Mali so far
The mammoth day of travel ended at 4am when, after being accosted at the airport by late night touts and again accosted when we refused the price of our first hotel, we found ourselves staying in a pretty decent, pretty cheap place.
The next day we met Mohammed. Mo is a pretty well known Malian guy with a highly successful tourism company. He also owned the auberge we stayed at. Anyway, most of our first day was spent haggling with Mo over trips to the Dogon region, trips to Timbuktu by boat, trips to the salt mines of Taoudenni and trips to about anywhere else you can think of. In the end we agreed on a price for a boat trip to Timbuktu because we were going that way anyway.

In the late arvo we looked for a bus to a place called Segou and spent two hours waiting for it to leave in the craziest African bus station: guys arguing, music blaring, people selling stuff, just general mayhem really – perfect for making low budget public transport even less bearable.
Five hours after departure we rolled into Segou at 1am. The trip should only take around two hours, but our bus was so overloaded and clapped-out we were lucky to arrive at all. By this stage we’d had two late nights with long uncomfortable journeys in between, so it was nice to finally get somewhere relaxed and just spend a couple of days wandering the streets, getting aquainted with black Africa.

Our next stop was Djenne, a world heritage listed village on account of it being the location of the world’s largest mud built structure, a mosque. But there’s not much else there, just loads of tourists and touts. And the locals seemed pretty unfriendly compared to Segou, probably because they’re sick of tourists waving wads of cash about and being generally arrogant.
Anyway, we hated Djenne, so today we met up with Mohammed, who’d just arrived in town, and managed to scrounge a lift in a comfortable, air conditioned four wheel drive to Mopti, the departure point for boats to Timbuktu.

Mopti is a pretty nothing place, but being with Mohammed meant we stayed at a cool hotel where we met two cool English guys, Ben and David, bound for Cameroon in a rally. For the last ten days the Chocks Away Team have been stranded in Mopti because their 1934 Austin 7 has completely carked it, so they’re waiting for a truck to ferry them the rest of the way.

This evening the guys in the hotel killed a goat in celebration of Mohammed’s return. It was a great night chatting with Dave and Ben, drank a bit too much though. Today I also started getting sick; think some food I ate last night at a local Djenne food stall might’ve been tainted with evilness.
Tomorrow we get up early for the boat to Timbuktu. Looking forward to spending three days meandering up the Niger River.