Friday, November 24, 2006

Trip to the PoPo

Me and Reaiah and one of the new chicas to Mali were heading to the office to get some business taken care of. We were just pulling down our road when all of the sudden I turned my head in time to see a moto (motorcycle) speeding toward the back of my truck. He jerked sideways to avoid hitting me and almost took out a pedestrian before falling over and almost sliding up under the back of my truck. Of course he got up, quite upset, and a little scratched from the fall, and shaking his finger at me. We just apologized and continued to sit there in the edge of the road because a small crowd of Malians was quickly gathering as the man was hollering at us. Being a few meters from our office, soon all of our Malian workers were out there defending us and trying to calm the mess down, but it didn’t do much good. All of the witnesses defending us, we couldn’t get the man to back down, so finally we agreed to call the police.
Once the police got there they started measuring something (never really figured out what that was about) and loaded his bike into the back of their truck. They almost confiscated another man’s bike who had accidentally almost run through their measuring tape (stretched across the main street) while they were ‘investigating’.
So then it was our first trip to the police station, still unsure if they might lock me up for no good reason (actually just for being the foreigner, and the one with the car=$). We waited, talked to the officer, waited some more. Seems they all knew it wasn’t my fault, but none of them wanted to do anything to the poor man who was actually bleeding a little next to me and who, turns out, is the neighborhood Imam (equivalent to our pastor). Finally he gave up and wanted to go home, so they gave us our papers back and let us go. Completely shot our morning and all the stuff we had meant to get done, but I guess I should be glad I didn’t get locked up. I think that would’ve just been too much for our supervisor to handle that day. Mark off another first for me…

Paradise in the Bush

We had been on the road for two days and already gotten in some seriously wonderful hiking and iPod jukeboxing in the car when we crashed for the night at a hotel a day’s drive from the infamous Timbuctu. That night our supervisor got a call from the office saying that a warning had been issued for Timbuctu and foreigners were advised to steer clear of the area for awhile. Apparently some Algerian rebels had descended on it and our visit would be like asking to get car-jacked…
So, sadly, we decided that other plans had to be made. Our resourceful supervisor, however, managed to get us a boat trip on the Niger river for the day and it was amazing. We just chilled out, enjoyed the water (from a distance of course, cause actually getting IN would load us up with amoebas), played some football at one of the land stops, and watched the sun set on the water as we dangled off the edge of the boat, singing to the Creator of the incredible scenery.
The next day we decided to head back to the capital and take it easy till time to start the training. On the way in, though, we saw a sign advertising a hotel with a basketball court, a swimming pool with a slide, and AC called “the Paradise of Mali.” Too curious to let the chance for basketball slip by us, we veered off-road and bounced down a bush-road following occasional miniature signs with the initials of the hotel on it and an arrow pointing towards the almost non-existent path. We continued our search for about an hour into the bush when suddenly the “road” came to a dead end into a compound (gathering of a few huts belonging to one family) which was surrounded by the river. After asking about our hotel and learning it DID lay just on the other side of the river, we loaded all up into a large canoe they had and glided to the other side, very carefully…
A little apprehensive of what kind of “paradise” there could possibly be this far into the bush, and secluded by the river, we stepped out of our canoe only to find a beautifully clean, sparkling blue swimming pool--- complete with slide!!! Individual rooms with AC. Basketball and badmitton courts. A small zoo. A honey shop. And a restaurant with some amAZing food. It was like little kids at Christmas, and we only had till morning to enjoy our private paradise!!! We had thought we should get up early to get back to the capital, but after only a few hours of swimming and playing we had already decided to push back our departure till later in the morning. By the time midmorning rolled around, waiting till after lunch seemed like a much better idea, and so we continued to play. Each time we changed our minds to stay a little longer, we had to relay the message to our boatmen, who had to come get us in order to take us back to the car still waiting on the other side of the river. We started calling Paradise “Hotel California” because we just couldn’t seem to leave (and it seemed like the greatest kept secret in Mali to be functioning so far into the bush that we felt surely no one’s heard of it because no one’s ever made back to the other side of the river…). But we eventually DID leave and drove back to Bamako, all of us jokingly thanking God for the Algerian rebels…