I had planned to spend the best part of a month in Mali, but Al-quaeda have been running around and the government got scared. So I called my Dad to ask him to check the FCO advice on the internet, and apparently basically all of Mali is no-go zone. I think its just that my Dad looked up what was there and decided he wanted to go too. One day Dad. But for now, I'm skippping it.
After my awesome time in Western Burkina I was not looking forward to coming to Bamako, capital of Mali, as no guidebook or other traveller was exactly complimentary. But I sat down on the bus next to a nervous looking law student who was moving that day to Senegal and had his Mum waving him off. Made me feel kind of stable. And the woman behind me started throwing up, and I got to be the one to take her temperature, give her tissues and chewing gum etc and I felt no longer like the one who needed looking after.
Aware of my optimistic first impressions of Ouaga and how I'd been disappointed I decided not to like Bamako, even crossing over the brightly lit bridge across the niger with a friendly taxi driver and good, well surfaced roads. I arrived at the nunnery (these are GREAT places to stay) and Sister Jeanne, who is shockingly friendly and speaks flawless English welcomed me in to a very clean, secure place. I went to the cafe literally oppositte where they welcomed me, sprayed me with mossie repellent (very necessary here) and handed me a small beer and a huge plate of chips and sheep, and when they didn't have change, just gave me all my money back. The fan in the room didn't work and there was traffic noise. Enough reason to continue not to like the city. The next day I had a lovely breakfast, again, just across the road, and was joined by two lovely french women, one who took me in her taxi to meet her friends and find a surprisingly cheap plane ticket to Dakar, and the other who invited me to have dinner with her. But at lunchtime I had to walk for at least ten minutes to find the tomatoes I fancied putting in my laughing cow sandwhich, bought from the sweet lady with the shop on the corner with the lovely little child. There's dust in the dity 'la poussiere'. Not as much as the guidebooks that I have now butchered to weigh less suggest, but still. And the taxis are expensive, even as much as 2 pounds to get from one side of the capital to the other. And the well stocked bookshops with friendly staff in the big air-conditioned hotels serving cheap fresh fruit juice don't happen to have the senegal guidebook I want. But they do have others.
I found a good reason not to like Bamako. I went out of town to the big market where the locals go to shop. Its immense, dirty, swarming with flies, I stepped in some vile greenish liquid streaming from under the meat section, I accidentally stumbled into a horrid public toilet, and I nearly got run over several times by people reversing motorbikes through the tiny lanes between the stalls. But nobody hassles the white girl there, they're all to busy getting on with their own lives. And its so interesting. And there's a woman in the corner making amazing crumpet-like cakes on a griddle. And I've never seen so many vegetables in one place in West Africa - beetroots, chives, ginger (that was so fat and un-rooty I thought they were stones), big, fresh lettuces, carrots, yams, chillies piles of oranges taller than people.
So I think I kind of like it, after all. Still, I'm looking forward to chilling out by the beach in a little fishing village in Senegal.
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