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...

Call for Postcards

As we said, we have moved to Bamako. We are trying to decorate our place and would like your help. Please send us postcards to improve our postcard wall. It has only been added to by Mark's mom, twin brother and his wife and his older brother. It doesn't matter whether you think your location postcard worthy or not, just send us one from where you are or where you visit. They will all be exciting additions to our wall, be they from Jackson Hole, Wyoming or Mendon. Vermont. You could live in Belfast, Maine or Kingston, New Hampshire or Boston or anywhere else (including Mali!). All those places are places we are excited to visit when we return. So be good, like Brian Hannon when he went to Croatia and sent us a postcard. Don't be a Missy McEwen or a Bryce Walker, who did not send us a postcard from Jamaica!

Our soon to be brilliant (with all your help!) postcard wall.



Postcards get sent to:

The Hannons P.C.V.s

Corps de la Paix

B.P. 85

Bamako, Mali

West Africa

(Believe it or not, it is actually necessary to write out West Africa to avoid your postcard ending up in Malawi, Bali, Malta or any number of other places they have been known end up. As you may guess, Mali is pretty low on the recognition scale and therefore postmen often believe you to have been unsure of where you wanted to send your own mail so they try to help you out. Sometimes they just make the mistake themselves. Thanks mail service.)

Please, send these cards a.s.a.p. and often but that is all. We are big city kids now with access to all sorts of conveniences and don't need big packages. Thanks to anyone thinking about that but save your cash and buy us a drink when we visit!

4th of July

We headed to Manantali recently. There is an annual gathering of Peace Corps volunteers in this western town for the 4th of July. It was really nice to get away from Mali for a few days. By that we mean that the scene was quite American. There were people speaking english all around, listening to tunes and drinking beers just like back home. There was even a full roasting pig on a spit.
Sam and Kelly rode bikes up to the Manantali dam in the morning and had a look around while Mark stayed behind for some more traditional entertainment. It is a strikingly beautiful 73km long reservoir behind a surprisingly stout dam.

Not a lot of constructions here fit into that category.

It was billed as a bit of a redneck affair so Mark got right into it with the handlebar mustache/mullet combo (note: full pig on spit in background). A few people assumed that Sam must be horrified by this look until they found out that it was Sam who cut the mullet in the first place. After that they may have been more disturbed by her than him.
Everything went so well that Mark stayed a few extra days because his service had yet to start up. Sam headed back with the crew to go to work. Public transport was a slightly longer trip than the Peace Corps land cruiser that had brought her there but that is just west African travel. Mark hung out with the hippos and monkeys and the Manantali volunteers for two more days and was lucky enough to ride back in Peace Corps transport again. Score!

Moved

We have moved. No longer do we dwell on the edge of the desert. We now live in the capital city of Mali, Bamako. There are trees around our new house! Needless to say, this is a big change. While we will miss our families in Yelimane, we will not be missing the oppressive heat and frequent sandstorms. We recognize that Bamako will be hot and also has sandstorms but right now it is rainy season and those problems are a few weeks off. Hey, if you can't lie to yourself to whom can you lie?

Here's some pics of what we leave behind:




















For the benefit of our European friends:

















And for those of you out there in mummifying cat land who are wondering...

Cote d'Ivoire

Now, from time to time we all have bad ideas but rarely do the stars align in such a fashion as to allow our worst of ideas to come to fruitition. Sometimes, just sometimes, you find yourselves very close to the war torn border of northwest Cote d'Ivoire and more rare still are the times when you decide it would be a good idea to cross that border.


Let's rewind a moment to the safety and relaxation of the beautiful beach in Sierra Leone. This was where the idea was hatched. Maybe we were doubting our out of date guidebook, which had been researched five years earlier (turns out the new edition comes out this month!) or maybe we were just getting cocky. We all laughed about how wrong our book had been thusfar. We figured that the war in Cote d'Ivoire must be over by now since we hadn't heard much. Why would our security advisor have told us it was o.k. otherwise? We joked about how funny it would be if Steve was our head negotiator with the rebel army on his birthday. What a gas that would be! So we decided to cut right through Sierra Leone and Guinea to Cote d'Ivoire on our way home. We could cross another country off the life list and besides, what could go wrong?


Fast forward back to the Cote d'Ivoirian border. It is, ironically, Steve's birthday and he is immediately approached by the rebel commander, making him our de facto head negotiator. Turns out "what could go wrong?" is that the rebels are still fully in control of large parts of the country. We are heading to their capitol and they are not sure why we would want to go there (if we are neither spies nor diamond runners, as we claim), much less why we are sneaking in the back door. Touchy situation.


The bad roads just became the last of our concerns.


So we headed up to the rebel headquarters to explain our situation. They ended writing permission for us to procede through their territory right into our passports, giving them all the official rebel rubberstamp! We also got a laissez-passe from the rebel commandant, as you do, for safe passage which we were instructed to show at the numerous checkpoints (about fifteen) we would encounter between there and the Malian border. Looked like this: Worked like a charm!

We headed to the town of Man, surrounded by gorgeous hills. We checked into the only hotel left standing that was not a rebel headquarters. It just so happened to have the best chinese restaurant we'd all been to in a year! Turns out they are fighting for some pretty scenic areas. We went to a really cool waterfall that used to have a fantastic restaurant and bar at its base but is now returning to the jungle.













On the bizarre side, we stopped at the edge of a wood on the way back and a bunch of locals clapped and yelled and made noise until a monkey came out to find out what all the fuss was about. We fed this wild monkey bananas. Surreal.



Our time was coming to an end. We hopped on an incredibly crammed massa (a twenty passenger van that held thirty passengers on this day) and headed for the border. It was hot and dusty and Mark had a man named Abdoulaye sitting half on him all day but at least we got to pre-pay our bribes. Who says the rebels aren't accomodating.

Ludicrous footnote: when we returned to Mali we wanted to make sure we were legal so as to avoid hastles down the road when we had to get our visas renewed or something. So few tourists have come through there in recent years (read: none) that the Malian border guards had no idea what to do. They ended up turning to the page in our passports that the rebels in Cote d'Ivoire had written on and transcribing that onto the next page, changing the placenames. That is how we were granted safe passage from the border to Bamako, through completely safe territory!

Sierra Leone

So, after a couple hours of Mark and Steve being detained for a money changing mishap and Sam and Natalie being hounded during that interval by a crazy man named Barack Obama who wanted to give them some of his incredibly valuable diamonds and make them both his wives, we were in Sierra Leone. The only catch was we had no visas. Predictably, we all had a long, uncomfortable sit down with an immigration officer who we ended up giving a gift for a temporary stamp in our passports. We would have to proceed to immigration later to pay the full visa price under penalty of arrest. Having already been arrested enough for one day, we promised we would do so and then moved on. We were in.
We hung out in Freetown, another powerless capitol city, for about five days to get that straightened out. It was quite nice. While it was too dangerous to stray far form our hotel at night, there was no need. The street sellers had the world's best fried chicken. Sam had chicken every night while Mark ate his bean, hot dog, omelette sandwiches. Delicious! We also hit a really cool and surprisingly well run chimpanzee sanctuary in the hills above Freetown.











We finally got our visas and moved on to the point of the trip: the beach. We went down the peninsula to the town of Tokeh and found that the beach was completely deserted.
Just up the road was the touristy priced River no. 2 beach, also deserted. We stayed in the functioning fishing village near River no. 1 and were rewarded with better prices and great fresh seafood.

It was the life. We just hung out for days eating petite barracuda, crabs and beer, playing cards and taking walks along one of the nicest beaches on the planet. No complaints. Well, maybe a larger hole on the latrine would have been nice but...

After that we headed inland in search of monkeys. We found them at the Tiwai Island wildlife santuary in the middle of the Moa river. It was a cool little eco-tourist spot. We did a dawn walking safari and were rewarded by finding monkeys crashing through the forest canopy above our heads. Alas, we did not, however, spot the rare and elusive pygmy hippos which live around the island.



Afterwards, we were off deeper into the jungle on any and all manner of rediculous transport. We were headed through diamond country for the Guinean border again. This was a slightly unnerving tour through areas truely devastated by the war. Shells of buildings and towns left behind, amputee and war wounded housing complexes started by NGOs. We made it to the river border near dusk and had to not just bribe our way back into Guinea's but bribe our way out of Sierra Leone. Fabulous part of the world!


We crossed the forest region of Guinea and it was on to Cote d'Ivoire.

Guinea-Conakry

Ah, Guinea...what can we say? We were welcomed to the country by a nice woman in the airport wanting a bribe. Steve was singled out at customs. At this point in our travels this was a novel concept. In the latter stages of our trip we could look so confused and clueless that the briber would often become frustrated enough that they would allow us to pass without giving up any money, this, however, was Steve's first experience with bribery on the international level. He played the part quite convincingly since he really did not understand what she meant by "gift for me." It was funny because we ended up simply picking up the bags and walking away. As a girl we met at the Peace Corps house later that week said when she arrived from the airport (she was arriving from Moscow, where they know a thing or two about demanding a bribe), "that's not how you demand a bribe!" True.

There are many third rate dictatorships in the world but this one is particuarly creepy. Each evening the new president comes on t.v. in his red baret and fatigues looking remarkably like Chuck from the Riverbottom Nightmare Band complete with entourage of cronies (although Chuck is well known enough to Muppet fans that he need not where a nametag) and speaking with a similar frightening tone. This may be completely normal for the Guinea PCVs but for those of us from Mali, it was a bit unnerving. Granted, most people don't get to enjoy his nightly rants without a generator due to the fact that the country he is running has no power, including the capital. There are plenty of drugs and humans trafficked through his territory, so at least something is coursing through the country, if not electricity.


Natalie and Sam being sufficiently creeped out by his nightly speech:











We quickly decided that Conakry was not a place that we would like to hang out in too long, although the Peace Corps digs there were first rate with a sweet beach bar close by. We tried, unsucessfully, to get our visas for Sierra Leone straightened out. We also checked out the town a bit in the daylight hours.





We had been to the coast in Dakar but it was too cold and near Conakry was too dirty to swim. In fact, we had been warned against even touching the water unless we didn't mind contracting any flesh-eating diseases. We preferred to avoid that, if possible.






We needed to swim! So we headed out to the islands off the coast. It was pretty eerie on our way out there in our pirogue because there was a ship graveyard on the way out. Apparently, people pay to trash their ships there and the Guineans sink them just off shore. It made for a pretty cool boat ride. Finally, we had reached a beach where we could swim.

We decided we'd had enough subtle, or not so subtle, police and military intimidation and we headed for the border of Sierra Leone, sans visas. Steve and Mark ended up being arrested at the border trying to exchange money at the frontier but they were released a few hours later. No story there; on to Sierra Leone...