衷心的欢迎！Welcome! So what's this all about? An American and a South African doing a foolish rally through Africa, that's what. Click on over for a proper intro.

Also, check out our sponsors: Shanghai's finest art gallery, Art Labor, providers of our fashionable uniforms, and its finest restaurant, El Willy, provider of our very own Zhu Bajie (猪八戒)*, a pig that will meet its cooker when we meet the Cameroon.

I am done

In conventional, Romantic imagery, the adventurer comes to the end of the adventure, and, gazing on some scene of beauty, experiences a moment of profound self-realization.  In reality, or at least in my experience, the voyage exhausts you, and its end is a moment only of numb relief.  Insights then are those of fatigue, and therefore weak; thoughts are stronger at the mid-point, when the blood is still up and the mind well fed.  So it was that on the beach in Benin, with the car sold, me sweating, hot, and tired, I could do little more than cast an eye over the ideas, resolutions and goals born weeks earlier, and turn my attention to the easier task of setting them down.  Most must remain hidden for now, but one is complete and pertinent and will serve as a period to the passage.
 
There are many shades of travel, each voyage by each person being in some ways unique, but just as the infinite colours are composed of red, yellow and blue, the shades of travel are variations on two basic forms.  
 
In the first, the traveller knows something of the land to which he goes, and has a more or less definite idea of the people, places and things he wishes to visit.  He travels to make contact with the great things of humanity; to absorb their lessons; to undergo new and intense experiences; to discover new aspects of the human animal; to create new bonds; and to both reveal and forge new aspects of the self in the furnace of movement, struggle, and ecstasy.  In short, he travels towards something, and does so in order to create a new present.
 
In the second, the traveller knows almost nothing beyond the vague associations of the name, a famous sight or two, and the blurb of the guidebook.  He chooses the destination because it “looks like fun”, or sounds exotic.  He travels in order to have something to do during his holiday; to acquire stories for the dinner table; to see some curious things and lift his boredom; to make of others’ history and misery a bauble for his leering inspection; and to take pictures that serve as reminders of nothing but the taking of that picture.  He travels from something, in order to escape a dull present and to store up new fragments of the past that can relieve a dull future.
 
These two forms, being internal attitudes, are not easy to distinguish.  Almost every one on a tour group is of the second, since the first is near impossible with even one other person.  Yet the quasi-hippies sleeping on the beach fall in the second too, as do the vast majority of the Lonely Planeteers.  There is not even any permanence; one trip may take on both characters.
 
But that is not to say these two forms are impossible to distinguish, nor that their distinction is neutral.  It is pointed, for the second colour is lurid.  It reduces proud cultures to dependency.  It turns rituals into stage shows.  It makes of misery a kind of living TV.  And it appropriates people’s lives and work to serve as fodder for the rich’s storytelling.  For there is no universal right to take pictures, a man working a furnace is not a monkey in a zoo, and not every question is permissible.  Indeed, how will we react, when one day hordes of Asian tourists traipse through our workplaces, grinning and taking pictures of us typing on antiquated technology?  It has even started, and the white howls have already begun.  History, though, is merciless, and it is playful.
 
Where does this leave me?  It is now a decade since my first travels.  When I began, I can say with confidence that the voyages were of the first type.  Indeed, they, and some later, have created a large part of who I am today.  I took no photos.  But, with an increasingly painful clarity, I have realized that much, nearly all of my recent travel has fallen into the second.  Even this rally, though for long stretches it was of the first type, was in the main of the second.  In short, over recent years I have chased passport stamps, and in the process come close to something I despise.
 
I am, therefore, hanging up my travelling boots.  I will go nowhere new, unless for a deeply compelling cause.  I may return to the places of my heart – Southern Italy, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Andalusia – but that is all.  In a few years I hope to join a caravan from Timbuktu to the salts mines in the desert, for fifty days in a physical and spiritual furnace.  Those exceptions aside, though, I am done.
 
Luke

Pictures!

Finally, they are on line, here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/shanghai.skywalker/AfricaRallyPublic?feat=directlink

The Mutant Pygmy Goats of Benin

(Editor's note: I'm actually back in Shanghai, but I'm clearing the backlog still)

There is an animal in Southern Benin that is born for comic effect.  Its body is short and fat, like a sausage dog or a Dachshund.  It waddles on stubby legs across the streets of the towns it inhabits, travelling in small packs of five or six.  This product of the Seventh Day would seem nothing more than a silly dog, were it not for its head.  For there, it is a goat.  It even has horns.  I do not recall if it bleated.  I still do not know what it is.
 
Of course, on matters zoological I am hardly an expert, and this animal may be perfectly ordinary.  In fact, not two weeks ago I had a moment of enlightenment on all things goatish.  As we were driving to the Dogon country I made a passing reference to a herd of goats by the side of the roads.  'There're so many goats around,' I said, or something like that.  A moment of silence followed.  'Dude,' said Mark, 'those are sheep.'  For weeks I had wondered why so many goats roamed West Africa.  Now I knew.  Throughout the walk through Dogon, the 'sheep or goat?' game kept me occupied.  By the end, I was a connoisseur.
 
So I can assure you that the dog-goats, or mutant pygmy goats as I prefer, are not pygmy sheep.  Moreover, they were concentrated in Southern Benin, where mutton is rarely on the menu. We had arrived there late on the Thursday before last, in the old capitol of the kingdom of Dahomey, a town called Abomey.  In the morning of that same day we had made that crossing from Togo into northern Benin, then sped southwards along remarkably good roads (the former dictator was from the North) until the late afternoon.  Then, with the sun behind a haze of clouds so thick the world could have been ending, I made the most foolish suggestion of the trip, to continue until we reached Abomey even if night fell.
 
You may have played, or seen someone play, one of those arcade games where, gripping a replica machine gun, you manically try to spot and destroy enemies who continuously appear out of nowhere and jump at you through the screen.  Driving that road at night was something like that, but on the hardest level, with invisible enemies.  And not only could death come from the front, you had always to worry that the guy behind you wired on cola nuts was going to turn his plastic little gun and shoot you in the back.  I drove for an hour in that darkness, with Mark hunched over in the passenger's seat, peering into the darkness, scouting, but whether for our nemesis or our salvation I could not tell.
 
Part of the reason why this hour or so of driving was so dangerous is that driving in Africa is, in general, a really dumb idea.  First, the roads are often filled with potholes, and not polite easy to see potholes, but sneaky little fuckers even at noon.  Second, the roads are badly signposted and unlit, so that light at the end of the straight may in fact be a truck coming at you around a corner.  Third, the roads are narrow, and while life in Africa proceeds very patiently in most matters, patience does not apply to the roads.  Not to overtake is not to drive, and not to overtake around a blind corner with broken headlights would be like having your penis inverted.  So, for being a general idiot, I owed Mark some strong liquor.
 
What made things even worse than I could have expected though was the geography of Benin.  The country is a long narrow scoop in the armpit of Africa, extending about seven hundred kilometres north from its primary city, the port of Cotonou, but only a hundred kilometres wide along the coast.  Hence, though once you get a couple hundred kilometres up the road forks, a single highway from Cotonou to the North must carry every good and person coming out of the city.  That's a lot of stuff, and there're only two lanes, and people there aren't quite as frightened of driving at night as we were.  Thus, the two ragged, wired, rushing white people who stumbled in to the hotel late that night.
 
On the other hand, while Abomey's location may have imperilled our lives, it was superb for selling the car, which was why we had come.  My Nigerian visa had long expired, and with it our hopes of driving all the way to Cameroon in the car.  We did, though, have plane tickets for the Cameroon and they had us leaving Benin a bare four and a half days after we crossed the border so we had to move rather fast.  We began by putting the word out at the hotel, the local restaurant, the watering holes.  'Psst, buddy, over here - wanna buy a car?'  People told us they'd talk to people who knew people who had motorbikes who'd fetch people who might know someone who wanted to buy it.  Cakewalk.
 
We were filled with the confidence of people who had seen all their recent plans succeed.  Sort of.  People to whom dozens of strangers, on bikes at the hotel, walking in the street, at the border post, had sidled up, cocked a head at the van, and asked, "a veindre?", "is it for sale?".  People on roads so deserted the only response we could muster was, "and then what? we walk to waga? wagawagadougou?".  So we figured we'd get offers, particularly because Abomey is around a hundred and fifty kilometres from Cotonou, and therefore at least partly isolated from the port's endless stream of old European cars.  Moreover, it's only nine kilometres from a major market town, one of the largest in the country, and used to be the ancient capital of a voodoo slaver Kingdom whose king watered the graves of the ancestors with the blood of his enemies.  What better place for some white people to sell a Renault?
 
Unfortunately, the first offer we received was disheartening.  As we were finishing our breakfast of crepes and coffee a large, mumbling man arrived on a scooter.  A local car dealer, he looked over the car, watched the motor start, asked about our papers, and promptly offered about a quarter of what I had hoped to get.  Fierce bargaining raised him to no higher than a third.  The problem, as the waiter explained it, was that our car was 'sans douane', i.e., without customs clearance.  When we drove into the country, in that dusty border village, I had obtained only a 30-day entry permit for the car, from a customs officer with the most pimped out office I had seen in Africa.  Satellite TV competed with the subwoofer for the attention of a young lady reclining on a purple couch.  Discs were stacked high on top of a projector unit.  A sign on the door said "customs and pimps", or something like that.  Whether because he was feeling flush, or we looked like shit, or both, he extracted no money from me, just gave me a white slip of paper and waved me away.
 
So it was that with my dreams of lucre diminished, we noted the first offer and resolved to keep looking.  The market town close by seemed the best bet, so we drove over and while Mark robbed an ATM I distracted the guard by asking him if he was in the market.  Sadly, he wasn't, but we did not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring was to come again to the road where we began, along which daylight revealed dozens of mechanics and dealers.   We pulled off the road at the first one that seemed promising.  Some mechanics swirled around us, at whom we stared defiantly and asked, "Qu'est que ce un homme achete une voiture?", or, "take me to your leader".  Said leader, "le patron", soon appeared, wiping grease from his hands.  He took one look at us, asked us our price, nodded and told us to await his friend. 
 
We sat in the car.  We smoked.  All of a sudden the door flung open and a round, jolly face appeared before me.  "400! Cash!" and his hands flung imaginary money on the ground.  This was Monsieur Olivier, and he had arrived.  I told him I wanted almost double that.  "Cash!" he said again.  This was his English vocabulary.  I stayed firm.  He went to consult his big brother, the money bags.  He came back.  "500! Cash! Maintenant!"  I wondered if he thought I took Mastercard.  I dropped slightly.  He stood firm.  I dropped again.  He went away.  The troika of Olivier, mechanic and sugar brother were deep in discussion.  They looked again at my little piece of paper from customs.  The kicked the tires.  Watched the motor.  "550! Cash!" and this time he threw the money on the ground not once but twice.  It was twice what the shady guy on the motorbike's starting price.  I accepted.  The car was sold.
 
Well, almost.  I had started the drive at the sea and wanted to finish at the sea.  So we negotiated a complex formula of deposits and document swaps, hand wrote a contract that would have made a New York paralegal proud, and promised to meet the next night.  Unfortunately on the way back to the hotel the car decided to throw one last fit, and fifth gear stopped working.  Luckily, we were black belts in this stuff by now, so after a tip from the hotel I drove it down to a mechanic who was even better at watching other people fix a car than I was.  While he and I opened a couple of beers, his ten year old 'apprentice' disassembled the car, then his sidekick did the fixing while he shouted out rudimentary fixing.
 
It did the trick, though, and the next day we did indeed take the car to the sea.  The last road was an encapsulation of everything difficult about Africa's highways: heavily trafficked; packed with idiotic drivers; pot holes scattered like a pack of fallen M&Ms; and then forty kilometres of dirt.  We arrived at the present day capital of voodoo in Benin, an old slaving port, and drove down the road of no return to the beach.  It whispered and broke and roared, enormous waves crashing down on steeply sloped sand as teams of boys pulled fishing boats out of the ocean.  Naturally, we got stuck in the sand.  Luckily, we had some pots and pans that we had bought to cook while we camped and had never used.  So we dug out the sand.  And remained stuck.  A group of villagers, who had earlier demanded payment to take a picture of us, now wanted even more to get us out.  We called them names.  We tried to push.  We failed. Mark flagged down some passing 4x4s, but all of a sudden the villagers mobbed the 4x4s and wouldn't let them help us, and then mobbed our car, shouting at us to give them money.  I was ready to sacrifice my bodily integrity for my moral integrity, but Mark was wiser, and, promising them payment, all of a sudden twenty hands grasped the car and started pushing.  Out we came, Mark threw a few dollars at them, jumped in the car, and as they were still shouting we sped off down the road, deeply in love with Benin.
 
That evening as we arrived back in town I called Monsieur Olivier, who told me that he was performing 'a ceremony' out of town but would be back as soon as he was done.  An hour later I called again.  "Monsieur Jordan!" came the reply.  They agreed to come to the hotel to do the exchange, since, as I explained, we were two white people who were scared the black people would take our money.  He laughed at this, ordered a steak and fries, and said he'd see us soon.  Another hour passed.  Again I called.  He'd be there "tout suite", which in Africa means some indeterminate time in the future.  About another three hours passed in the same fashion, until we gave up and went for dinner, only to finally get the call, "Monsieur Jordan! Nous avons arrivee! Ou est le steak garnit?"  We hot-footed it back to the hotel, where three cars had pulled up outside and disgorged four men in traditional outfits, Monsieur Olivier first among them.  He gave me a bear hug, and with a big smile declared, "We have the money!"  We set up a table for the deal, where he handed me stacks of bills, each worth ten dollars, I counted, Mark took them inside to check for counterfeits, everyone laughed nervously, and then it was done.  Monsieur Olivier took the keys, posed for some photos, and reversed out, almost running over a small child in his overflowing joy.
 
And the price? What was it in real money?  Well. I'll put it like this: gross profit from buying a failing old car in Germany and selling it in Benin: 500 euros; UK rally 'organiser', German mechanic, and Italian shipper: 2 500 euros; the look on our faces when we finished this insanity in Abomey: priceless.

Number of times I will ever use that formula again? Identical to the number of banks, travel agencies or hotels in West Africa that accept Mastercard. Zero.

With the car sold all that was left was to get down to Cotonou, take a rickshaw from the depths of the market to a hidden voodoo ceremony, and then wing it down to Cameroon to see some waterfalls crashing into the sea.  In a few days: the result of all this, plus the grand picture upload, but for now:

Profound Life Lesson of the Africa Rally: sometimes a goat is a sheep, unless it's a pygmy.

Dogon and the whirlwind

The end approaches.  The car ran more reliably, until its ultimate disposal.  There are only two or three more entries to go ("sweet Niger, run softly till I end my song").  From here, the content will become increasingly polemical, though I will try to keep the axe sharp, and to swing it with a laugh.  In this update, we ditched the car to trek through southwest Mali, then got back behind the wheel to sprint through three countries in three days: Burkina Faso, Togo and Benin.
 
DOGON COUNTRY

It was noon, the heat searing, the shade vanishing.  We had walked seven kilometres through the morning to make it to our rest stop.  Before lunch we had walked up to the cliffs above the village to see houses carved into the rock. On our return, our guide greeted a thin old man in a blue robe who reclined outside an elaborately carved door.  When we had walked on, the guide told us that the old man was the village chief, and as a sign of respect we should give him a kola nut, a foul tasting herbal narcotic.  I fished one of these nuts out of our bag and walked back to give it to him.  He took it warmly, standing up to shake my hand.  Then he smiled, opened the door, and, gesturing inside, asked, "souvenirs?"  Even the door was for sale.
 
The scene of this collapse of dignity was the Dogon Country, an escarpment that runs through south east Mali, dotted with villages above and below.  After my return from Tmbuktu, we had met up with two other travellers to form a group to go trekking there with a guide.  I had told them that, given the car, they had to accept the risk of our car not starting, and, lo and behold, when the evening for departure came, the key stubbornly refused to even enter the ignition, let alone turn it.
 
The fault lay with the new key we had 'cut'.  Back in Djenne our primary key had literally fallen apart.  Not in a door or anything explainable, but as I was carrying it around the bottom half just decided it had had enough of the top half and succesfully filed for divorce.  Later, we found the top half in the mud.  Being nervous about our remaining key, while I was in Timbuktu Mark tried to have a spare cut in the town of Mopti where he was recovering from the tea.
 
After much enquiry, he discovered that Mopti, I believe the second biggest city in Mali, has exactly one key cutter.  Moreover, this cutter works entirely by hand.  He is also expensive.  Hence our only option was a key that looks like a child's tracing and melted slightly in the sun.  The car obviously liked it even less than we did.
 
Rapidly deploying our hard-earned expertise, we waved our hands around in the hotel until a mechanic appeared on a motorbike.  He opened up the bottom of the steering column, and, hammer in hand, proceeded to do his best to destroy it.  After half an hour of his hammering away at the hard plastic casing, he managed to wiggle the ignition free.  This struck me as not quite how a European mechanic would do it.  In particular, it worked.
 
( Editor's note: at this point the author got drunk by the sea in Cameroon.  Some of the following may be incoherent )

It turned out the ignition mechanism was broken, so we needed to replace it.  The mechanic tracked one down quickly, from a trashed Citroen, and the next morning came round to install it.  A bit of filing was needed, one French key being marginally longer than another, but both short, and soon was hammering the car back together again.  The new key worked, the others piled in the back, and off we went.
 
The Dogon Country is famous for two things: the beauty of its scenery, and its animist beliefs.  The first is true.  An enormous cliff face runs through the wide plains of the savanna, and you walk below it or upon it with the widest, grandest sky imaginable up above.  On our third day we turned off the dirt road that runs along the base to clamber upwards over rocks, in dusty, dry heat, and then, as in a movie, emerged into a cleft in the ridge where the water collects and lush green fields were being tilled.  In the evening we sat out on the very edge of the cliff, foot perched on the edge, and sqaw the sun set across a vista so broad the eye felt inadequate.
 
Our guide through this was a young man named Hamma, an orphan, illiterate, and known everywhere.  He was a faultless organizer, but he was sick, the lingering effects of yellow fever or the continued effects of AIDS.  He was also very reserved, so that the effect of all this on him was hard to tell.  We knew though that he was often too sick to walk, so we would be guided by his young apprentice, who we called 'Little Hamma'.  Hamma himself would appear only to take us up into the parts of the cliff where the Dogon once built their houses, and, above them, lived the Pygmy tribes with which they were at war.
 
The animism though is near dead.  Islam and Christianity have done what they do.  The value of this is not at all clear, since despite the fascination of the old beliefs they were not exactly nice.  Women in period had to go live in a round mud hut and were not allowed to come out.  The corruption of the earth was put down to having sex with an uncircumcised woman, hence ... you can fill out the rest.  Only around ten percent of the Dogon are said to retain these beliefs.
 
Yet they are fascinating for tourists.  In particular, the ritual complex of these beliefs involves a complex masked dance that is irresistable: exotic, pretty, and filled with enough intellectual content to stretch out the anecdote at dinner.  While some dances are still performed as part of these rituals, they are also reenacted for tourists for large fees.  I would compare this to prostitution, but prostitution is honest.

( Editor's note : sobriety returns, even if it may not be apparent )

To make matters worse, there are the children.  Across West Africa the appearance of a white person will trigger a mob of running children shouting, 'tubap! tubabou!', the word for us, followed by, 'donnez moi un cadeau' - give me a gift.  Few phenomena are as unflattering to humanity as this one.  On the one hand, as much as the children and their parents have reduced strangers, who once would have been welcomed with hospitality, into sources of money and nothing else, the reaction is understandable.  In the face of unimaginable wealth walking carelessly into their midst, and liberally giving of that wealth with the right prompts, it is not unexpected that they should abdicate both their pride and their future.
 
For the Europeans though, there is no such partial pardon. Under the morality they preach, the practice is indefensible.  First, such giving makes begging lucrative, and therefore discourages more productive work.  For adults often there is no productive work, due to disability or the economy, and this argument can be weakened.  For children there is school, and the decision about attending or not is most often made by the parents, who will keep the child away if the family can be fed by its begging.  Second, more harshly, if the goal of this giving is to alleviate misery, then the childish delight in play, which Africa has stripped by adulthood, means that at a given income level adults will be more miserable than children.  Therefore the same amount given to an adult will relieve more misery than giving it to a child.  In short, even if one believes in charity on the streets, the case for directing it to adults vastly overwhelms that for giving to children.
 
But of course African adults are not cute.  They do not break into toothy, camera ready grins when given a coin.  The photos just aren't that good.  Despite the obvious warm glow that it brings, there is no goodness in this giving, there is only a deeply unpleasant game of performance and dominance.  From an unthinking, soft inhumanity, white tourists in Africa are reducing a generation to dependance.  And they feel good about it.
 
What happens with the children is merely the sharpest end of the stick of the general phenomenon of a culture reduced to selling itself as a curiosity.  And of course, I was there too.  We slept on the roofs of guesthouses with the most spectacular night sky above us, every star visible in sharp relief, and at times with the sound of some village celebration nearby.  It was beautiful, 'Africa' in the most evocative sense.  Yet, perhaps for that reason, it stirred unpleasant thoughts, whose conclusion must await another day.

AVEC VITESSE: BURKINA, TOGO, BENIN
 
We left the town closest to Dogon country early on a XXXday morning.  Naturally, we had few expectations that we would in fact make it, not least because by that stage we had been in Mali for near two weeks.  The road we drove down did not help, being either dirt, or, worse, more hole than road.  We had hoped to make it to Burkina's capital by lunch time.  It took us that much time to get to the border.
 
Once we did, though, the crossing was the easiest of the trip, even though we almost drove straight past the border post.  The no man's land between the two countries is about ten kilometres and mostly deserted.  A lonely little output with a rusted sign saying 'Halt! Gendarmerie!' is all that lets you know that it's time to get the passport stamped.  We got our visas within a few minutes, completed the car formalities, and hurried onwards.
 
We had heard legends about the friendliness of the Burkinabe, as they are known, but our first encounter was with the road, and it was not a good one.  Dirt for long stretches, bumpy dirt for others, dirt that had been somehow hollowed out and felt worse than a bad pothole.  Somehow nothing went wrong, and after we arrived in the first major town the road transformed into a miraculously smooth highway all the way to the capital, conforming to the rules of African roads: roads within the country are always better than roads between countries; a country's wealth has nothing to do with the standard of its roads; whenever you pay a toll, the road's about to get a lot worse.
 
There were no tolls that I can remember on that road, so moving at a swift pace we made it to Ouagadougou by the evening.  Yes, that is the name of a city, of a capital no less.  Even better, it is pronounced as "wagadoogoo", or "waga" for short.  "We're coming from waga", "we got the stamp in waga, wagawagadoogoo" and so on.  Indeed, the rest of Burkina has similarly amusing names, as its second city is called Bobo, as in, "the Waga-Bobo road".  We had no choice but to amuse ourselves in this way, since much of our Ouaga time was spent sitting in visa offices and travel agencies as we tried to figure out what the hell we were going to do.
 
With that sorted on the second day, we indulged my nun fetish once again, dining at a restaurant, yes, in a convent.  As a fountain sparkled under a statue of the Virgin, we drank, smoked, and gambled on cards.  After dinner the nuns all stood around and sang the Ave Maria, then cleared our plates.  Forgive me for a moment of sacrilege, but for those - and from previous mails I know there are a few - who wonder about me and the nuns, I explain it thus: if nuns are married to god, then to sleep with a nun is to cuckold god.
 
The following morning we rose at the crack of dawn, a rare feat for us, and headed out of Ouaga towards Togo.  Once again, the road was magnificent within Burkina, and our early start meant we drove at high speed through the cool of the morning.  Once again, the closer we got to the border the worse the road became, until, having crossed into Togo, the road's shoulder became as sheer and jagged as the cliffs of Dogon and the holes in the road swallowed cars whole.
 
By nightfall though we somehow made it to our destination, a small town near the border with Benin, for which we would leave in the morning.  Burkina is said to be poorer, on aggregate, than Togo, but the stretch of northern Togo through which we had driven was the poorest we had seen.  Children with swollen bellies and smudged faces lined the road, gesturing miserably towards their mouth; men and women who looked sixty but were thirty or fourty pulled enormous loads on carts or piled them on their heads; the old did not look wizened and dignified, they were bent and broken.  There used to be a national park up there, but during some turbulence within the government the people, in desperation, reclaimed all of the land and the animals fled.  We passed a motorcycle accident, its driver lying on the ground motionless, clearly dead, with nothing approaching care for miles.
 
The next morning this continued.  We had come down to Togo in order to take a particularly scenic border crossing into Benin, one so remote it has not posts, you simply get the stamps in the towns close by.  The people in this area have been fighting to keep what little they have for a long time, which has resulted in them building mud houses that look like castles, complete with turrets and pointed roofs.  It is surreal and spectacular (and reminded me of a castle I saw in Lebanon that a man built simply because when he was a boy his teacher had told him to stop dreaming of them).
 
The people though are still quite proud, and therefore this area is nowhere near as visited as the Dogon country, to which, at a glance, it is superior in cultural and scenic interest.  To enter the area one has to pay a tax, and ordinarily take a guide to make sure you don't trample around gawking at other people living (this is almost the inverse of a Dogon guide).  We managed to avoid this since we were driving straight through, but in exchange we were asked to give the bureau chief"s little brother a lift, to which we gladly assented.
 
The road we drove down was barely a path.  We were driving it during the months of the dust wind, the Harmattan, when a haze covers the horizon and the dust billows continuously.  At one stage we came to a low bridge that had soft, powdery dust piled as deep on it as a snow drift in the mountain, and as we gunned the engine to get through it a thick blanket of dust was thrown up and settled down on the car and on ourselves.  Days later mechanics would still be shaking this dust out of the bottom of the engine.
 
In the villages we passed through the poverty did not scream, but it did in the fields outside.  After we had dropped off the passengers we had given lifts to, we continued into the rural no-mans land, stopping off every now and then to point and ask some bemused local, "Benin?".  At a fork in the road, we got out to give a ride to an elderly woman carrying a weight we could barely lift, and to ask her directions.  While parked, an old, bald person came up, whose gender was impossible to tell from her appearance, but who on speaking turned out to be a woman.  She had a bone stuck through her bottom lip, rags on her body, and had been working in the fields.  She tried to talk to us, but it sounded not even like the local languages we had heard, it was simply a kind of keening.  We slipped her some coins we had, not more than half a dollar, and she broke into a kind of joyous whoop and danced exuberantly for five minutes.  We helped the other lady into the car, checked we still had our things, and drove off.
 
The next time we asked "Benin?" we were in Benin, where we would sell our car, and bring the car driving phase of things to a close.

Of mud, and flight

It is somewhat of an understatement to say I am behind with these updates.  I am now in Benin, which is utterly awful, having passed through Burkina Faso and Togo, which were wonderful, I have struck a deal to sell the car, and I must still write about Mali.  Nevertheless I will try to make good the gap as swiftly as I can.
 
For the week following my last missive we absconded from speed and decided to explore the sights of Eastern Mali.  Hence, while enough still went wrong to provide amusement, this narrative shall be of a more serious bent.  By place:
 
DJENNE (16 - 17 JAN)
 
We left our idyll by the river early in the morning, and drove through yet more dust to eventually return to the main road.  From there we proceed at a rapid pace, for us somewhere between a donkey cart and a taxi, but this lasted only until we struck a particularly nasty example of the scourge of Malian highways: the dreaded deviation.
 
Since Mali's highways are built and maintained in section, one minute you're cruising on tar as thick as the coating of my lungs, the next a big red arrow is pointing you towards a dirt road.  Ostensibly, this is to allow men to work, but only one in five times would we see any sign of activity.  On this particular occasion, a barricade of sand bags blocked the road, just in case you hadn't got the point of the arrow.  The 18-wheel truck lying on its side in the sun obviously hadn't.  A passing woman with a bundle of firewood on her head gestured threateningly up the road, and we took the hint.
 
When we had followed this deviation for ages, at right angles to the road, stopping a farmer, a cattle cart and a youth to make sure we were really going the right way, we finally emerged from between some huts onto the road.  A man under a tree unbent himself to extract a tourist tax from us, and a somewhat pretty tree-lined road later we found ourselves at the ferry for Djenne.
 
At first we were told that the ferry only went with two cars.  Then we were told the crew needed to eat.  All the while people were trying to sell us sun-caps and children, for which Africa has multiple production lines, with a product development department that is finely tuned to the tastes of white people.  We resisted their wiles long enough to find out that not only was lunch short, but two horse carts equal one car, so we drove up, the horses got on, some men pulled the carts, and we were in business.  A hop, skip and a stall later and we drove onto the dusty streets of Djenne.
 
In itself, Djenne is simply a small town in the middle of Mali.  On a Monday it has a somewhat famous market where people from all the surrounds come to buy whites at cheap prices.  Sorry, come to sell themselves dearly.  Wait, no, where there's lots of local colour and tourists on hand to photograph it.  People who like costly markets, not free ones.
 
We didn't go on a Monday, and we arrived in the heat of the middle of the day.  We nosed the car through an opening in a large, mud wall, and wound our way down dusty streets.  The odd child shouted 'white man' at us, but those streets were mostly empty.  Then, around a blind corner, we emergend onto the main square of town, and it loomed above us, just visible between the tents and stalls of the square.  The largest mud-brick building in the world, the Great Mosqure of Djenne.
 
Once, a hundred years ago and more, the town was the capital of a large polity, and hence the site of the largest mosque for hundreds of kilometres.  It is an imposing building, twenty times the height of a man and more, and the width of near any cathedral in Europe.  The mud itself is a rich, dark brown, formed by moulding and then baking squares of mud for days in the sun.  I am not sure how the building survives the rain, but it does require renewal every year, and for that purpose it is studded with wooden beams that serve as scaffolding for the annual work.  It is, apparently, something of an annual festival, when thousands help with the work.
 
The result is something magnificent.  It is beautiful in its crude way, and feels as if it might wash away at any point, sustained only by the combined wishes of a people deteremined to preserve it.  When you stand in its shadow you can hardly believe it is mud, and then you forget that it is mud, and simply absorb it.  Moreover, in some small ways it clings to a very different past, as when, at some prayer times, its microphones are eschewed and the muezzin still stand at the outer corners and call with their own voices.
 
One such moment was at the sunset of our first day, when, as I lingered by the market, an old man in a robe the yellow of daisies came to the corner closest to me, and, swaying on his cane, in a soft voice smothered by the wind, called the faithful to prayer.  That yellow was stark in the gloom, and the mosque was a looming shadow behind it, and behind that the empty sky was fading out.  Here was something where a poor people had nevertheless decided that their spirits could and would scale the peaks, and made that reality with the common, continuous work of their hands.
 
Some modern buildings do surpass this mosque.  But not many, and not by much.  Its builders had mud, and soared.  And we?  We have everything.  And we crawl.

TIMBUKTU (18 - 20 JAN)
 
It is a name with which to conjure.  It stands, in some way, for the extremities of travel.  It is therefore fitting that it encapsulates that hoariest of cliches, that the journey is worth more than the destination.
 
We had heard a lot of noise about safety on the road up to Timbuktu, mostly noise about our old friends at the local Al Qaeda franchise.  Nevertheless we'd been running into people who had made the journey, and then in Mopti, a staging post for T2, we ran smack into a veritable feast of them.  Flocks of reddened white people who had just spent days nodding their dreaded locks to world music had beached in the only well known hotel in town.  All of them looked far too fat to have endured a kidnapping; so we decided to go.
 
However, the car had remained in its somewhat temperamental mood, and we decided that we would rather not have to ask Osama and co for a push start, let alone an oil change.  So we decided to leave the car at the hotel in Mopti, hope that the white people hadn't stolen it when we returned, and make our way north by public transport.  Since for half of the distance the road is not tarred, public transport takes the form of decades-old Toyota 4x4s packed with twelve people and leaving ... at some time which is always, always 'tout suite'.
 
We booked our seats, and I clambered in the middle row, after three African ladies of considerable gravitas.  Or gravity.  The result: one squished white man.  As we headed out of town, we also ran into the police blocks.  In most of West Africa, the police have decided that grey-zone public transport is a much more fertile field to plough than random white people.  We had driven past many an informal bus parked by the side of a police stop; now we were one.  It didn't help that one of the passengers was bringing up his villages potato supply for the month, so the car was not a little overloaded.  The driver was stingy too.  So we sat.
 
In the meantime, Mark was paying the price for a bit of folly earlier that morning.  While waiting for the bus he was offered tea by a souvenir seller who was pestering us.  Not only did he accept, but when the resulting liquid appeared, not exactly boiling, and not in the family silver either, he took a few sips of it.  The result was that while the driver was arguing with the police, his stomach was arguing with him, and with the prospect of seven hours of driving still to go, he bowed out.
 
The beneficial side effect for me though was that I now had a couple of seats to myself, and could extricate myself from the dignified elderly lady's armpit.  We crawled northeastwards, the key occasionally falling out of the ignition, until at an effectively anonymous town we turned at a sign for the River Timbuktu. 
 
From this point onwards it was dirt road, as we drove beneath an immense sky, across a dry and dusty plain.  We passed a formation of hundreds of massifs stretching upwards, so grand I half expected to see on them the carvings of some long-dead race of giants.  The population thinned even more than before, and at the stops the sand grew deeper and finer.  Twilight fell as we stopped at yet another random police check, where some children showed me their drawings of cockroaches.  At some point in the night we stopped at the village to unload the potatos, and then finally pulled up to the river bank somewhere around 10pm.
 
I was somewhat disconcerted, as we arrived, to see a lot of activity, namely the setting up of tents.  There is no bridge over the river.  We had, of course, got there too late for the car ferry, and as a result would have to sleep in the car until 6am the next morning when the ferry opened.  This did not seem, uh, ideal, and by this time the driver clearly wanted to be rid of this highly annoying passenger, so he told me to get a boat.

Not for the first time, my extreme packing philosophy came to my rescue, and picking up my shoulder bag I quickly found a small fishing boat that was willing to take me over.  The town was another fifteen kilometres from the other shore, but a quick call to a hotel in Timbuktu assured me that, should I find no transport, they would pick me up.  So I clambered into the boat, much to the amusement of the other passengers, who seemed certain they would either pass me in the river or see me waiting on the other side in the morning.
 
In the end, the boat ride was about three times further than I expected, so that pretty soon we were in near complete darkness, close to a new moon, motoring across the water under more stars than I'd ever seen.  At the other bank the motor was cut and the boat was pushed in with sticks by torchlight.  A few enquiries and a bit of banging on doors yielded no transport options, so I called up the hotel and after fifteen minutes with a local boy as my guard a rather modern 4x4 whisked me, at last, into Timbuktu.
 
Once there I was instructed to drop my bags, given a gin and tonic, and taken out to a nearby bar where one of the bands from the festival was playing.  I had not eaten a thing all day, but by now it was close to midnight so I wolfed down a plate of beans and chips.  A midget showed up, it all turned lively, and when I got back to the hotel the door was locked, so with a dancer I had met we clambered over the wall, tearing off chunks of it in the process.  Shivering, since I had forgotten to ask for a blanket before going out, I fell asleep on a mattress on the roof, under countless stars.  In the morning I woke to a spectacular sunrise over the desert.
 
The rest of the trip was less remarkable.  There were still some people left in the town from the festival, and they were a far more interesting group than those I had encountered a few days previously.  The town itself is not even faded glory, it is disappeared glory.  All that remains is a mud mosque or two, neither of the quality of Djenne, and a library of quite astonishing manuscripts.  The latter are housed in a museum funded by South Africa, so I was shown Thabo Mbeki's signature from his visit, just before I was hit up for a tip for the guy who briefly showed me the documents.
 
Another bumpy 4x4 journey later, in fact in the exact same car, and I was back in Mopti, poised for a hike into the Dogon country.  But since I've started working on this update we've driven through three countries, so I'm just going to send the thing and follow it up with the rest of the trip tomorrow.
 
Luke

Of breakdowns, nuns, and a toilet

( Editor's note: other teams have finished and we, in, I think, a proud last place, are only leaving Burkina tomorrow.  I am also only, oh, two weeks late with updates.  But for posterity, I'm going to post anyway, with all the adventures of Mali _ where all but Sunday of the below occurs - from the beginning )

I have been learning some new languages along the way.  I now speak car, at least conversationally ("oh, the alternator isn't working? is it the brushes or the collector?").  With less proficiency, I also speak voiture ("§ O la la, l'alternator est mauvais, non!?!? C'est le collecteur ou le ... le ... le brush?").  Not only are we becoming linguists, but we have also become quite expert at watching people fix a car, whether a soldier changing a wheel or a masked man on a motorbike shorting the battery.

Such valuable skills have of course not been acquired without a cost.  The last few days have been replete with, well, adventure, so much so that no structure but the chronological will suffice.  What follows then is a recount of the last week or so, with, as an interlude, the Saga of the Toilet.  It's a bit long, so I'll have to write it in parts and make it convenient to read in chunks:

SUNDAY 5 JANUARY (THE DEATHLESS MARLBOROS) - SENEGAL

Like a conversation with a hooker, the day began promisingly.  The car started, the old French man who owned the bush hotel waved us off, and we headed out of Thies.  That was when we were flagged down by a man in an orange vest.  We expected our first extortion.  The man mumbled at us in French.  We smiled.  He pointed at a young police guy.  We got worried.  Then through the haze we realized all he was doing was cadging a lift for his friend.  But of course!  So we had our first hitchhiker, and it was a cop.  He sat on our tire, listened to some music, I tried not to kill us all, and we smoked.

Now one would have thought this would be good for the karma.  One would have been wrong.  Not five kilometres after we parted ways with the officer, we were flagged down again.  Two buzzards in grubby vests and a louche sloth of a customs officer lazing under a tree. Where was the paperwork? Here is the paperwork.  The paperwork is wrong.  No it isn't.  Yes it is. Naah na na naah your pants are on fire.  Or something like that.

Bribery was in order.  Out here it's called "un cadeau", which is voiture for "a gift".  My opening gambit was two packs of Marlboros.  Strategic error, opening too low.  They looked at them with disgust.  Desperate, I did the best sales job I could.  They are special, see, they are from Morocco.  They taste better.  They don't have the warning stickers, see? They don't kill you.  They upped the pressure by threatening "the brigade".  I stood firm, not wanting to cede more ground.

We could have waited but this had taken too long.  I slipped the guy 10 dollars. He threw it back at me.  They wanted more.  But then they made their mistake.  They went too high, asking for 40.  My expression made it clear they'd never get that.  Moreover, they had already given me back my passport.  They took the 10.  We left.

We made it about five kilometres before we got pulled over again.  This time, we sobbed.  Charity! We are doing it for charity! Have charity on us! We have given our gifts for the day! That wild and desperate look worked.  They pointed us in the right direction and sent us on our way.  Only one more stop that day, when in a panic Mark and I swapped seats and as a result got dusted down for drugs.

All seemed fine, with no overheating problems, until we stopped at a petrol station.  And the car wouldn't start.  Nothing from the battery at all.  An old man in overalls wondered over, took a coin out of his pocket and twisted some caps off the battery.  Turns out it was thirsty.  This I never knew, that you have to water a battery.  Water it we did, the whole gas station came out to push, and we were off, with the old man's "pas de problem, pas de problem" ringing in our ears.

He was right, of course.  Well, as long as you don't count the engine cutting as you pull out to overtake a truck a problem.  Up a hill.  With no one around.  Push start failed.  Stoicism needed.  That or a random French guy with his Senegalese wife driving past in an SUV.  No jumper cables, but a fraying tow rope, and a conversation along the lines of "do you have tools? no. do you have a knife? no. okay".  First tow start failed.  On the second the rope broke.  On the third the car roared to life.  Vive le gloire!

We decided that rather than try to do anything about the underlying problem, we would just keep driving until nothing worked anymore.  That meant a couple more push starts, on a dirt road and elsewhere, until an hour before dark we stopped for petrol and ... nothing.  Push start failed even with half the village lending a hand.  A younger man appeared.  He took out the batter and went to charge it.  Then he went to work on the alternator. Cables were ripped open, connections tested, the works.  I was particularly fond of the way he would hold one end of a wire in his mouth, attach the other to some surface or connection, and tell me to turn on the car.  After his not dying a few times, I grew sanguine when he used the spit on his hands to cause sparks all around the engine.

Finally, it started, and we were off ("pas de problem" once more).  We limped into the town of Tambacounda as darkness fell, I managed to avoid running over any people or goats, and we settled in with two large beers to watch more Senegalese wrestling on TV.

MONDAY 4 JANUARY (WHERE IS ...?) - SENEGAL / MALI

We woke up early, expecting the mechanic that the hotel had recommended to arrive at 7am. Except he was washing. Then AWOL. Then we were directed somewhere else. Then we were back to the original plan, but we were going to the mechanic.  The car started, and we headed off to a dusty lot where a young guy was sweeping the dust with a broom.  He was the apprentice.  He got very angry when we suggested he was not a mechanic.  Then the mechanic turned up, and he went silent. Sweep. Sweep.

The mechanic popped the hood.  He was very tall and gangly, with a slight stoop and a big forehead.  He went "hmmm".  He made me start the car.  He asked about some lights.  He pronounced the car in perfect working conditions.  "Pas de probleme"!  Such is life.  We drove off, for the longest breakdown free stretch we'd had until then.  It was about three hours.

The Senegal-Mali border is a work of art.  There are very few signs until you get into a small, dusty town, with a right turn that has nothing to mark it but a big rusty sign saying "Halte! Police!".  We skipped that and stopped to get supplies.  A woman selling fruit asked us to smuggle her to Mali.  We politely declined, given the folded nature of our tent.  Cokes and cigarettes quaffed, we figured we might as well try that turn.  There was no one standing anywhere near the sign, so we were about to just drive through when we spotted two guys sitting in the shade gesturing at us.

"Do you have the stamp?" No, what stamp? "From the police" We need that? "Yes, then we write your names in the book" Where is the stamp? "At the station in town, that way". Unfortunately there was a religious revival happening in the main square, so we had to duck down a bunch of alleys to get to the station.  There, our names were hand written in a large ledger, our passports stamped, and an offer made to purchase our car.  Back down the alleys, more goats, and the two men did indeed write our names down.  They also wrote down some details from our customs documents and told us to hand them in at customs "down the road".

We started driving, and saw a funny looking turn off with some trucks and some food stalls.  Can't be it, we thought.  It's some random stalls.  That's what we thought until about fifty metres later, when we entered a bridge, saw a sign like a town name with SENEGAL and a line through it, and ten metres further a similar sign with Mali, with no sign.  So we have, I think, illegally fled Senegal.  Fugitives.  If you go, don't say you know me.

It a little while for us to realize we had actually made it out of Senegal.  We had dragged the car through two countries.  There was much shouting and joy.  And Mali began wonderfully.  The customs man handed back the 10 dollars in my passport, stamped our forms, laughed at the car and sent us onward.  It took us a fair bit of driving to find the passport hut, but once we had they explained they didn't have the visa stamp since it was away getting the date changed, and we should get our visa in the nearest city.  The car fired up, and off we went down a barren, empty road.

We had thought that Eastern Senegal was empty but it teemed compared to Western Mali.  Long stretches of tarmac with little but dead trees, dust, and toll gates.  Nevertheless it was all going well - such deadly words - when, once again, the engine cut out while driving.  We trundled to a stop, and a push start failed.

Never daunted though, we put our waving expertise to work.  The first person to pass was a man in dark glasses, with a hood and a mask around his mouth.  He stopped, but none of this came off.  I will never know what he looked like.  He unwrapped some tools from the back of his bike, I popped the bonnet, he touched some of those tools to the terminal, declared himself satisfied, and ordered another push start.  This time, it worked, and he ran back up and rammed down on the accelerator until the engine spouted oil.  Then he drove off into the distance.

This left us to crawl into the border town of Kayes late in the afternoon. Chaos. Dust. Bad directions. Getting lost. We found one hotel and our sobs failed. No drop in price. We started off again. The car overheated. We stopped. We smoked. We waited.  A policeman with a stutter told us where to get our visas.  We started again, trying to find the train station, spending a lot of time trying to pronounce "gare", and mostly failing.

With the sun starting to set, the car overheated again not a hundred metres from the train station.  Recalling Dakar we pulled off the road, not certain if the car would even start again or where we would find a hotel.  Oh, and I was wearing the bright orange jump suit, since we'd crossed the border.  In West Africa, white people are called "tubap".  Around Kayes, I was being called "le grand Tubap".  Some young men were eyeing the car.  Possibly out of boredom.  But maybe not.  We still had no visas.  The coolant was booling.  This was getting a bit, um, uncomfortable.

Then: salvation! Gitmo uniformed and all, I wondered down past the train station and found the hotel.  Back with the car, it started, did not explode and got up the slope onto the road before staggering that last distance to the hotel.  It was the same price as the last one, but we defined "no bargaining position" and hauled our bags to the roof-top room with relief.

Later that evening a mechanic turned up and declared the alternator at fault.  We ran into another rally team whose timing belt (I know what that means!) had melted in the desert and whose gasket had blown.  So we felt better.  Dinner was suitably Kafkaesque - "I'll have the quarter chicken please" "We don't have it" "Do you have chicken?" "Yes, a quarter chicken with chips" "So the chicken exists if the chips exist?" "Yes" - before I settled in to the wonderfully sleazy hotel bar.  For my viewing pleasure, on the bar's tiny TV set a fat Steven Seagal dubbed into French was beating up a woman in a tank top before driving away in a black SUV.  Then they switched it onto Narnia.  At this point, words fail me.

Key lesson of these two days: it's easy to get a broken car running if you don't care what happens over the horizon

Things for which I am thankful: customs officials who hand back bribes; police officers who are too lazy to extort us; fewer mosquito bites than breakdowns

TUESDAY 5 JANUARY (THE TOILET)
 
After the insanity of the previous two days, we woke to the minor miracle of the mechanic arriving at 7 as he had promised.  While I watched he opened up the bonnet and went to work knocking things about until he pulled out a dusty turbine-like thing.  This was the alternator. I expected him to take it off to a workshop or such, but instead he just sat down there in the hotel parking lot, pried a bit here, banged a bit here, and soon the thing just fell apart.  Then he tested the odd wire, spun it around a bit, blew some dust out, and then put it back together.  That was the fixing.
 
Then he took a look at the cooling system.  This involved a bit more knocking about, followed by a long thoughtful stare into the reflecting surface of our water tank.  If you stare into the abyss and so on.  A grunt, a tip of extra water, and then the man leaned over, cupped his mouth to the water tank, and blew.  A little jet of water gushed out on the other side of the engine.  He put a finger over it, and blew some more.  Some purple shit came out.  He blew some more.  I smoked.  Then he declared the engine fixed.
 
And - I dread writing the words - so far neither battery nor cooling have failed us again.  Mr Moussa, for that is his name, seems to be a genius.  The cockpit of our little rocket has been a continuous struggle between the two eternal and opposing forces of American optimism and ex-colonial cynicism.  I believe the car is always about to fail.  Mark believes we should make plans with dates.  As a compromise, we pick a vague direction and hope we get there.
 
On this day, that direction was Bamako.  We made it out of Kayes by late morning, and a lovely day of driving followed.  There was something of a moment when we stalled at a police boom, but the guard was more perplexed than looking for opportunities to extract money and after a bit of questioning he waved us onward.  We met some random Swedes who were on the way to this music festival in Timbuktu - a grand gathering of pasty white pseudo-hippies - and then carried on until close to dark, when we began looking for a place to camp.
 
We pulled off down what looked like an empty verge, into a bunch of bushes that provided about zero cover, fretted a little bit but decided to just go with it.  Mark got the tent out, I went back to the road to confirm that yes, we were visible, and we were just settling in when we heard the clip-clop of an approaching horse.  We froze.  An old man and a little kid appeared.  The old guy looked like a National Geographic picture, and he smiled and waved, and we were reassured.  He asked if the car wouldn't start, and we told him we would camp.  He looked puzzled, and continued.
 
We were unsettled, but decided not to be silly and to stay put.  About five minutes later a bike came past.  Two young men.  With sunglasses.  A nod and a wave.  Not looking good.  We began to debate staying or moving.  The moment felt tense, equipoised between a village inviting us to a feast and a village feasting on us.  Then a five year old kid rode past on a donkey cart.  He didn't wave.  We panicked.  We fled.  Open tent thrown in the back, wheels spinning, we sped back up the dirt road to the highway and didn't stop until we were over the horizon.
 
Our cowardice though paid off, since when we did pul off again we found a picture perfect spot underneath the branches of a tree, amidst hundreds of dried cow droppings in the midst of grazing land.  We pulled out the stove, but failed to figure out how it worked, so we ate old bread and spooned some fruit out of a can.  Mark took the tent, I cleared the back of the car a bit and lay down for a night spent seeing shadows moving past the car (in the absence of light) and hearing dozens of noises, none of which turned out to be real.  We debated the equilibria of extreme communal punishment.  We failed in our attempt to fold the tent.
 
Most importantly, though, we used the toilet.  You would be right to wonder how I found a toilet in the middle of nowhere in Mali.  Simple.  We brought it with us.  In a moment of inspiration I still do not entirely understand - who ever does? - in Dakar I had purchased an entire ceramic toilet.  For the road, of course.  Because you never know.
 
We had carried it with us through everything, hauling out the seat at dodgy hotels, wondering what the fuck the rest of it was for, smuggling it over the border between Senegal and Mali.  It took up space.  It used up fuel.  It was a bit foolish.  Finally, here, in the middle of nowhere, we had a use for it.  We hauled it out, place it among the cow shit, and urinated under the stars.
 
In the morning, we left it there on the plains of Africa, as an offering and a gift.  It may be that in a hundred years it shall still be there, a monument.  Or it may adorn a chief's house.  Or, perhaps, some kids will fuck around with it before there's a bit of a fight among th
 
Sometimes, you have to leave the toilet behind and take the toilet seat with you (I don't know what this means but I'm sure it's a Chinese proverb)
 
WEDNESDAY 6 JANUARY (SOME GUY, MARK, LUKE AND SOME OTHER GUY)

The morning started with the car failing to start.  By now we had seen enough things go wrong that we knew the problem was something new. A quick feel of the engine revealed it to be cold as a nun's tit.  So we pushed it around until it was in direct sunlight and hauled out the books.  An hour passed.  No warmth.  This was getting frustrating given all the overheating in the past (I'll skip the woman metaphors).  We were just about to push it back to the road when long dormant memories surfaced and I remembered you need to punch the accelerator to cold start.  Voila! Another bit of car learned, and we were on our way to Bamako, Mali's capital.

Like most other cities here, Bamako hits you suddenly.  The barren land, punctured by a few huge rivers, forces people to live either in small and scattered villages that subsist off large areas, or to cluster at the intersections of rivers and trade.  Hence as we drove into Bamako we stopped several times to make sure we were still on the right road (which of course we were), since we could see barely any sign of a city.

And then we hit it. Bamako is quite small, around a million people, but at any given moment it feels like all of them are descending, intent on causing chaos, exactly where you happen to be.  Legions of motorbikes swerve along the pavement, between the cars, and around sink holes.  Cars try not to hit the bikes but don't really bother about pedestrians.  Almost as much dust hangs in the air as covers the street.  The odd police lounge around, watching all this unfold with complete nonchalance.  And, of course, there are goats.  Herds.

We fought through this chaos, getting lost of course, praying we didn't overhead, until we got us to a nunnery.  The Mission Catholique de Bamako, to be more precise. It hosts travellers at cheap rates in the centre of the city, so it's not only racy, it's popular.  The nun who checked us in thrilled at our names.  "Oh, c'est l'evangelistes!" she exclaimed.  Now, as impregnated with irony as is the image of a European post-colonial atheist and a West African nun, I must report that nothing of the sort happened.  But the frisson was fabulous.

This was later, though, since, as if in anticipation, the nunnery was closed to us on our arrival. The nuns were resting. So we sauntered over to the road to find a couple of French hippies running a vegetarian restaurant.  Of course.  They had been on a trip through Africa and just, well, dropped out.  Then we went to buy a map of Mali, since we'd been driving without one, at a tourist bureau where we were not only ushered in to meet the head guy, but half his retinue came past to practice some English. I went looking for an internet cafe and found a prison.

When finally the gates opened and we entered the convent, waiting for us was a cornucopia of stereotypes.  A Dutch couple had arrived from their beach house in Senegal, and promptly pitched a tent in the courtyard rather than pay for a room.  A group of Germans, Bavarians to be precise, entered in a BMW and promptly crossed the street to empty the local bar of its beers.  Two old French women pursued their own inscrutable purposes.  This continued into the evening, when we went to a restaurant with the world's most intense ginger drinks, and a band playing Malian music, to which an old French man was dancing like a snake rising out of its basket.

And the nuns?  There were not that many of them but they were younger than expected.  Mostly, they moved like a group of quiet nurses in an old movie.  They were polite, even when we smoked, and one of them rode a scooter.  In the morning we had to delay our start while they prayed and sang a bit wanly.  In all, they had perfected their indifference to all but the Biblicly named travellers in their midst, and it was a good night's rest for not that much.  Indeed, it only takes 10 dollars to get thee to a nunnery.
 
THURSDAY 7 JANUARY (DUST SO THICK THE SNOT CAME OUT BLACK)

We bade farewell to the nuns and other stereotypes, and headed into the beginnings of Bamako rush hour.  Some sickness stalked us still, particularly a hacking cough that fed itself off the trinity of dust, flu, and smokes.  We thought we were going to make it out smoothly, until we realised that the bridge we had hoped would take us over the river was composed entirely of traffic coming towards us.  Swerving away, we sat in traffic along the river for ages, then crossed the bridge barely able to see for the haze.  A couple of turns later and we were on our way out of the city.

You might have thought that by this stage we would have given up so obviously futile an exercise as making plans.  If we had that kind of sense we probably wouldn't have been where we were.  On this bright morning we were debating whether we should push through all the way to Mopti, at ~600km, or rather go to Djenne first, at ~500km.  You may guess where this is heading.  A pothole.

It was the music's fault.  You may recall that in an earlier mail I mentioned that some Italian sailors had stolen our car radio.  This meant the journey so far had been tune-less, filled only with the sound of our voices debating.  Even we were tired of this.  The car was obviously complaining.  We had searched for a solution for some time, but a CD-equipped boombox was near impossible to find, since CDs are not prone to playing smoothly on most of Mali's roads.  In Bamako though Mark hit the brilliant solution of buying a set of cheap but effective iPod speakers, and hooking them up to my iPod.

It was the chance to rest our voices that, more than anything, made us so cheerfully optimistic that morning.  Indeed, we made terrific progress, covering a few hundred kilometres by mid-day.  Right then though we were struggling with Bowie, somewhat fittingly hunting for Rock 'n Roll Suicide, when, coming out of a tight bend with deep ruts, I hit a perfectly wheel sized pothole at close to full speed (which, by the way, is about 90km/hr).

All of a sudden the car felt and sounded funny.  We pulled over to the side of the road and took a deep, pensive look at the front tyre.  It looked deflated.  The metal part was kind of banged inwards.  "Is that normal?" we asked ourselves.  We had to look at the other tyres to verify that it was not.  Now, it seemed, the moment was upon us: a wheel change!  Except I forgot we had a spare wheel, thinking we only had the spare tyres in the back.  And we didn't really know where to put the jack.  Plus when we pumped the wheel it didn't hiss very much, and we were close to the city of Sevaré.  So we pumped the tire, abandoned our manhood, and drove onwards.  Fifteen kilometres later, at a police checkpoint where we stopped to try again, a soldier saw at once that we had no idea what we were doing and came over to help us.  Our abandoned manhood was now roadkill.

Spare wheel in place, we continued into Sevaré, a lovely town along the river.  Once we had found a restaurant ("Le Niger, ex-Le Golfe") on one of the town's dusty squares, I asked the guy who ran it where we could get a wheel fixed.  A couple minutes later a portly man, the Malian Michelin man, turned up at the restaurant terrace, took the wheel, and rolled it off across the square. We ate, chatted with a French woman who had dropped out of Europe to build herself a house in a Malian village, I got my shoes stitched up by some street kids, and when it was all done the wheel reappeared, fixed for four dollars.  The shoes are kind of fucked.  The wheel still works.

At this point though our plans were as valid as a maxed out credit card.  Knowing we would make neither Djenne nor Mopti, a flip through the guide book revealed a lodge on the river banks that required a mere fourty kilometre detour.  This was more than tempting.  Said detour took us off the main highway, onto dirt roads that snaked through the Malian countryside.  We passed cattle, strange trees, stranger birds, multiple villages, and dust.

No ordinary dust, not even the dust we had become used to, but thick beds of it, clouds sprouting from the earth, layers of it descending everywhere.  This dust was so thick that our snot came out black.  On one of the many bumps in the road the back doors of the van had jolted slightly open, not even enough that we could see them flapping but enough to admit the dust.  When we finally arrived at the lodge and looked at our stuff, everything had turned brown.  Merely removing our bags plunged us into fits of coughing.  To this day the back is not entirely clean.

The lodge itself was simply incredible.  On arrival, all of a sudden the dust gave way to thick foliage, to trees buried in the water, to camps of fishermen drying their nets and lighting their camp fires.  Exhausted, relieved, we collapsed.
 
FRIDAY 8 JANUARY (FLEEING)

In the morning we woke, took breakfast, and were on the way to check out when I detoured back down to the river's edge.  The river was wide and tranquil.  The week had been, to put it mildly, eventful.  We decided we would stay, kick back, and continue the next day.

So passed a largely unremarkable day.  Some reading, some writing, some chess, some walking.  The only incident occurred when I went out for a walk along the river.  On its edge were a couple of villages, and in one a man waved me over with good cheer.  In my mood I was barely suspicious, so I strolled over to his hut.

Then, with no warning, like a scout caught by an ambush, I was surrounded.  A dozen children surrounded me.  They tugged on my fingers, made those noises, wouldn't let me go.  I tried to extricate myself, and failed.  I tried harder, and this time succeeded.  I ran.  The things chased.  I ran faster.  Finally, they stopped.  I rejoiced, at least until the smoking-TB one-two punch hit me and I doubled over, coughing and wheezing.  Luckily, my pursuers by then were too busy among themselves to notice this moment of weakness, and failed to pounce. 

I avoided them succesfully for the rest of the day, until the sun set over the river and the stars came out.

SMS Update

Having rocked Dogon country for four days we are finally out of Mali. Backlog of Mali posts to come later today

Hitting the road, and breaking down

( Editor's note: I am woefully behind on posting updates that have already been written.  Blame a legion of breakdowns.  Hence I'm posting the backlog, starting today.  The below is back from Senegal, from the second day of driving )

I am writing this from a little town in Senegal called Thies, where we have stopped for the night.  It's about 50km from Dakar.  We had planned to be, oh, around six hundred kilometres further on.  And on a different road.  Not that we're lost.  Call it the scenic route.
 
And the 50km? Weeelll ... we had this spectacular plan to head out of town at the crack of dawn.  But then we were lazy bastards last night, and all in all it was more like noon.  But hit the road we did, tea cosy, uniform and all.  No music though since the sailors on the ship stole the radio.  They were kind enough though to replace it with the old tape player. Upside down.  At least they have a sense of humour.  I hope it survives when a giant sea bird shits on their head, twice, a dolphin plucks out their eye and a mermaid gives them herpes.  Shortly before their ship capsizes.
 
But being such daunting souls we went with the sound of silence and began driving out of town.  After about an hour of sitting in traffic jams, the little temperature light thingie came on.  So we pulled over in an OiLybia - thank you Muammar - and popped the bonnet.  It was hot.  We smoked.  It cooled.  I put the key in, and the car sounded like it was throwing up.  So we pushed it over to the side, had another cigarette, and waited for the local mechanic.  He played around with some cables, some other stuff - the fuses or something - put it all back in, and hey presto, we were on the road again.  This was kilometre 10, round about.
 
For about twenty minutes.  When the temperature light came on again.  In the middle of a traffic jam with no verge.  Then a kind of funny noise started coming from the bonnet.  I thought it was the truck in front, Mark thought we were about to explode, Mark was right.  So we pulled over to the dirt track and - you have to love Africa - an electrician, a mechanic, a hanger on and a big man all appeared at once.  The water jug next to the engine was kind of rattling around and steam was pouring out.  Purple fluid shot out of a pipe like a burst aorta.  We smoked.  This was kilometre 15.
 
The electrician though channeled the gods - at one point he attached one end of a wire to a terminal, put the other end in his mouth, turned to me and told me to start the car - some muscled guy pumped all the purple shit out like a halaal butcher, and then we waited for the engine to cool, after which we might or might not be fine.  On a dirt road, on the shady outskirts of Dakar, a couple hours from nightfall. We smoked. We peed against the wall.  We contemplated the Dakar-Dakar rally.  And then the car started, the crowd nodded approvingly, and all was right with the world.  Until we missed our turning.
 
Now you may be asking how any of this is even possible.  Existentially, the anser is simple - stupidity.  Practically ... well, I have to go back into the mists of time ... to 2009.  December 31 2009.  You may recall that our car had arrived in port but we were waiting for customs and so on.  Well Dec 31 dawned with little real news and us needing the car soon.  So I headed down to the agent to figure out who needed a New Year's gift.  I arrived in time to join an expedition to check out the cars.  We headed down to the port, past the smell of rotting fish, to find the rally cars parked in a line.  With many things missing.  Took my tools.  Took my bag, with the maps and the soap, and sundry other items. My bag in toto. So it was a Buddhist New Year.  Let go of material possessions. And so on.
 
The day moved swiftly through to the afternoon with little news and a growing prospect that we might not get the car until Monday.  Tears.  Drama. Ethical dilemnas, competition for leadership, the works.  The man from customs was coming ... he would take fifteen minutes ... he would take two hours ... men got angry ... and then, with an hour until customs closed, the man appeared.  Twenty kids piled into taxis and sped across town.  We smoked.  We waited.  We paid.  We sped back to the port.  We hit the craziest, wackiest bar opposite the port.  An old Senegalese man told me he eat couscous with Michael Jackson when MJ was six.  That he knew Dizzy, Diana, the works.  An old woman hit on Mark. We queued. We paid. We queued. We smoked. I got in the Gitmo uniform.  We got the cars!!!
 
We drove out, finally, at about 8pm.  Now all we had to do was get across Dakar.  That took an hour and a half.  We got lost.  We got stuck in the sand.  We dodged goats, and people, and fire crackers.  A mechanic had to fix the window.  And then we drank.  And eat, and hit the town.
 
Dakar parties late.  At 1am the patisserie was pumping as everyone was still getting their pre-party coffee.  At 3am the bars were packed.  The clubs only started to empty at 6am.  And the clubs ... rewrite every standard you have about beautiful people.  The average man or woman in a Senegalese club would be the hottest thing in almost any club anywhere.  The men are immacutely suited, svelte and polished, the women - indescribable.  Perfect figures everywhere.
 
Stagger out though we did at 6am and piled into the taxi.  With the devout taxi driver playing a recital of the Quran all the way there, we arrived in time to go skinny dipping in the ocean just as the dawn was breaking, followed by a short stagger back to the hotel, breakfast and final collapse.  
 
Later that afternoon we roused ourselves enough to make our way to a large stadium for the biggest match in the Senegalese wrestling calendar.  You may recall I referred to this as midget wrestling.  That was stupid, and down to some more than misleading pictures.  These wrestlers are like freight trains.  Not comically over-built like American wrestling, but with every muscle bulging.  We watched five bouts of a sport that's part dancing, part boxing, part wrestling, the crowd getting rowdier through it all until the clear favourite won the last match.  The spectacle prompted numerous musings, but I'll save those for another time.
 
Tonight we are staying in a delightful hotel, run by a French man who came down to Senegal after retirement, and picked this town via the random decision of his taxi driver.  In the morning, god willing, we will be off again, aiming to get close to the Malian border by nightfall.

SMS Update

Just watched a midget dance in timbaktu

SMS Update

Timbuktu!!!

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