Mali

Mali – Country 33

After our little border problems, we headed for Mali, we chose a little tiny border to go through, which came with sleeping officials, and bad roads (80km took over 5 hours…), almost felt like we were sneaking in! The scenery changed again and became green and lush, with grass that looked so soft you just wanted to roll around it.

The towns, however, were dusty and dirty. A sandstorm came through one as we were driving that was quite wild.

We stayed in Bamako, for about 10 days, longer than normal as we had some time spare now and a little break from driving was most welcome. We ended up staying in a very nice hotel (we were advised nowhere else was safe enough!) (side note: this hotel was attacked not long after our trip and many people died-  safe is relative!!) and ended up in our nicest rooms yet, well suites with a bar, that we have stayed in. This was great as I had tonnes of work to do and spent long days working on spreadsheets! As we had hit West Africa in the rainy season, we were used to a bit of rain, but WOW, the rain that came down one afternoon was insane, in a matter of minutes, the roads were flooded, I kept looking out the window to make sure the cars hadn’t floated away…

We did a bit of sightseeing around town, but couldn’t take too many photos, we got chased away be the police!!

Most of West Africa, the main transport is by motorbikes, but Bamako takes the prize. At times you can’t actually believe what you are seeing, the amount of bikes number in the 1000’s.

As it was Ramadan we didn’t host a customer function, and a lot of things shut at 2pm and didn’t open again till the next day, so the town was not too hectic. We did visit an orphanage to make some donations. This was a large home that had so many tiny babies, a lot of them had been abandoned (one that morning in a market), it was a bit overwhelming in the end. All the older children just wanted to cuddle or hold your hand, they have a lot of carers but crave attention, at one stage I was flattened by so many kids on top of me…

Our drive to the Guinea border and our first Ebola country took us through some beautiful scenery and straight into more border problems!! We were again refused entry (this was now not funny!), we had our visa on entry documents but the police, not the immigration said they wanted us to get the visa in advance (we were now entering our most corrupt country on this trip, but that is another post!!!). We were able to make a plan with the Ambassador and drive back to the Guinea Embassy in Bamako (100km away) and get the visa and eventually crossed the border 10.5 hours after we arrived!!!