Quick Tips:

Best Way To Get Around:

"I’d like prices of flights to Bamako around the end of December please."
"Sorry, where was that again?"
"Bamako,"
"OK"

There was a pause while he shuffled through a folder full of charts.

"Where is Bamako exactly?"
"It’s the capital of Mali."

Slightly more frantic shuffling through the folder.

"Do you mean Bali?"
"No, I mean Mali, central west Africa. South of Mauritania."
"Right."

Some serious reshuffling.

"You wouldn’t happen to know the airport code would you?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact I do – its BMK."

A lengthy stare at the chart on the first page of the folder.

"Can I take your number and get back to you?"
"Sure, no problem. If I’m not in just leave a message."

About a week later there was a message asking me to phone my man at Thomas Cooks. So I did.

"HOW MUCH? You’ve got to be joking me! That’s more than my car cost!"
"No madam, the price quoted is the standard economy class return fare from Edinburgh to Bamako via London and Nairobi."
"NAIROBI? WHY THE HELL HAVE I GOT TO GO TO EAST AFRICA TO GET TO WEST AFRICA? Have you got an atlas handy?"
"That was the cheapest route we could find madam. Er, so will you be wanting us to book flights for you? We can make reservations over the phone if you like."
"Nah, you’re alright thanks. I think I’ll have to walk."

*I know that is a cliché question but he did ask it. I also know it was really wicked of me to go into Thomas Cooks when I knew there wasn’t a chance they’d come up with a fare that wouldn’t have seriously damaged my trip fund.

I had by this time trawled the flight sites on the net and had a few reasonable but not perfect options. The cheapest had a 14 hour stop-over in Paris; enough time to write a short novel perhaps? I toyed with taking the train to Paris and picking up a cheaper flight there. I juggled with the logistics of train vs. coach vs. car vs. air to London from Scotland in the week between Christmas and New Year. I’d only asked for 4 weeks leave, which meant I only had 3½ days of available travel time before and after the trip round Mali so I didn’t have time to travel any further than Paris by coach or train in order to pick up a cheaper flight. So it was decisions, decisions. I’d more or less decided that I’d just have to take the creative writing opportunities of Paris airport when I thought I’d have a skank at some of the real airline websites rather than cheap ones. British Airways were rubbish, Air France was nothing to shout about but I hit the jackpot with Royal Air Maroc who were doing some sort of promotion and I managed to get flights from London for the same price as the Paris one but without the humongous wait. Quite a few people on the trip were on the same flight as me to Bamako and those that had booked through an agent had paid quite a lot more than those who had gone direct to the airline website. I booked on-line and the tickets arrived 3 days later; so try www.royalairmaroc.com.

While I was swithering about going to Mali in the first place, somebody suggested a cheap airline called Point-Afrique based in Paris. That somebody then went on to tell me about what a hassle they’d had with that particular airline. Unreliable flight times, difficulties with communicating with the company either by phone or e-mail, lost baggage and big delays. Frankly that description wasn’t a million miles removed from a previous experience of mine with KLM returning from India last year but I didn’t have the time to muck about with all that so I didn’t even bother to investigate. However, a couple of people on my trip did choose Point-Afrique and they did have a hassle with missing baggage and lack of subsequent information and being unable to reconfirm return flights. They are though, very cheap compared to all the other airlines so if you’re up for the adventure AND you’ve got a lot of time to travel then try www.point-afrique.com.

For reasons totally beyond my control, I couldn’t return to the UK by plane as intended, but overland instead. What a trip it was – up through Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Spain and France. However, the worst road conditions were definitely in Mali. Heading north to the Nioro border crossing is fine until you get to Diéma. After that there’s about 100km of nothing much to drive on. There is a road being constructed from Diéme to Nioro and you do follow this for a good way but the going is particularly tough as the tracks through the scrub have been heavily rutted and pitted by the road building vehicles. It took us 4 hours in our truck. If you stop at Diéme you will be told that you need a guide to get you to Nioro. Load of rubbish – YOU DO NOT NEED A GUIDE OK. Same goes the other way too, Nioro is full of guys telling people just arrived from Mauritania that they need a guide to get to Diéme. Although I guess folk have got to make a living somehow out there.

Just before turning off the main route to go into Diéme there is a large truck stop with loads of grubby looking cafés on the left hand side. If you stop there, look for the café/shop run by a guy called Si Si (or possibly Ci Ci) and his sister. The food is a bit iffy looking but OK and they do a wonderful milky coffee and Si Si speaks good English. We were wanting to camp up there for the night and Si Si was brilliant. He directed us to some land behind the shops and cafés and close to a toilet and shower block. We were provided with big buckets of water for washing and generally looked after for the night. It was interesting to note that after dark the toilets are not only full of mosquitoes but frogs as well.

Public transport runs to Diéme from Bamako. After that it’s possible to get a bush taxi over to Mauritania from here or cadge a lift. There were quite a few foreign 4x4’s passing through heading north and I did meet someone who managed to get all the way to Nouakchott this way. So, if you’ve got the time, energy and inclination then this is the way to go – or come back!

Right, it’s not my style to be delicate when it comes to bodily functions so I’ll get straight to it. Cystitis! Even if you’ve never suffered from it before, it’s a damn good idea to take something in your med kit to deal with it just in case. Particularly if your trip around Mali is going to involve travelling for long periods of time without regular "pee stops." For a long time health workers in less developed countries were aware of the high incidence of cases of cystitis. However, this problem pales into insignificance when up against killers like malaria, dysentery and AIDS and medical supplies and provision need to be prioritised. Recent information collated during health education programmes however, has revealed that the high incidence of cystitis is due primarily to social and cultural restraints on women rather than any physiological condition. In other words – WOMEN DON’T PEE WHEN THEY SHOULD.

In some countries, custom and tradition dictate that women must wait until after the men of the household have left for the day before attending to their own needs. Modesty is another factor – while most blokes don’t have a problem and will pee pretty much anywhere, this is not an option for women when there is no privacy. The lack of private domestic toilets necessitates using waste ground so women will wait until there are as few people around as possible before going. On long distance transport, toilet stops are few and far between and often of little help to women. Consequently they are forced to hold it in, so to speak, which puts a tremendous pressure on the bladder. It does not take long for this habit to result in a bad bout of cystitis. Now, all the female travellers I met in Mali were the type who would have had few qualms about stampeding over anyone, regardless of gender, in order to get to the toilet first in the morning. So not a problem there then. Instead it’s the long overland public transport journeys and lack of privacy that are the contributory factors for female visitors to Mali. It seems to be very common judging from my own and the experiences of other women I spoke to and when it strikes, it strikes fast. When you’re sorting out your med kit for travelling then either get a prescription drug from a doctor or buy some cranberry tablets from a health food store. If you don’t have either of these then bi-carbonate of soda should either cure the problem if caught early enough, or at least relieve the symptoms until you can get to a doctor. You can buy packets of bi-carb in pharmacies and you just chuck about 5 teaspoons of it into your water bottle. It’s not too unpleasant and it works.

And while we’re on the subject of bi-carbonate of soda then it’s also good for insect bites. Just mix some up with water to make a paste and dap it on your bites to relieve the itching. Don’t forget to either wash it off or wear long trousers if you’re going out in public. Your companions might be used to seeing dribbles of white fluid down your legs but it can raise a few eyebrows when in the company of strangers.

Which leads nicely to the topic of inappropriate behaviour. Although thin on the ground, advice given in guide books about what to wear in Mali suggests that modest is de rigeur and keep the skimpy stuff for by the hotel pool. But when you get to Bamako, not only do you find female travellers but also local girls wearing strappy little t-shirts with exposed shoulders. Be aware of two things here. Firstly there are differences between rural and urban attitudes towards the issue of female dress and secondly, even if a Malian is offended by your dress they’re unlikely to show it. An elderly Malian gentleman I was speaking with one day explained that Malians would think it was rude to appear offended and that it is their tradition to show guests hospitality and not rudeness. I thinks its probably fair to say that many of us who’ve been offended before, would have had a hard time if then required to offer hospitality to the offender when you’d rather have given them a slap. Must take a lot of self-control. So, there’s a strong possibility that when you’re out there wandering round in your skimpy top, a lot of the folk you meet who’re being nice to you are only doing so out of duty and not because they want to. And no, for the record, I don’t have a problem with skimpy tops – I have a problem with skimpy brains!

And skimpy underwear as well it turns out. I didn’t realise how much you could actually spend on underwear. It’s staggering. How on earth can an item of clothing as small as a bra cost so much? On this trip to Mali I met someone to whom spending more in a month on underwear than I spent on the cost of my trip was commonplace. It was actually quite an education listening to the discussion about the merits of custom-built support and I can see the arguments for it – I still can’t get my head round the price though. Anyway, regardless of how much you pay for your underwear you might want to consider the following; the most predominant colour of the dust in Mali is a sort of reddy-brown and this is the colour your pastel shaded underwear will absorb over the days. It does not come out when you wash it – the colour and dirt just get redistributed. Whether it’s £3 in Tesco or £150 in Bond Street, it might be a good idea to make sure you buy your bras in a colour called something like "Muddy Moods" if you’re taking them to Mali. Trust me, it could save you hours with a scrubbing brush and a bucket of cold water.

So that’s it. Just a few things I found out when I was in Mali that I thought would’ve been useful to know before I got there. Oh, and just one more thing – wet wipes! They really are most useful on trips and not just for the obvious. Put an un-perfumed one over your nose and mouth before you wrap your scarf round your face when driving through dust. It acts as a filter as well as giving a bit of moisture to the air you’re breathing. You can tell the guys about this one if you like!

Take a walk around the shopping area of any town in Mali and look at the paintings on the walls to the side and above the doors of many shops and workshops. Regardless of whether I could speak any French or not, I would have no trouble figuring out which shops sold spark plugs, bread, ceramic floor tiles, tinned sardines or plastic kitchen utensils. Neither does it matter that the paintings are often out of proportion, two-dimensional and idiosyncratic; they do the job. Tombouctou was particularly fruitful when it came to signs. One of my favourites was a driving school advertisement depicting a set of traffic lights, a stop sign, a pink saloon car of indeterminate make and a somewhat incomprehensible right of way type sign. It’s interesting that in Tombouctou there are few if any stop signs and no traffic lights at all, yet these images are used to signify learning to drive. A barber’s sign in Tombouctou also had me momentarily puzzled. Two nearly life-size men’s heads had been drawn onto a piece of ripped sheeting which was tied onto gate railings. The head on the left hand-side had a smart hair cut and trimmed beard while the one on the right hand side was a bit of a scruffy looking tyke. I wondered why the guy on the right looked more like the "before" than the "after" picture. Then it dawned on me – the barber must have been a Muslim. So the "before" picture was actually the "after" picture because the advertisement had to be viewed from right to left. OK, so maybe I was a bit slow – I know that picture books and comics, when in Arabic, are read from back to front and right to left. I’d just never thought about applying it to "before" and "after" adverts. You do really need to be in a country where there’s a staggeringly low literacy rate and a tradition of Muslim culture. It also helps if advertising as we know it, just hasn’t really happened yet. I can’t think of many countries I’ve visited that have that specific combination of factors so I suppose that’s why I was puzzled.

The Government and NGO sponsored public information signs appear at regular intervals along the side of the main roads in Mali as well as in the villages and towns themselves. By far the vast majority are concerned with public health issues, in particular the prevention of diseases such as malaria, dysentery and AIDS. So you get depictions of mosquitoes, mosquito nets, hand-washing, soap and this black bacteria-shaped splodge with an evil face that represents the AIDS virus. The messages are clear enough without the use of script. One of the most disturbing public information signs was a World Vision sponsored sign condemning the practice of female circumcision. It shows a young girl cowering as an older woman looms over her – instead of a tongue, the older woman has a scalpel pointed at the girl from her mouth. It is estimated that about 90% of girls in Mali are circumcised and moves are being made by the Government to stop the practice. It is now an offence for hospitals and medical practitioners to perform circumcision and a few villages have actually banned it. It will be a long haul for the Government because the practice has been going on for hundreds of years and has become part of the women’s cultural tradition. Indeed, it is the older women themselves who perpetuate the custom and that is why it is an older woman shown on the sign. It is hoped that through a countrywide education and public awareness programme women will, in time, reject this unnecessary and very dangerous practise.

There was one public information sign I saw that I loved, although you did need to be able to read a bit of French to get the most enjoyment from it. It was for charcoal stoves and the artist had painstakingly painted three different models of stove and the logo of the Strategie Energie Domestique (SED) in the top corner. The SED is a government initiative that aims to discourage the use of wood as a fuel and promote alternative energy sources such as imported charcoal or increasingly, bottled gas. It was the slogan painted along the bottom that got me – MA FEMME EN A ET LA VOTRE? – which means "My wife’s got one, has yours?" It was like going back in time and watching those old early 60’s TV ads for cookers. Your cooker is not only your status symbol girls, it’s the key to a happy marriage!

So, the moral of this tale is; read the signs. It may well be that as literacy rates improve and language and script become standardised, this "information art" could one day be a dying tradition. For the time being though, it is a contemporary and functional style of art that is worth looking out for.