Christmas Break Travels

Wow, its not even the New Year and I have experienced so much in the past few weeks of travels. Im currently in Sevare, Mali and Im typing on a French keyboard so youll have to excuse the missing punctuation and typos, Im not used to this thing at all.

I left Accra on the 15th right after my final exams were finished and about the same time most of my friends at school took off back to the States and Europe. I headed north to Burkina Faso and stopped over briefly in Paga in the north of Ghana to feed some sacred crocs and check out an historic slave camp. I reached Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (the capital city) and was not really that impressed so I looked in my guide book for another option, got myself a bus ticket for the next morning, and left town after one night in Ouaga. I ended up spending a little over 3 days in the west part of Burkina in the town of Bobo Dioulasso and Banfora.

My visit to Bobo and Banfora was great. I went swimming in some beautiful waterfalls, climbed around some spectacular rock formations, heard some good music at two different evening concerts, and had an amazing experience watching hippos as the sun came up on Lake Tirfiguela. I definitely enjoyed my time in Burkina.

I then had a hellish bus ride out of Bobo to Mopti, Mali. A journey that should have been about 15 hours turned into a 34 hour ordeal with frequent breakdowns and two nights sleeping in the cramped bus. On average there were about 20 Africans in the bus and me. I tried to maintain my cool because, frankly, there wasnt much I could do about the situation. It helped that I was reading an amazing book about fishing in Oregon, The River Why.

I met up with some friends in Mopti (Mike and Jenn) and the three of us traveled by boat down the Niger River to Timbuktu. It took us about two days and we reached the famous city that has always been synonomous with the end of the world. Here in Buktu we met up with some other friends from the Univ. of Ghana and we all spent Christmas together. After Christmas we spent a bit of time in Buktu just exploring the sites and we arranged a camel ride out in to the Sahara to spend the night at a Toureg camp. I have so much respect for these nomads who make a living in the sparse environment of the desert. It was pretty awesome to spend the night out under the stars in the Sahara... after a dinner of rice mixed with camel butter of course.

After Buktu I had another crazy transportation experience, this one included our bus getting stuck while driving onto the Niger ferry and included flying down ragged roads in the bus to make up lost time. I think I spent more time in the air bouncing off my seat than I spent actually sitting on my seat. So now Im in Sevare, Mali getting ready to trek in Dogon country. Its definitely been an amazing trip so far. And I have some pictures posted on my flickr page for those interested, www.flickr.com/photos/renegadegast.