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.

Mali

I had my tent set up on a sandy area that seemed to be isolated and quiet. It was dark when I set up my camp and the moon was not out yet so I went by star light. I got a good night's sleep. The sun came up and I was just sitting there getting ready to get up and pee outside. I was staring out the door of my tent when all of a sudden there was a naked girl in front of my tent looking in at me sitting there naked. I was caught off guard by this. I quickly grabbed my shorts and put them on before going outside my tent to see what was going on with naked girls running around. I stood up as I came out of my tent and the girl had not moved yet. She was frozen in place staring at me. Then she turned and ran off over a sandy rise. I started to take my piss and as I was standing there peeing a mixed group of about fifteen or twenty youths came bounding over the rise and stood there staring at me. They were all naked and ranged in age from maybe six to fifteen years old about half boys and half girls. They had already caught me pissing and I just went ahead and finished. They were all staring at me in silence. I told them hello and they did not respond so I switched over to French and they all started to giggle and laugh then they started to run around jumping and dancing. They started to run off over the rise one by one and I followed as the last few disappeared. As I came over the low crest of the sand dune I saw a beautiful scene. There was a river curving across the center and about fifty women were washing clothes and bathing in the river. Most of them had infants on their backs and toddlers right by their sides. Almost the entire group was naked or near naked. They heard the kids squealing and they all looked up in my direction as I came over the crest. They all stopped moving and just stood there staring at me. I waved and said hi in French. They all acted like they didn't hear me or something. They still just stood there staring. I turned my attention to the kids. A few of them were creeping up closer to me. I went "Boo!" and when they acted scared I started to laugh and then they all laughed along with me. The first girl came up to about two feet in front of me. She was a very beautiful dark black skinned girl with an almost fully mature body. Her hair was almost shaved and she had on some jewelry on her wrist and neck but nothing else on. She was not shy. She clearly led the group of children and would soon be joining the adults. She spoke to me but it was in an unknown language for me. I just smiled and spoke in English and then some French but she spoke neither. So we just smiled at each other. The other kids started to gather closer to me and the adults started to walk in my direction too. I started to play games with the kids. I held my left big toe in my right hand and then I hopped through the circle that my arm and leg made then hopped back through the other way and pointed at the kids indicating it was their turn to try doing it. They all started to try to hop through the circle and they were all falling down. I did it a few more times to show them how easy it was but none of them could do it. We were all laughing together. The adults crowded around me just like the kids. A few of them even tried jumping through the loop but fell down as well. Then they were all laughing. Finally one little boy about six managed to do it and he kept repeating his feat over and over again. We all laughed with him. Then the adults walked back over and went back to work convinced that I wasn't a danger to them of their children.

I had to take a dump. These people around me would not have been phased at all if I had just squatted and took a dump right there with them all watching. That is how they did it. But I just wasn't comfortable doing that with a hundred people staring at me. I walked down and swam in the river and took my dump under water. I made sure I was down river from the adults. Then I went back to my tent and packed up my stuff. I came back over the hill and walked across the river and sat down. I just watched the whole scene. National Geographic magazine pictures kep rolling around in my mind. All those naked natives that I had perved at as a kid were standing right in front of me. I wanted to take a picture for the magazine of this scene. I enjoyed sitting there admiring the beauty of it all.

In a short while the women had finished their work washing clothes and bathing them selves and their kids. They bundled up the clothes which had already dried in the hot dry air and after filling some urns with water they started walking as a group back to the town. I followed them. Playing with the kids.

We were in the town after a short walk. The buildings were all built out of adobe plastered smooth and white washed. There were no trees or anything green other than a small well tended garden here and there. I walked into the heart of the town with about thirty to fifty people following me. I found a stall selling fruit and I bought a few mangos and bananas. I ate them as I walked on. Then I found a little cafe stall and bought some coffee and bread. It tasted good to me. I wandered around the town for a couple of hours. I was able to talk to a few of the people in my broken French. I asked them how to get to Timbuktu. They all directed me to the church in the middle of town. I found out why when I arrived at the church school. The missionaries all spoke English. They invited me in for lunch.

I ate my nice lunch and drank a few beers with the missionaries. We had an after lunch cocktail also. The missionaries told me a lot of the history of the area and what to be careful about as far as dangers. They also told me how to get to Timbuktu. We talked for a couple of hours and then they invited me to speak at the school in the morning. I was caught off guard by that invitation. I didn't know what they wanted me to talk about. My French was lousy. They told me they would use a translator for one class but that they had an English class that they wanted me to speak English with. I reluctantly agreed to do it. So they fed me and put me up in a nice clean room for a couple of nights. We drank a lot of beer and cocktails from their fully stocked bar.

My talks at the school were interesting for me. It worked out into a question and answer format. I fielded lots of tough questions from them. They asked me to explain the racial animosity in the United States which was all in the news with riots and huge demonstrations going on regularly and they were aware of it all. I tried to explain the problems as misunderstandings between two groups of people and that the color was not the issue but rather the distinguishing traits identifying and separating the groups but the color was not important. I pointed out other groups with similar problems that were different colors and then I pointed out that even in a group all the same color the same issues came up and I pointed out the city nearby that they didn't like the people in. They understood that. We also talked about music and western culture. I explained what a daily routine for a typical kid their age in the United States entailed. It went smoothly and I actually enjoyed the talking.

I ended up speaking in many schools just like this all over Africa. The questions were all very similar and I refined my answers to the difficult race questions which always popped up. The missionaries treated me well everywhere I went. they always had good food and good booze to share with me too. Sometimes they gave me directions to the next closest missionary school to go there also. It worked out well for me and I hope the students benefited also.

A few days later I was packed up and the missionary gave me a ride to what he referred to as the station. It was just and empty lot with a few cars in it. There were a few people around and the drivers of the vehicles were hawking their destinations. They left whenever they were full and not before. I told them I wanted to go to Timbuktu and they pointed me to a car. I went over and hung out until we had a full load and then we left. The car just headed out into the sea of sand. There was no road and no landmarks just rolling arid land with mostly sand and a few rocks. I have no idea how they knew were they were going. They drove fast and looked like they knew exactly where they were going despite the lack of roadmarks to my eyes anyway.

We rolled into Timbuktu in the late afternoon. The town was all closed up and looked to be vacant to me. There were no people anywhere in sight. I good out of my vehicle all sweaty and dusty with sand in every crack and crevice or orifice of my body. I was in serious need of a shower. I went looking for a place to stay. I walked around the town amazed at the cliff side buildings and all the other unusual architecture of the place. I am not sure it was worth the hassle to get here though. There certainly wasn't much excitement going on in town. I finally found a place to stay. It was a tiny little room with a narrow little cot in it but I rested in peace for a few hours.

Senegal at last

I had a major fear as I walked down the gangplank of the cruise ship and stepped into Africa. As a kid I was severely eaten alive by mosquitoes when I was camping in the Everglades. My whole face, neck and mouth swelled up so much that I could not breathe and my parents had to take me to the emergency room. I had been thinking about this all the way here and now the acid test was coming up for me.

I told my friend about my fears and he got very serious with me. He walked me off the pier and over to the sandy beach area. We stood there for a couple of hours while he told me his ideas about the mind and body connection and how I could overcome my mosquito phobia and allergy by just thinking the problem away. He was very convincing of the power to control your body with your mind and he gave me many examples of historical mind body experiences from the world at large and from his own experiences. He convinced me. I spent about an hour meditating on not reacting to mosquito bites. Previously any bite I got swelled way up, was very itchy and lasted for days if not longer making my life miserable. When I was ready we walked away from the beach until the wind died down enough for a mosquito to land on my arm. We sat and watched it bite me and fill up with blood then just as it got ready to fly away he told me to kill it. I killed it with a quick swat. Then we watched the bite area and he talked me through meditation to first acknowledge the sensory signals from the bite and then to reject them with my mind. I followed his instructions and to my surprise I was able to ignore the bite. I did get a small red dot from it but it did not swell up into a goose egg and it stopped itching almost right away. It worked! I had overcome mosquitoes at last. This gave me great comfort as I headed into thick mosquito country all over Africa. We put up our tent on the beach after we ate some food and we slept until dawn.

In the morning we headed into town for some food and to look around. We found lots of small coffee shops and coffee stands all over town. There was also the smell of freshly baked french bread permeating the air. We picked out a small shop with a cute young girl running it and had our coffee and bread with jam. It was very good. After breakfast we split up because my friend was heading off on some private mission that I didn't even want to hear about since he was just released from prison for drug dealing. I wanted no part of anything that might put me in a local prison.

I walked around town. There was a lot of poverty evident by the hand built shacks with flattened cans as roofing material. The people were all very nice and friendly but I attracted a lot of attention as I walked around town. Not many white tourists walked around the slums of Dakar I guess so I was a bit of an aberration walking casually around their neighborhoods. I always liked getting off the beaten track and this was definitely off the beaten track. The downtown area was very sprawling. It spread out seemingly forever as I walked around. For the next few days I just wandered around eating here and there when I got hungry and saw or smelled something good. I enjoyed myself.

Then I saw a travel agent window with posters of African animals and birds offering a river tour of Gambia. I was interested and a lazy riverboat tour sounded good to me so I went in to talk to the agent. He sold me the tickets and made all the arrangements for somebody to come by my hotel to pick me up in the morning.

I was picked up on time and taken to a boat in the harbor. We sailed out of the crowded harbor and went South. A short time later we went through customs again and then we were transferred to a different boat, a riverboat. I was shown my "room" which was a hammock in a corner and given a tour of the small boat. It made me think "African Queen" all the way. I was surprised that it wasn't named that. There were only about fifteen passengers total. Most of them were French or English. I was the only American. We chatted and got to know each other a bit as the boat headed up river. It anchored for the night just before the sun went down. It was pleasant talking to the other passengers. We drank a lot and then crashed for the night. The boat was moving again before the sun came up. For three days we went up and down the river and only saw a few birds. We stopped at a few villages along the way that sold junk for tourists and served us some of our meals. The tourist junk never interests me. The food was good though. It was mostly meat stews with starches on the side and lots of French bread. I gobbled it and enjoyed relaxing. It was disappointing not to see any animals like in the posters for this trip but I found out in the next year or so how Africans kill anything that moves and eat it or sell it. There was no sense of conservation at all until I got to Uganda a year later.

My tour came to an end and I was transported right back to my hotel in Dakar. My trip to Gambia was a nice introduction to Africa for me. Low key and relaxing but not much else.

I was wandering around Dakar a few nights later when I came across an area of town that was clearly the red light district so to speak. There were girls working the streets and men getting drunk and raising hell. Lots of tiny little hotels dotted the area and small bars were serving beer and spirits. I walked around watching and then stopped for a beer or two. Nobody paid much attention to me. I got up later and continued my walk. I saw one girl that caught me eye. She looked really good compared to a lot of these tired looking women. This girl had a hot young body and was dressed nicely and she was not acting so much like a street walker. She saw me looking at her and she marched right over to me. I continued walking as she tried to hustle me to take her to a hotel. I insisted I was not interested but she kept after me. She finally grabbed me and kissed me and tried to stroke my crotch. I copped a small feel at first but then I backed away and asked her to leave me alone. She kept following me and started to yell at me for abusing her. I finally lost her and went back to my hotel. A couple of hours later there was a knock on my hotel room door. I answered the door and there were about ten police officers outside my door and the same girl was standing behind them. She accused me of raping her. The police were very nice and polite to me. The told me they had to respond to her charges but wanted my side of the story. I told them she just confronted me on the street against my wishes and that if anybody was assaulted it was me not her. They kind of laughed at that. Then I said alright if she says I raped her she must have seen me naked and ask her what my tattoo looks like. they asked her and she looked caught off guard. She described a tattoo just because she felt she had to. Then I showed the police that I do not have any tattoos so it must have been some other guy. They agreed. However, they decided to fine me for kissing her which I had admitted I did when she kissed me. They charged me a couple of bucks for a fine and they left. The girl was furious. The police made sure she left but as soon as they were gone I left the hotel and moved to a different one because I did not want her coming back again now that she knew where I was. Not that the only white kid in town would be hard to find mind you. The police obviously found me quickly. I left town the next morning because the whole incident left a bad taste in my mouth.

I hitch hiked out of town and headed East. My plan was to go to Mali and see Timbuktu. There was almost no traffic and I found getting a ride was slow. So I started to walk down the road. The road was quickly just an overgrown trail. Once the City of Dakar came to an end there was not much out there. I just walked on. I saw more birds and lizards then I had seen on my Gambia riverboat trip as I walked along the road. At night I would put up my tent and read or just sit and look out at the sky full of stars. I finally caught a ride with an American woman driving along the road.

She was a Peace Corps worker. She took me to her place out in the middle of nowhere and told me that she was losing it mentally from being so lonely. She had made a request to the office to be relieved of her commitment so that she could go home. I did my best to cheer her up. We had a good time for a few days. It turned out she would be my last sexual contact for quite a few months. I saw lots of evidence of sexually transmitted diseases everywhere I looked so far in Africa. I did not want to catch anything so I ended up just abstaining for the most part. She asked me to leave because she was afraid that if she enjoyed her time with me she would be even worse when I left like she knew I would. I was up front about my goals. I did see one weird antelope while I was at her place. It would be the only one I saw for a long time. My vision of an Africa full of animals was quickly fading to black. I left on foot from her place after a nice full breakfast.

I walked for days. No vehicles at all came down the road in either direction. The countryside quickly turned from lush green tropical jungles to arid brown dry hot grasslands with almost no trees. Then it turned into mostly desert. I was worried about water but I kept going. Eventually I came to the border and went across to the Mali side and put up my tent to get a good night's sleep. I enjoyed walking like this and ended up walking for thousands of miles over the next couple of years. I read a book and fell sound asleep.