimes just two or three bottles can have a move grave effect than an entire night of downing pitchers at your local bowling alley!



Her ad campaign is absolutely fantastic. It appears that the idea is to send Castel table coverings to all the bars and hope that they use them instead of the competitor's (Flag beer) table coverings. The writings on these tables are what's great. Our favorite is "nothing succeeds like success." There is no way to refute the truth in this statement. Denying her logic is impossible, condordance the only option. Brilliant!

At any other time Castel would not be worthy of marinating your brats in. This, however, his is no ordinary time. It speaks volumes that one can hear a chorus of angels break into "Hallelujah" opening a bottle of one of the world's worst beers. It says that one lives in West Africa...
possibly as a Peace Corps volunteer.

What's different?

Besides the most common question we receive, "where the hell is Mali?", we are often asked if life is similar to home. Yes and no. While life here is ultimately the same as anywhere, people raising the next generation to raise the next generation and so forth, there are some things we do here regularly that we didn't do often in our lives a lot back home. Some examples:


We wear funny clothes.

We sleep under mosquito nets.

We feed small animals.

We hand wash clothes.

We wear plastic bags on our heads.

We hold babies.

We check out the mummifying cat.

Sam cooks.

Mark builds houses.

We watch policemen assist children to urinate in public.

We eat from communal bowls.

We read many, many books.

We open care packages!

We throw kids in the air.

We look at Mauritania.

We re-check the cat's mummification process.

So there you have a few things that we do in country that we did a limited bit of back home...

Another Roadside Attraction

Oh, we forgot to mention that across the street from the Zoo is a set of three caves that were once inhabited by cavemen, apparently. They have since been transformed into a instructive little jaunt through evolutionary time.

In the first grotte, there is a brief explanation as to why one might dig here.

The sign reads: "L'Archeologie, C'est Qoui?"

The second cave has a fine display explaining human evolution, complete with a skull of an australopithecine from Kenya.

The third cave contains a mock up of life for the average caveman.



There was a nice painted evolutionary timeline that had a surprising degree of, brace yourselves, accuracy.


The exposition finishes up by undermining all the pretty good information which had been disseminated in the previous exhibits. It has a few cavemen living alongside what we believed to be a brontosaurus, although its been a while since any of us were in the second grade so we could not be sure. This is obviously misleading for little kids who might be learning about dinosaurs (or cavemen, for that matter) but it provides a great opportunity for the toubabs to pose infront of a dinosaur and act terrified. The security guy must think this is some sort of european tradition, as we were followed by others doing the same. He probably sees a good bit of this:





FYI: Sam is the one who has not been pooped on by birds...

Offroadin'

We have been doing a bit of driving lately. We took the road between Kayes and Bamako three times in just over a week. There is a new road, which is beat up by American standards but one of the best roads in Mali, that gets you there somewhere between eight and eleven hours later. Had we taken that road three times there would be nothing to report. Alas, we did not. There is another, slightly more tiring way to go. The back way takes a bit longer (i.e. two days) and is on a more, shall we say, traditional Malian road. A traditional Malian road is one that can make even riding in a Land Cruiser uncomfortable.


In rare spots the road is paved...


In various spots it was once paved...


In many spots it simply a jeep track...

And in some spots it disappears and you pick your own path.


Don't get us wrong, it is a prettier ride and there are actually things to look at as opposed to on the paved road. There are plenty of cute little villages, as seen in National Geographic.

There is also the "world famous" dam at Manantali. This is a relative term reserved for those whose world is confined to its shadow. It is likely none of our readers has ever heard of it although it does power those parts of West Africa which have been "electrified" as we would have said about a hundred years ago.

All in all, we recommend this ride to anyone, just not more than twice a week if it can be avoided. Your neck and back will thank you.

At the Zoo

We decided years ago that a good way understand countries more might be by visiting their zoos. We figured that it is quite telling how a society treats their animals. Not sure if this is true but it sounds like a deep insight. Some places we felt treated the animals well, some not so much. Then there are places like the zoo in Bamako. We have no idea what the conditions in this zoo indicate, as we had never encountered anything quite that surreal.

Sam, Mark and their friend Kelly (many of you Jackson Hole folks remember Kelly as the bubbly girl from the Apres Vous lift) headed out for an excursion to the Parc Zoologique. They saw a few big ticket animals like lions and chimps,

some regional favorites like the hyenas and the jackals (although there was a glaring abscence of the country's namesake, the "mali" or hippopotomus), as well as the famous Bamako zoo donkey exhibit. They were allowed to get much closer to these large animals than any of them really should have felt comfortable with, as you can see from the photos (Kelly's hand pictured with the banana for scale).

In fact, Sam almost fell into the used jeans exhibit!


There was also a rather interesting (read: horrifically bloody and foul smelling) butchering area where the meals for the attractions were prepared fresh daily. This was a pretty unique sight, as dead animal body parts of any description are generally discouraged at many of the world's finer zoos.

They were intrigued by a sign for the rare african manatee.

Not getting out to the ocean all that often they figured that they should check it out. Alas, it was not to be. The pen, pictured, appeared to have been abandoned a while ago.

It was only later in the day, out past the cheetahs, that they made a gastly discovery. It appeared that what remained of said manatee was to be found in what remained of a glass case. The case had been broken open to expose the corps to the effects of the harsh african climate. This resulted in a curious mix of decay, mummification and outright scavenging by various carrion feeders. Needless to say, a bizzare sight in the extreme.