Heat and Dust

Well, we made it out of Timbuktu alive, and after a gruelling two day drive on desert roads arrived back to some semblance of civilisation. Of course the truck broke down for several hours, a knackered suspension as opposed to the anticipated radiator collapse the cause, though we've still ended up replacing the radiator here in Bamako.

The rigours of overland travel in West Africa are beginning to take their toll on me and on my enthusiasm for the place. The scenery is relentlessly dull unless you particularly love endless flat expanses of scrubby trees and bush, dotting a brown earth baked hard like concrete by the merciless sun. The Sahel landscape is unvarying to quite an amazing degree over vast areas of West Africa, and seemingly empty of much life apart from goat herders and their flocks. We have a further solid five days of the stuff ahead of us as we depart Bamako for the Senegalese coast, with no sights to speak of en route. I'm craving hills and grass and something spectacular to see.

The highlight of the past days and in a sense of the whole trip has been a three day trek in the Dogon country in eastern Mali. The Dogon remained fiercely animist in the face of Moslem incursion into West Africa and retreated to defend their traditional beliefs to a spectacular escarpment landscape in the fourteenth century. The Bandiagara Escarpment truly is a landscape to make the heart sing. The wind eroded sandstone escarpment runs for about 150km with a fertile plateau behind where the Dogons cultivate onions, dropping magnificently 300m to a fertile plain below where many of the Dogon villages are picturesquely sited in the lee of the cliffs. There are gorges and dry river beds aplenty, with fabulously twisted boabob trees providing much needed shelter and shade from the heat and dust.

Dogon culture is quite fascinating and incorporates an important role for masked dancing. The masks are highly elaborate and in some cases astonishingly large. We were able to see a dance performed in one village which was really quite a sight to see. We also visited a cliff ledge painted with what could almost be taken for modernist abstract paintings in bold colours, where the Dogon boys are circumcised in an age old 15-day ceremony that marks their rite of passage into adulthood. The ubiquitous square thatched granary buildings raised on staddle stones are the signature buildings of Dogon villages, looking a little like the steeply gabled turrets of fairytale medieval castles. Every husband must provide a granary for each wife he takes, and it is these buildings which traditionally were sealed with the famous carved windows and doors of the Dogon. It was wonderful to be off the truck and on foot through this place, sleeping on roofs under the stars at night to recover from the rigours of a day's hiking.