Tim gave me some pretty good advice about our time here and what I’m writing. He thinks it might actually be a better idea if I do write more specifically what and where we go through Dogon. He’s got a point too. Even if it doesn’t mean much to other people it’d be good for us to know, so that we can remember. I’m even going to try to put together a bit of a map but we’ll see how that turns out. He’s the highlights so far though:
Starting from Sanga we walked down the escarpment through 3 or 4 villages that were way overcrowded with tourists. We stopped briefly at Goldfish’s house in Bongo. The small village right after Sanga still atop the cliff. We met his wife and brother there as Goldfish picked up a few last minute things. We wandered through a very cool cave in Bongo that Goldfish says in totally unique. There were a large group of kids playing and singing in the cave, but they were just oing it for the tourists. Goldfish is a little sad that the Dogon are slowly losing their culture to the western world. The clothes, Coca-cola and mineral water, cigarettes... the western world has brought a lot of things that are really hard to ignore. On the way down the cliff we passed Gogoli and then Banani which was at the base of the escarpment. Goldfish said that Banani mean Ba=father, na=mother, and ni=singing. From there we crossed the small river and through a new small town that had the school and is expanding to meet the ever growing number of tourists.
From there we walked across the flat lowland and around the opposite escarpment and finally came to Neni. At Neni we chilled out a bit and got some more of the low-down on Dogon culture. We even saw the Hogon’s house. Then we bgan the long, fairly tiresome ascent up the escarpment.
I think I haven’t really explained how amazing the landscape here really is. Before when described the flat layered rocks I saw that it was really more coming into the area from Sanga. As we travelled throughout the first day though I was constantly astounded by the variety of rock formations and the swiftly changing lands around me. It seems as if every half hour or so we were into a totally new environment: sparsely rocked hillside, high cliffs, grain strewn flatlands, or sheer grey wild carved rockfaces. A really beautiful place that has a lot of life and energy surrounding it.
After an hour or so of hiking up the escarpment we reached Kundu-da a very nice small village at the top. There we stopped and ate lunch. It was a pretty decent meal of rice with sauce and some chicken. There was a large group of older French tourists there but they didn’t seem so friendly so we didn’t talk to them and instead lay down for a midday siesta. After a few hours we headed down the other side of the escarpment to the village we’d be staying at Kundu-gina.
Apparently Kunda-gina has a number of Catholics in it and although they don’t have a church, they were having a small ceremony with singing and dancing for Christmas. We passed at staying at the largest encampment as the French tour group was staying there. We opted to stay at the smaller 3rd encampment in town.
They gave us mattresses and a thin blanket for sleeping on the roof. But we really need to pick up some thick blankets for ourselves as soon as possible. Hopefully we can get this thick mud-cloth ones because it got verycold last night. Once we settled into the encampment Tim, Joe, and I wandered around the town a bit although it was a very small village and didn’t have too much to see.Then we headed back for a dinner of Macaroni with sauce and Goat meat. Pretty soon we hit the sack, or the roof as it were, once the sun went down. Luckily for us the moon set pretty early and the stars were absolutely amazing. Joe has a constellation field guide back in Gambia and he knew a bunch of constellations that he tried to point out to Tim and I with varying degrees of success. I think we’d all agree that it was a pretty amazing Christmas Day. |Even if we couldn’t be with our families, at least we got to spend some time in probably one of the most beautiful places on earth. It’s good to be here.
Todasy I woke up at 5:30am simply freezing. It’s not the coldest night I’ve ever experienced but it sure was close. My shoulders ache and my thighs are all burny-tingly, I’m definitely not in very good shape for this. My senses tell me that today is probably going to kick my ass.
We got packed up and ready to go pretty early. After a quick breakfast of coffee and Panquettes (fried dough balls) we walked out of Kunda-gina and headed for an hour or so across some farmed lowland to another small encampment. Passing the villages of Youga and Youga-na we hiked up a pretty damn steep cliff that almost did me in once or twice. Almost to the top we passed through Younga-dogoru and the path began following a fissure between two extremely high sheer cliffs. The people there had dammed a natural spring into a small waterway and our climb became more precarious as we had to start using homemade ladders to ascend some of the steeper rock faces.
We reached the top find a totally amazing landscape. A bare grey rock face, rippled by the wind over the years, covered the entire top of the mountain. As we walked across the summit plateau it reminded me of the moon or the bottom of the ocean. Except that the view was totally awesome, and every few hundred feet we had to step over a crevice or a natural rock bridge crossing chasms descending into gloomy darkness. The winds pressed on us and we soon reached Youga-pedy, a village descending down the far side of the mountain.
We waited a bit to go down as once again the large French tour group impeded our swift passage but eventually we climbed to the bottom and ate our lunch of cous with onion. After lunch we walked across the flatland back to the base of the main escarpment at Yendouma, where we’ll be spending the night.
We’re now at the main encampment chilling out some. Today is the market day here and Tim and I both picked up very nice blankets with dyed indigo woven into the cloth. Tim also got himself a goatskin bag pretty similar to one that Joe got this morning in Youga-na except that Tim’s bag still has the testicle skin attached t6o the base as some sort of freakish decoration. Then again I suppose you really might need to store something that is just testicle size... then it’ll come in really handy.