Celebrating a Quarter Century while Hiking Le Pays Dogon

No pictures this time around because I forgot my camera cord in my backpack. It's a shame, because as beautiful and interesting as the area around Banfora was, I think Dogon Country just blows it away. In fact, it probably eliminates the competition in all the rest of West Africa, but I can't make that claim until I visit the rest of West Africa. Dege dege as the Dogon say. That's moso moso to all you Zarma speakers or slowly slowly for everyone else.

To get to the Bandiagara Escarpment (where I hiked with Eli and Lauren for four days and nights), we had to start at 4:45 am to catch a bus from Ouagadougou to Ouahigouya. From there, we waited around a few hours for a bush taxi to Koro, and a few hours later, we grabbed another bush taxi for Bankass, our starting point for Dogon Country. Overall, it was a full day of traveling or waiting, but it was all worth it when we caught a view of the Bandiagara Escarpment while on the road to Bankass. Traveling through the Malian countryside, you're surrounded by plains, grasses, and trees of the Sahelian variety. In short, it looks exactly like Niger. Then, suddenly, your gaze moves to the west, and a 500m cliff face just seems to appear out of the middle of these vast, unbroken plains and stretch to the horizon. It's a 150km-long cliff that looks like someone just gashed the ground and pulled up solid rock.

The hiking is amazing. Let me say this now: I had giardia for the entire trip, and I still thought it was amazing. The trip. Not the giardia. I've had worse giardia, but anytime you think you're going to pass out while climbing onto the roof where you're sleeping in the pitch black...ya, not a great feeling. This echoes a friend who went to Dogon Country and realized he had malaria. Despite the horrible symptoms, they could not overpower the magic of Dogon Country. By the way, I don't mention it like I should, but we slept on the roof of the Dogon houses. An amazing view of every star in an ink-black sky, and mornings at sunrise? I don't think you can feel anything other than peace as you watch color slowly bleed into a brightening sky.

The Dogon are an amazing people. There's been a lot of research done on the Dogons in anthropological and archaeological sources, so I'll leave the heavy work to anyone really interested. The Dogon people came to the Escarpment around the 15th Century, where they met the Tellem people, who were already living there. The Tellem allowed them to settle but said the Dogon were not allowed to cut the trees or eat the fruit. The Tellem were a very small people, only about three or four feet, but they possessed powerful black magic which allowed them to fly. This explains the vaults, small houses in the rock which are completely inaccessible today but which the Tellem used to store their most prized possessions. An explanation more likely than flight (or very advanced climbing gear) is that this area was at one time much rainier, which allowed vines and other plants to climb the cliff face, allowing climbing access for some pretty scrappy people. Whatever the explanation is, it still takes a pretty brave little guy to climb up the 300m to where some of these vaults have been secured into the cliff face.

I'll skip ahead a little now. The Dogon eventually broke their word and began cutting the trees, so the Tellem left the Escarpment, never to return. The Dogon, holding tight to their animist beliefs in the face of repeated aggression from Islamic empires such as the Malian and Songhai, built their houses at the very base of the cliff, making them nigh-impregnable. Thus they maintained their distinct culture down to the present day. In the past fifty years or so, most of the Dogon have moved down to the plain, and many have taken up Islam or Catholicism. The only thing assaulting the Dogon these days are hordes of tourists, which has actually helped the Dogon in that they haven't suffered the loss of their younger generations to better opportunities in the big cities or elsewhere in Africa, America, or Europe. They no longer live at the base of the cliff, but all the old houses and granaries are still there, and their culture, strangly, has been somewhat preserved by the tourism industry. There's actually a reason for the Dogon to continue speaking their language, performing their ritual dances, and remembering their past, and that reason is because they've found a market among Westerners.

I could go on and on about the people we met, some of the breathtaking scenery we saw, and the even more breathtaking cliffs of which we peered over the edge. However, all of it is just words, and pictures paint a thousand words or more, so I'll try to post some in the near-ish future. I'll also try to post more about this amazing place, but honestly, I'm having such a hard time keeping up with the places I'm going that it's going to be very difficult to go back and rehash the places I've been.

For example, right now, I'm in Mopti, the Venice of West Africa. It's spread out over three islands at the confluence of the Niger and Bani rivers and is probably the biggest river port on the Niger. Everyone and everything on the river seems to move through Mopti, and as a result it's very hectic and colorful. However, hectic is not what I wanted for my birthday yesterday, so Eli, Lauren, and I chose a nice bar down by the water at sunset to while away the time and watch other people be hectic. After, we met up with our Dogon guide, Moumouni, for another beer, and I began to hatch some plans about possibly trying to get to the Festival in the Desert in a couple weeks. We'll see how that goes. Overall, it wasn't much activity by way of birthdays, but zipping through the streets at the end of the night on the back of a motorcycle, I could only think of how happy I was. I'd hiked out of Dogon Country in the morning, made it to Mopti by the early afternoon, and was drinking beers by the river in the Venice of West Africa by sunset. All with two great friends alongside me. Of course there are more people I wish could have been there, and they know who they are, but I couldn't ask for a better end to a great day.