Christmas in Mali

Happy New Year everyone! I hope your holidays were lots of fun. Mali was great. Of course, no trip would be complete without a little unexpected excitement and ours was no different. In order to leave the country, we have to submit a form with our trip plans and get them approved by our country director before we can leave. Aaron and I submitted our forms twice just to be safe but of course that didn't work. The bus to Mali was leaving at 7am Tuesday morning, but when we went to the station we still weren't sure if we were even going or just seeing everyone else off since our forms hadn't been received yet. Luckily, just as they started up the bus to get going around 9, we got a call saying we could go.

We spent 5 days backpacking in Dogon country and spent the last night in a town called Sevare where we heard the food was 'epic'. Dogon is really interesting, it is a stretch of escarpment about 100km (I think, we've also heard 200km) with villages along both the top and bottom. There are old ruins from a tribe that lived there in the 7th century before the Dogon people came as well as old Dogon houses from the 14th century. We stayed in a different village every night sleeping on the roof of the hotels. We started and ended most days by passing a calabash (bowl) of millet beer around for everyone.

Christmas was lots of fun because we went to a village with a big Catholic population that was having a party. By the time we got there, the dancing was already started and it looked like they had already been through some millet beer. We danced with them for a while, got our picture taken with Santa (real name, Daniel), and called it a night since we had a long hike the next day.
We also got to see the opening ceremony of a mask festival in one of our last villages. Dogon has lots of festivals but they change villages every time and some only happen once a year or once every couple years so you can to have a bit of luck and good timing to catch one. (Though I heard if you offer enough money, they will 'reenact' a festival for you.) Most of the villages contained groups of Catholics, Muslims, and animists. Animist sections of town have these rounded statue-like things which are their fetishes, or sources of power or magic. You can't touch them and I think there are also rules about who can go near them (of course I accidentally touched the first one we saw). It was all really interesting: fetishes, sorcerers, black magic.

Our guide was from Dogon and he was great. He liked to sum things up by declaring them "complicated" ("It's complicated...she's complicated...I'm complicated").
After Dogon, we headed to Sevare for our dinner at a hotel run by an American. Ever the bargain hunters, we ended up sleeping in what I can only describe as a nun's army barrack. I only saw the place in the dark, but there were clearly nuns and the rooms were made for a boot camp. Dinner was pretty epic. There were multiple courses and everything. We sat with a group of guys from Britain who had spent the last three weeks motocrossing all over West Africa. They were really funny and taught us all about American culture. It turns out that The Simpsons is the best show ever and that you can't count yourself as American if you don't know where Evel Kneivel was born.

Our trip back home from Mali was the typical transport nightmare. We started at 6am and after 13 hours, 1 car with a made-for-Nascar driver, and three buses (one of which never took us anywhere, we just stood on it for an hour) we made it home. All together, a pretty great trip.