The Bittar bus was a modern single deck bus which left right on time.  As before the loading of the luggage and the passengers was impeccable; it was orderly and well organised.  We reflected that the standard of public transport and roads had steadily improved since we left Gambia and the Atlantic coast and headed east into the interior. This was to be a recurrent theme. The road was well surfaced with white lines painted up the middle and at the sides.  The 250km journey was completed without a hitch and we arrived in Ségou in the mid morning. Being a small town it was relatively straightforward to walk from the Bittar bus depot to the Djoliba Hotel.  The hotel was a small pleasant and friendly establishment, owned by a German.  Our room, though small was very clean with a hot water shower, TV, telephone, and air conditioning.  We wanted to move on to Sévaré the next day and so we walked up to the Bittar depot to book tickets.  Unfortunately the first Bittar bus out left at 11:00.  So we walked to the main bus station.  There we found that a Somatra bus would leave at 09:00 so we booked tickets on that.  A rotund, friendly and perceptive official, the bus controller, fell into conversation with us and confirmed that our bus would leave at nine the next day.  He invited us to give him a wave when we arrived in the morning and he would see us straight. Our admiration for the Malian public transport system was growing daily.  It seemed we could do no wrong.

A gentle stroll back through the town took us past the commercial centre and down to the banks of the River Niger.  Here we took in the broad River Niger and chatted to youths who were watching the world go by.  They were used to European tourists and conversed easily in English.  Whist offering their services as local guides, for a small consideration, they were neither pushy nor rude.  Our vantage point on the river was near the L’Auberge, a  well appointed small French run hotel where we had an excellent lunch.  Whilst there, we chatted to a Dutch couple, Jan and Nel, who suggested that we share the cost of a pirogue to cross the river to see a village.  This seemed like a good idea so we quickly agreed and set off with their guide to Kalabougou, a village where the locals make the ceramic pots which the Ségou region is famous for.  The journey on the river was very pleasant. Lying back in the covered pirogue moving steadily up the River Niger, trailing a hand nonchalantly in the water, we saw a large snake swimming across. At a small green island of lush grass in the blue river there was a herd of white long horn cattle being made to swim from the island to the bank.  It was idyllic. In Kalabougou they form the clay pots during the week and then fire them all on one day.  As luck would have it this was the very day they built their fires of straw to fire the pots.  The village seen from our distant approach looked like Dante’s inferno.  Some women were tending huge oranges blazes raising plumes of dense white smoke, appearing black as it rose and contrasted with the blue sky. Other women were already pulling finished glazed pots from the blackened ashes of previous fires, with long wooden poles.  At the village we encountered banco for the first time.  Banco is a clay and straw mixture used to face mud brick houses and buildings to give them a smooth and relatively weather resistant external skin.  This gives the houses a more natural looking texture than the cement skimmed houses we knew in Gambia. As we entered the village we were introduced to the Alkalo, the village headman, whom we greeted with traditional Arabic;

 ‘Sallam Alekum’

 ‘Malekum Sallam,’ he replied obviously pleased that foreign tourists had the courtesy to acquire some local respectful greetings. 

This always paved the way for a more friendly chat.  He told us that whilst the women made the pots, tended the fields, cleaned the compound, fed the family, looked after the kids and generally and kept house; the men engaged in sporadic iron forging, a bit of fishing, looked after the animals and drank tea and conversed about matters of importance.  A few CFAs changed hands as a gesture of thanks for letting us visit, a tourist tax or whatever.  Smiling, the venerable Alkalo with white hair and beard, set off by a light blue robe and matching skull cap, with a sweep of his hand made the traditional sign of welcome and a general invitation to look around.   This was a popular stop on the tourist trail so we didn’t raise much interest as we wandered around the village chatting to people.  The women who were forming the pots walked round and round the pots smoothing them by hand rather than spinning the pots on a wheel.  Miraculously they looked perfectly formed.  With toothless grins they asked us for Kola nuts and chided us because we didn’t have any.  Seeing painfully thin adolescents carrying equally distressed siblings on their backs it was a sobering thought that life expectancy in Mali was only 46.5 years.  It was an extremely interesting, picturesque and above all a thoughtful experience.  On our return to Ségou going back down the river there was a wonderful sunset as the yellow orb of the sun slowly inched toward the horizon in an indigo sky silhouetting palm trees on a distant bank.  We dined well in our hotel after saying goodbye to our Dutch companions.

In the evening we noticed a lot of flying insects in the toilet and so sprayed the place with ‘Bop’, our insecticide of choice.  When we returned an hour later the floor and sink were covered with wee dead beasties.   

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The Grand Hotel in Bamako was a five star international hotel run by a French Company.  It was wonderful to arrive from Kayes all covered with dust and grime and have a hot soapy bath with soft fluffy towels and a good meal.  Staying in the Grand Hotel was like plunging back into Europe after months in Africa.  We wandered around the hotel smiling stupidly with delight at familiar European style restaurants; familiar looking bars, lounges and hotel shops. We started to explore Bamako next day taking a short walk through this modern, busy city of a million inhabitants.  There are about twelve million people in the country who speak Bambara, with French as the main foreign language. Clearly with twelve million people in an area five times bigger than the UK there is a lot of empty space, and that is mostly in the north where Mali extends up into the Sahara desert. Bamako was impressive with paved roads, pavements, streetlights, parks, museums, multi storey office blocks and big modern hotels.  Since Mali has gold, iron ore, manganese, and uranium it is perhaps not surprising that the capital is so well developed.  On the other hand we knew that Mali was poor with a Gross Domestic Product, GDP, per head of $900 and some sections of the population were suffering from malnutrition.  So we were not sure what to expect.  The images of poverty, starvation and suffering promoted and promulgated in the Western media tend to dominate the imagination and don’t really give a balanced picture of West Africa.  Here was a relatively well to do city with happy industrious people working hard to make a living.  Certainly there was poverty, malnutrition and lack of opportunity in many agricultural areas, but that was clearly not the whole story.  To write off Africa as an economic basket case on the brink of starvation was just plain wrong.  Africa has more natural resources than almost any other continent; and with only 800 million inhabitants, half the population of China, it must be in with a fighting chance of eventual economic success. 

Our exploration of Bamako continued with a walk from the Grand Hotel down the main street, Avenue Modibo Keita, to the fabled great River Niger.  Here was another of the major African rivers and the object of European speculation and endeavour during the exploration of the African interior 200 years ago. It was wonderful to stand looking at this great African river, blue reflecting the perfect African sky, about 500m wide, and flowing slowly eastward toward Timbuktu, pointing the direction of our travel. At one time, a little over two hundred years ago, so little was known of the geography of the interior that it was believed that the Niger and the Nile were connected, somewhere in the centre of Africa.   We stopped for a drink of coke at a modern and expensive hotel on the banks of the Niger.  From there we took a taxi to explore the large bus garage on the south bank of the river.  The six or seven different bus companies that operated from here were in active competition and employed touts to bring in the customers.  So two white faces turning up sparked a riot of interest, which we expected and understood.  That is why we arrived in the taxi and not on foot. There were reasonably good buses to all parts of the country and our taxi driver very helpfully, dodged the touts and recommended the Bittar bus company.  So we bought bus tickets for the first bus out to Ségou the next day.

The main national museum was recommended and it was well worth a visit.  The exhibition of Malian history and culture was very well laid out with the exhibits tastefully displayed in air conditioned halls.  Explanations in English as well as French would have improved it for us, bit it was never the less fascinating. At the time there was also an excellent photography exhibition by a South African photographer who specialised in character studies and street scenes from all over modern Africa.  We took a slow walk back from the museum to the hotel to complete an interesting day in Bamako.  The hotel restaurant that night served excellent dinner and we took coffee in the bar.  Later in the evening there was a concert of leading Mali musicians, around the pool, which we enjoyed from our room.

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On the basis that what can go wrong will go wrong we rose at 05:30 to get a taxi at 06:15 to take us to the bus departure point. We arrived in the darkness and settled down to sit on rickety benches with our rucksacks at our feet. Other passengers had arrived much earlier, or perhaps the night before, and were lying sleeping on the ground wrapped in their travelling blankets and robes. As the eastern horizon lightened hinting at the dawn a lady set up an open air coffee stall on a rough low table with benches on three sides. Several eggs were broken into a glass jar of dubious cleanliness and shaken vigorously before being tipped into a greasy black frying pan perched on cement blocks over a small open fire. She had fresh bread and soon the smell of freshly cooked eggs stirred the sleeping forms who rose like mist from the ground and congregated silently on the benches. Margaret joined them and returned with two omelette sandwiches.

Our luggage was marked with the number on our ticket and our destination and was loaded onto the top of the bus.  All of the luggage was then covered with a tarpaulin and lashed down. Our fellow passengers were an assortment of romantically dramatic looking men in robes and turbans which were wound over their faces leaving only their eyes visible.  There were also women in brightly coloured clothes carrying babies and young children. The passengers were loaded by ticket number, with the dispatcher calling out the names of each passenger in turn.  We were very impressed with this level of organisation, so different from The Gambia.  Our bus was a sturdy looking blue and white cabin, with windows and thirty padded seats, welded onto a high wheel base army lorry chassis.  The vertical exhaust pipe gave it a very business like all terrain appearance.  Our map of Mali was passed around the passengers with great interest. Studying our route, we were surprised to discover that we had set out on the apparently impassable northern route to Bamako through Sandaré, Diéma and Didiéni. According to the ‘Rough Guide’ this route was only an inadvisable rumour but not a practical possibility.  Clearly though or driver had other ideas or, more likely, the road had been greatly improved since the Guide had been written. The road was actually surprisingly good, level and paved for the first 350km.  As we bounced along through yet more light brown scrub and lonely goat herds sheltering under isolated baobab trees we chatted with our new set of friends.  Our dramatically attired companions shed their turbans to reveal rather disappointing looking ordinary blokes.  Ah well what did you expect, Lawrence of Arabia? We stopped at a service area comprising several rustic ramshackle shelters made from branches supporting a reed thatch or corrugated iron roof.  Sheep and goat meat was cooked on flattened beaten oil drums with a wood fire underneath.  These delicious morsels were served on second hand cement bags and exquisitely seasoned by Sahara rock salt.  They were really good and we became quite partial to lamb cooked and served this way. There was also meat and rice dishes on offer and the popularity of these was reflected by the row of busily munching diners on benches around the long tables under the rustic shelters.  The toilet area was round the back.  Men irrigated one patch of sand whilst the women irrigated another.

Having regained our seats with nods and smiles and greetings we were underway again and making good time. The next 100km was on rough dusty gravel roads, with potholes and no road surface.  The narrow seats and cramped conditions made this stretch of the road a bit tiring.  We shared three narrow seats with a thin Malian chap on the isle seat. Every so often the bouncing of the truck threw him off the seat and he had to shuffle his behind back on to the bench.  This he did with smiles and great good humour, but it couldn’t have been much fun for him. The last 150km was on a very good fast road from Didiéni right into the heart of Bamako.  It was a tiring twelve hour journey but there were no breakdowns and everything had gone well.  It was dark by the time we drove slowly into the centre of Bamako which was clearly a large modern bustling city with street lights and even traffic lights. Our travel companions pointed out places of interest, including the lights from the presidential palace, high on hill overlooking the city. At journeys end our fellow passengers were, as ever, friendly and helpful.  We easily found a taxi which took us to the Grand Hotel.

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