Never, ever travel to Mopti

Hey from Vacay!

I'm about to get kicked off this computer so I'll briefly write some descriptions under the photos, and then try to add some more depth at a later date (that later date has arrived on 5/2/08). I'm in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso at the moment. And I'll be heading to Ghana for a few weeks tomorrow if everything works out. To the BEACH!

Safe and sound,
Matt

Pull a 90-degree turn and you'll see a pretty large cliff. There are gigantic cliffs everywhere in Dogon Country. AMAZING landscape and great hiking. UPDATE: There's a 150-mile espcarpment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escarpment) here that attracts a lot backpacking tourists. And also the inhabitants of this area - the Dogon - are also quite unique in West Africa.

Long story short: They're a vibrant culture in a vibrant landscape - unique traits in northern West Africa. Also their architecture looks pretty unique. Instead of mud bricks or thatched grass they use rocks to builds their homes. The landscape along the escarpment is awe-inspiring. People have been living in this are for a very, very long time. Before the Dogon were pigmies - apparently they were driven off their land and journeyed to the current homeland in the Congo. The story is made really interesting when you see pigmy ruins half-way up a 1000-foot cliff (with no obvious way to reach the cliff other than technical climbing). The locals say they were like chimps and could scale the cliffs with ease. It's a mysterious place with an even more mysterious past. I need to go back during wet season.

Onion farming in between Dogon cliffs. Good soil is hard to come by in this area due to the abundance of bare rock. So any good soil is heavily farmed. Along the path we were hiking there were sporadic plots of onions, tobacco, tomotoes, lettuce, carrots, and cabbage - but mostly onions. The rocks around the onions in this photo act to trap the irrigation. That's my friend Katy in the photo.

Katie and our lying, crooked, and pretty dumb tour-guide Yussef Guindo. UPDATE: Well, all that information is true. But I was pretty bitter when I wrote it. To begin with, we get swindled into hiring Yusef. We were told he spoke English well - a complete lie. The fact that he said "yeah" way too much when we met him should have tipped us off. Also, we were told that he knew everything there was to know about Dogon Country - again a complete lie. E.g., and this is verbatum... Katy asks as we were walking along the escarpment looking at the pigmy ruins in the cliff, "Yusef, do you know when the pygmies lived in Dogon Country?" Yusef replies, "Yeah." Katy's persistent, "Um, do you know what year the pygmies lived here?" Yusef's on the spot now, "Sixty three, fifteen, seventy one." I look at Katy in awe.

Yusef either knew something we didn't, was thinking up lotto numbers, or was the most entertaining liar I've ever met. On the second day Yusef took us on a 20-mile hike during the hottest part of the day (during dry season in the Sahel) and got us lost. We were out of water looking down a 1000-foot drop with no trail in sight to get us down it - and we were paying good money for it. The story goes on and on through mutltiple villages, towns, and cities and involves multiple teenagers and men of a shady nature. That's why the title of this blog entry is never, ever travel to Mopti. That place ruined my peace of mind for a good week.




Yusef the Dubious, a village elder, and I at one of the the village meeting spots. Every Dogon village has multiple meeting spots. It's an elder men's social club where the town's politics are discussed. They all look pretty similar to the one in this photo.



It's May and I'm back in America! Clap yo hands!