Dogon Country-Part 2

Monday Jan 3, 2011 (continued): after our trip to the village, we headed back to have lunch and meet up with a family who would be joining us for the rest of our day. we had a typical lunch-rice with tomato sauce.

after lunch, we met up with a couple and their 3 little girls (i think they were 5, 8 and 10). sidenote: i thought that it would be a real pain having kids on this trip but these kids were AMAZING! they hiked around, climbed, walked, sat and never complained. i think their parents should write a book on how to teach kids to be well behaved. back to the day-we drove to our next stop in dogon. the drive was through a canyon-type area and it was gorgeous.



after about 30 minutes, we came to another village. this one had houses actually built into the cliffs. they were so tiny, it's hard to believe that people would actually ever live there, but we'll go with it.
this is a view from the bottom of the cliff. we climbed up and checked out the houses a little closer.

carvings on the walls

we headed back down the cliff and drove further to a campsite for the night. it was an open, walled in area with a choice of rooftop sleeping or a small, doorless room. we chose the rooftop so we could look at the stars. in hindsight, this was a terrible decision. the stars were great for the 5 minutes i looked at them, but the donkeys having sex all night was not a great way to sleep. i have never heard such loud noises. tim had warned us about the donkeys, but i really thought it wouldn't be a big deal. it was horrible. i can still hear it in my head. needless to say, none of us slept too well due to the noises.

our 'beds'

the camp area

when we woke up, it was time for breakfast. most of the time, you get bread and jam for breakfast. this morning, we got peanut butter!!!!! i was in heaven, as i LOVE peanut butter! the peanuts in mali were really good. they were small (guess they don't put chemicals on their peanuts to make them huge) but they had a great flavor. anyway, i had like 3 pieces of bread with peanut butter. oink.

after breakfast, we drove further into the village and started a hike up the cliffs. our guide told us to just bring a bottle of water and acted like it would be an easy hike. we hiked for about 4 1/2 hours up and back.

halfway up the cliffs!

these were my most favorite trees. they were all over this area and i just thought they looked really cool.

here we are-middle of nowhere together.

village kids watching us

some friends i made

if you're bothered by naked kids, skip this picture! this kid started following us and we were trying to get a good picture of this turtle because the village gave the turtle all of their food to taste and make sure it was ok to eat! too funny. you can tell by this sweet child that most of the villagers we met were pretty malnourished by his skinny legs and distended belly. many of the kids also had a reddish tinge to their hair, which i was told is also a sign of malnourishment. not to bring anyone down, but just wanted everyone to know that that's what we were seeing for 2 days.

just climbing rocks!

tim up top and lp to the right. it was the highest spot around!!

we then hiked back down. it was so sunny and warm and of course i hadn't brought more sunscreen because we didn't know we would be gone for so long, so i got a little burned on the hike down. by the time we got to where we would eat lunch (rice and tomato sauce) we were all so thirsty that we gulped down a liter of water in like a minute! we took a short rest after lunch and headed to where they were having a celebration. i don't know why they were doing it, but there was some dancing people so we stayed to have a look.



tim, lp and i had to leave early because we were trying to make it to sevare before it got too dark. we drove back and stayed at the hotel we had been a few days. lp and i had to get up early (6:30) the next day to drive to timbuctu, so we said goodbye to tim and went to bed early.