Mopti Mali to Upper Volta (Now called Burkina Faso)

We Broke our camp at first light and hit the trail. My friend driving was in a hurry for some reason. I always get suspicious when I meet people that act like this man. He could be fleeing from the police or military, fleeing from drug dealers or smugglers, could be any of the above or could just be insane. I needed the ride so I just accepted his eccentricities. We traveled all day. I dumped the fuel into the tank from his cans as needed and he did all the driving. He was a crazy driver. Seems to be the most common type of driver I encounter. The little box he wanted me to be careful with was costing me bruises as I bounced around from his wild driving. He kept telling me how valuable the contents of the little box were and how fragile it was but he didn't seem it was important enough to slow down and drive a bit smoother. We came to paved road finally and then entered Bamako.

My driver knew where he was going and headed straight there. We stopped for some beer and food but nothing else. He arrived at a compound and we were allowed to enter the gate by an armed guard. He asked me to wait in the vehicle and I did. He went off for a few minutes with some men that met us as he parked. A few minutes later there was another package in the back of the vehicle and we were off again. We were almost overloaded by this point. He never mentioned what he picked up and I thought it was better not to know. He was looking and acting more and more suspicious by the minute. He was a red headed stocky man with a full beard and wore a dirty safari outfit and a goofy hat. He sweated profusely. We had fun together but he was on the silent gruff side of normal. If he had smoked a pipe he would have been a total stereotyped professor out of a Walt Disney movie.

We drove for a couple of days sleeping by the vehicle at night and driving all day. We stopped at a few places that sold coffee and tea with food. We always filled all of our jerry cans with fuel every opportunity we came across. When we found one with beer we stocked up on that too. We drank beer all day and all night. This would be my water of life for at least the next year. The water was not safe to drink without treatment but the beer was tasty and cheap as well as safe to drink. Even though we drank copious amounts of it we never seemed to get drunk unless we added booze to the mix. Every night we did just that after we set up camp.

At one point he suddenly veered off the trail and drove overland in a giant semicircle and then rejoined the trail again. I finally couldn't take it and had to ask him why he did that. He told me that he had just driven around the border crossing. I was surprised and asked him about our passport stamps we would need if any police stopped us and also to get out of the country again. He told me not to worry about it he would take care of everything if we got stopped and that I should say not say anything to anybody. I quickly shut up and rode along.

We drove into Ouagadougou in the late afternoon. We parked and were immediately mobbed by people dancing, singing and shouting. I thought we saw a big celebration before. This time there were hundreds of people. Bonfires again lit up the sky and drums again pounded a beat into the night and hundreds of people chanted, sang and danced all around us. We sat in our chairs and my friend mocked the people relentlessly as they went about their party. I had to laugh at a lot of his crude humor but he was extremely racist and evil with his comments. If I didn't need the ride I may have confronted him about it. I didn't confront him, instead I just laughed along with him. We watched until we got tired and drunk from the beer and booze then again we had to drive out of town in order to get some sleep. This evening was a real memorable African experience for me. I thought about it a lot over the rest of my life. This type of spontaneous party happened often as I continued through Africa and every time it did I remembered this night as the most spectacular of all.

We drove on passing very interesting houses on stilts with pointed thatched roofs that were scattered among all the termite mounds sticking up out of the ground. Most of them were round but they came in all shapes and sizes. There were some small family farms here and there as the countryside got less arid. The families would stop and watch us as we flew by them. When he did another large off road semicircle I did not ask him about it. I was sure now that he was smuggling his artifacts out of the country without any permits and was he afraid to go through customs and immigration in case he could not bribe his way through. I just hoped I didn't end up in prison with him.

I assumed the we were in Ghana now since we had gone around two borders already. The scenery was getting somewhat greener and greener as we drove South. There were even a few trees now. We drove through a game park in Northern Ghana that was full of grasslands and we saw a couple of animals at a distance. I never saw them close enough to identify them and my driver did not want to stop or even slow down. He told me he had a ship sailing that he had to get his items on and he was behind schedule. We pushed South harder than I wanted to travel. I liked the slow paced city by city approach. As soon as I came to a good place that I wanted to see more of I planned on jumping this ship.

Timbuktu and Baboons

I woke up from my rest and went out to explore Timbuktu and find some food. It was early evening now. There were a lot of people out on the streets now. They were not very friendly with me. They were polite but there was clearly a problem with my looks or something that I was not aware of that they did not approve of. This was Muslim territory and I was clearly not conforming in some way to their expectations. Nobody ever explained to me what the problem was and I did not feel comfortable. I ate some great fresh bread and drank some tea. Then I ate some stew that tasted like goat or mutton or maybe more camel I could not tell. It was tasty and filling. I wandered around the streets but was not enthralled with the place. I enjoyed the exotic look of the town but the vibe was not good. I went back to my cramped little hotel and slept then packed up to leave in the morning.

I took a ride going south in the direction of Bamako but not all the way there. I should have waited for a through ride. The little village I was dropped at was out in the middle of the Sahara desert and consisted of a few buildings and a small store with a cafe. I spent the night in my tent. The next morning I bought some extra beer and some water before hitting the hard to see trail heading out of town in the direction of Bamako. I started walking which was probably not a wise thing to do but I did it. I just started hiking along the trail. I walked all day except for the early afternoon when it was blistering hot. I made myself some hot tea and waited for it to cool at least a bit.

It cooled ever so slightly and I started walking again. I saw something over in the distance. There was a tall termite mound and somebody was sitting on top of the mound. It was about five hundred yard away. I squinted to see who it was and then I saw them stand up on the mound and look right at me. That was when I realized it was not a human. I wasn't sure yet what it was but whatever it was, it was running right at me at fullspeed. I watched it intently as it came closer. Then I figured out what it was. It was a large full grown male baboon and he looked hungry with me on his lunch menu. I was suddenly pumped full of adrenaline. My mind started to race. I was out in the open with no trees to climb or anything to hide in on or behind. I had no gun. I did have a knife but it was small. I pulled it out and opened it. Then my time spent working with the monkeys at the University of Wisconsin came to my rescue. I pulled out the most dominant macho attitude I had in my bag of tricks and coolly kept walking down the trail with my back to the huge baboon with the gigantic canines chasing me to eat me. My balls needed to swell to the size of watermelons to be this macho. I walked and listened. He kept getting closer and closer and my heart was racing. I thought about where I should stick the knife when it came to that. Should I sacrifice my left arm to his huge mouth full of teeth while I stab him in the face or should I go for the kill in his heart or what. He was very close now but I kept waiting. Then when he was about fifty yards way, I turned around and looked at him and yawned my widest toothiest yawn I could and then I turned around and kept walking slowly with my back toward his charging jaws. When he was so close I couldn't take it any longer, I suddenly spun around and held my pack over my head and let out the loudest, most guttural scream I could muster from deep inside my primordial soul. To my relief and surprise the charging baboon slammed on the brakes and immediately spun around and took off running back in the direction he came from. I turned my back to him and walked on. I wanted to turn back and check to see what he was doing but to be truly dominant I had to show that I had absolutely no fear of him and his flashing canines by keeping my back turned to him. If I so much as glanced back it would have been a show of weakness that might have cost me my life. Even a single bite from a vicious animal like he was and I would likely die from blood loss and there was no help for a very long ways away.

He left me alone and I kept walking. I wanted to get a long way away from him before I set up my camp for the night. A couple of hours later I heard a vehicle coming. I got set to hitch hike and in about ten minutes a white Land Rover came bouncing down the road. There was a single white male driving it and nobody else in the vehicle. He stopped and looked at me like I was insane. I started to speak French to him but then I noticed that he was an American and we started to speak English.

He was a professor at an American University here to collect artifacts for his school. His Landrover was full of items packed into wooden boxes, wrapped in cloths or just in woven bags. He had a small item in his lap. He asked me to carry the small box and to be very careful with it. I took care of it as we headed down the hard to see trail. We made camp not too much later because it was going to get dark. Close to the equator like this the sun sets very rapidly and it goes from light to dark in just a few minutes with only the stars to illuminate the night until the moon rises.

We slept under the stars and I told him about my travels so far. He was peppering me with questions. Some of them were very personal but I answered them all. He pulled out some booze and we got hammered before we fell asleep. The next day we made it to Mopti. What a city that was, large, vibrant, friendly and loud. We found some food and a large group of people gathered and started to dance and play music around us. We just sat in our chairs next to our vehicle and watched it all going on around us. We finally decided that if we were going to get any sleep we were better off to drive out of town and sleep somewhere with no people. That is what we ended up doing.