Forty-eight Degrees and Rising

It's forty-eight degrees Celsius right now, or maybe forty-nine, the bar man wasn't sure. That's in the shade - I don't know what it's like in the sun. Welcome to northern Mali.

I knew April and May were the hottest months in West Africa, but it's one thing to know and another to understand the implications of that knowledge. I'll spare you the descriptions of how one's body reacts to that kind of heat, suffice to say that I've gotten two different types of heat rash and I wake up every three hours during the night from the heat (it only cools down by about ten or fifteen degrees at night). I take a cold shower, re-soak my sleeping sheet, and go back to bed knowing that I'll do the whole thing again at 4 am. It's fun, you should try it.

Mali is the first country I've visited that's left me lukewarm about the experience. Not because of the heat, but because it's a rip off. A taxi ride in Bamako (the capital) costs a minimum of 1000 francs, while the minimum price for a taxi ride in Ouaga is 300. A plate of riz sauce (rice with peanut sauce and a few pieces of goat meat) costs between 1500 and 2500 francs in Mali, but in Burkina you can get it for 250 francs. And as for transport... Mali has figured out how to get people to pay large amounts of money to receive terrible service. The 11 hour bus ride from Bamako to Mopti cost 7500 francs, which is what I would have paid for a similar trip in Burkina or Ghana. But in Burkina and Ghana the bus would have been air conditioned with clean and comfortable seats and the driver would not have made 2 hours worth of unscheduled stops to pick up unauthorized passengers whose fares went directly into his pocket. I'm not saying that such bus rides can't be had in other countries, but you pay a lot less for them. And to top it all off, the locals hike up prices for toubabous (white people) more here than in the other countries I've visited. No, Mali is not a country for the faint of heart, or the faint of wallet.

But putting all that aside, I've seen some really cool things in Mali. Bamako is without a doubt the most beautiful of the three African capitals I've visited. I think that the urban planner who designed Bamako must have really loved it. The Niger river bisects the city from north to south, keeping the temperatures in the mid- to high thirties. The city follows the river's contours and expands outwards from its banks. The downtown core is a well-laid out grid of tree-lined avenues along the west bank of the Niger. It has a higher percentage of paved roads than Accra or Ouaga's downtown cores. Someone thought to build a pleasant riverside walkway with terraced gardens and benches. There are landmarks like statues and monuments that you can use to find your way, and the wide sidewalks make it easy to get around on foot (where there are sidewalks). Somatro's - Bamako's tro tros - zip around the city for a minimal fee. Compared to the humid jungle that is Accra or Ouaga's transit-less, landmark-free muddle of streets, Bamako is something special.

The nightlife in Bamako is fantastic. Mali has probably produced more world-famous musicians than any other African country except South Africa, and every big name in the African music scene makes a stop there at some point. The problem is finding them. If you don't understand the radio ads in the local dialect then you really have to know someone in the industry or haunt the downtown billboards in order to know what's going on. The stars don't seem to bother advertising their performance schedules online when they're playing Africa, or if they do then a half hour online search isn't long enough to find them. I tried to go see Oumou Sangare sing but didn't get lucky, so I went to rue Princesse, which is one of Bamako's clubbing strips. I took in the scene there for a while, happily drinking the first beer I had found in the city. Bamako takes its position as the capital of a 95% (or thereabouts) Muslim country seriously enough to make alcohol hard to find during the day, but not so seriously that it hurts the city's nightlife. If you go out at night in Bamako the liquor flows like water. But here's the rub: Bamako's nightlife doesn't really get going until 3 in the morning. You know why? It's because people don't want anyone they know to know that they're going out because it could hurt their reputation as a good Muslim. Senegal is as Muslim as Mali, but nobody there cares about such things. According to my friend who lived there for years, you'll frequently see Senegalese men leave the mosque in full bou-bous and head to the maquis across the street for a cold one. Another example of Bamako's capricious relationship with Islam is that the city closes down on Sundays. Shouldn't it be Friday?

I left Bamako and boarded a horrible bus for the overlong trip to Mopti, several hundred kilometres north. The further north you go in Sahelian countries, the closer you get to the Sahara. That's when it starts to get really hot. I'm writing this post from my hotel in Mopti.

Mopti is a neat place. It's a port town on the edge of the massive inland delta that covers much of central Mali. The Niger and Bani rivers merge at Mopti, bringing together people from five different ethnicities for trade and, during the dry season, survival. During the rainy season you can take a three-day boat trip from Mopti to Timbuktu on the edge of the desert, passing Bozo fishing camps, Tuareg villages, travelling Peuhls, and maybe even catching sight of Mali's desert elephants along the way. At any time of year traders ferry shallow-bottomed gondolas called pirogues between Mopti and Timbuktu, bringing slabs of salt as big as a coffee table from the desert and carrying vegetables back up north. I went on a one-hour pirogue tour with some French tourists and saw all these things, except the desert elephants.

The next day I went to the Dogon Country. The Dogon Country consists of fourteen village strung along a 250 km stretch of cliff formed millions of years ago. I didn't even realize Mopti was on an inland plateau until we arrived suddenly, spectacularly, at the brink of the cliff and looked down at the plain spread out a thousand feet below.

The first village I visited was called Djigibombo (pronounced Jiggy-bombo) and it was just before the brink of the cliff. It was supposedly founded by the slave caste of the Dogon people, who were fleeing the forcible conversion to Islam occuring further west. It was very small and very traditional, with cylindrical graneries with their conical roofs and a strong animist presence. People still live there, but you only see old people and children at this time of year because everyone of working age has gone to Bamako or another big city to earn money. It was also touristy. There was a small hotel in the village with a satellite dish that stuck out like a sore thumb.

The next village I visited was built into the cliff. If you know what the cliff dwellings in Arizona look like, this village was like that. The major difference is that the cliff dwellings in Arizona were abandoned 500 years ago and the cliff dwellings here were only abandoned 50 years ago. The villagers rebuilt on the plain directly under their former houses and many elders remember growing up on the cliff-face. They had to abandon their homes because there wasn't enough water, though now there's a pump in the village so everything's fine. UNESCO takes care of the cliff dwellings, including the painted walls sealing off the home ofthe Dogon spiritual chief. Before they left the cliffs for good, the Dogon spiritual chief had a tenure of 60 years. For those 60 years he wasn't allowed to leave his cliff-dwelling because he had to remain in constant communication with the spirit world. He couldn't even leave to bathe, and even if he'd been allowed to descend he still wouldn't have been able to bathe because he wore sacred charms - gri gris - which couldn't get wet. So he would call a serpent, and the serpent would come and bathe him with its saliva. Sixty years of snake spit... Right now the Dogon don't have a spiritual chief because he last one died 20 years into his mandate and the spirits only select a new one every 60 years, no matter what happens in the meantime.

Soon I go back to Burkina and I can't tell you how excited I am. It will be a little less hot and a lot less expensive. Malians are among the poorest people on the planet -I think the only country that ranks worse on the UN's Human Development Index is Afghanistan. If I'm feeling squeezed by the prices here, how do they manage?