Transportation in Mali

The Road to Gao

Although our site in Mali, Gossi, has a population relative to 20,000 people, and is thus a city at large, it really is too primitive a place for us to fulfill all of our needs as Peace Corps Volunteers, for example, banking and Internet communication. So being located in Gossi has with it the necessity of traveling to Gao every so often for Banking and Internet, and this travel requirement is accompanied by an even longer journey that must be made whenever we return to Bamako. During Site Visit, one of the important characteristics of our site, Gossi, was distinguished by it’s remote location and the role transportation will play in our lives as volunteers in northern Mali – an out there out there location. This section of my blog is dedicated to transportation in northern Mali, and the events that took place during our site visit…

We took public transportation from Bamako to Gossi. The entire trip took a total of nineteen hours, which wasn’t too bad considering that our expectations told us “fifteen hours”. Beyond expectation was the heat, stench and humidity on board the bus, the frequent stops the bus made, how long each stop was, and the uneventful and unexplained reasons in which the bus was stopping. One African man decided to bring his lit cigarette onto the bus, although he was only permitted to keep it a short while, it nevertheless didn’t help the limited air supply on board. It was also interesting to behold a group of woman walking off the bus, squatting next to the road, and taking what was a very public and communal poop. Overall, the trip to Gossi was a breeze compared to the trip back to Bamako.

The Road to Gao…

My homologue, Boubacar Gindu, arrived at our house at 5:00am to walk us to the paved road. It is a thirty minuet walk from our (Natalie’s and then mine and Bess’) homes in the center of Gossi to the paved road, and at this time of morning the event was a spectacle of pure beauty (some of my sunrise pictures can be seen in the blog section titled Gossi). As we walked this morning in silence and solitude, in a sleepy but happy and wakeful state, we remained unaware of the disaster in which we drew closer with each advancing step. We got the first taste of disappointment when we reached the paved road at 5:30am and learned that we had missed the first two buses, and that the second one had just passed fifteen minuets before we arrived. Fortunately, Boubacar Gindu was willing to wait with us as we three PC trainees waited for a third bus that would most likely come sometime in an hour or two, which wasn’t too bad considering that the fourth bus would show up sometime between 10:00pm and perhaps as late as 3:00am the next morning – and that’s not a good time to be waiting by the side of the road. Something to appreciate is how much more the United States functions in a timely fashion

When the bus came at 6:00am we thought, for sure, that luck was on our side and that nothing could prevent us from enjoying a day of shopping, dining, and relaxing in Gao. It was during this state of overconfidence that I proposed a question to Bess and Natalie that would later define the moment in which we sacrificed our power and freedom to secure a safe trip to Gao. I asked, “Does someone want to call Omar Cisse and let him know we are getting on the Bus?” One of the girls replied, “No, we will call him from the bus on the way to Gao, we have two hours”. Sounds simple enough… and none of us thought anything more… and why should we…

Now Gao is only meant to be an hour and a half from Gossi using public transportation, and there are only several stops along the way because there really isn’t much between Gossi and Gao but a couple of small villages. Our language instructor, Abdalla, had sent us a text message from Bamako two days before saying that the road from Gossi to Gao was broken, but we had heard that it was fixed since then… so we expected no difficulty in our travel plans… but apparently the road broke again during the night so 45 minuets into the drive we found ourselves pulling up behind three other buses stopped dead along the side of the desert road. Apparently, the rains had formed a river in the desert which destroyed the road and made the surrounding area impossible for any bus to continue. It was even difficult for off-road vehicles and large trucks. Our bus, company Binki, was the fourth bus behind three other buses, all company Sonef. If Sonef was a Four Season’s Hotel, Binki would be less than a Holiday Inn. All three Sonef buses were full of people, luggage, and random cargo items; the first bus had been there since 3:00am, the third bus was the one we had missed by fifteen minuets. At first, we didn’t realize what was going on, we though these people had decided to throw a party at some random location along the side of a desert road, because… people were making tea… cooking meat… selling cookies… smoking cigarettes… it only took a couple minuets before Natalie translated from French to English that the road was out and that these people had been waiting since 3:00am for off-road transportation to arrive… So realizing that we too could be stuck in the desert for a while… we took refuge in the shade of a tree… and that’s when we had the bright idea of calling and having Omar Cisse come pick us up in a Peace Corps vehicle – only there is no and never was any cell phone reception outside the cites of Gossi and Gao and thus no reception in the middle of nowhere - desert. And so I began kicking myself for having not called Omar Cisse as he himself had advised me to and I myself had promised him I would. In other words, a simple phone call not made in Gossi became the mistake that cost us a day in the desert waiting under the hot sun.

We were never really sure how serious our situation was until the first transport arrived and we saw people fighting their way onto the back of a flatbed truck, forcing and pushing, begging to be the chosen ones. We were happy to see woman and children being given some priority and astonished to see some men grabbing onto the back of the truck at the last moment to ride out into the desert with what little strength they had left in their arms. We sat in the shade and watched, waiting patiently, because we figured that most everyone else had waited much longer than us, and so we wanted to see them leave before us… and so we waited…and waited… and waited… and every so often a big truck or small off-road vehicle would come out of the desert and fill up to the brim with people, luggage, and cargo… and would then disappear back into the desert… and we waited and watched… and eventually the sun and heat got to us… and we wanted to get out of the desert as soon as possible… whatever the cost… and so Natalie started translated in French… and the news was this… “there is a transport coming for you” and then a transport came and they said “this transport is not for you”… and this happened again and again… and again… and we got very anger when a flatbed truck left the scene full of mostly luggage, some people, and whereby there was easily enough room for us three PCT’s to be on it. So Natalie asked in French and we discovered that all the transports showing up and leaving were Sonef, and Sonef wouldn’t allow any non-Sonef travelers (Binki) to use there transports because – that’s how Sonef does business. Unfortunately, at this point Bess was running a high fever and developing heat stroke, she really wasn’t looking healthy, but weathered, and nobody seemed to care about her well-being – only good Sonef business strategy, which was really poor strategy if you ask me. So as Bess withered in the sun, Natalie and I watched trucks leave for Gao in which we could have been on. Eventually, the first Binki transport arrived… it was a hideous deep bed dump truck with sharp flailing metal coming off the back end, sharp enough to slice an arm off. The truck had obviously been used recently for construction but was now being used to transport people and luggage. As hideous as this truck was, Natalie, Bess and myself were trying desperately to make sure we were going to be onboard, at first, they were telling us “no problem”, “sure you can go”, so Natalie and Bess and gave them their luggage and their bags were tossed into the truck bed and buried under a mountain of random luggage, cargo, and random stuff… it was once their lugged was lost and buried in the back of the truck that they then said we couldn’t ride on it because it was too full of stuff… so they tried to make us walk the desert detour… or walk down the broken paved road… saying “there is another bus at the other end of the desert detour that will take you to Gao, the truck will shuttle your luggage but you will need to walk” and they gestured for us to follow these two young men into the desert. I said, “Natalie, tell them there is no way we are walking off into the desert with them”. So then they told us we would have to wait for the next Binki transport, indeed, some people did go walking off into the desert, but they were few. I didn’t feel good about the girls being separated from their luggage so I wanted someone to ride on the dump truck with the girl’s bags, but they were only letting men on the truck, so I decided to leave Bess with Natalie and ride with their luggage since I was a man. Once I climbed on top of the truck I looked down at Bess, saw her condition, and decided that she needed to get out of the desert as soon as possible. I couldn’t leave her… So I yelled to the girls… “You need to get on this truck, Now!!! Get up here, Now!!! Climb!!!” And so the girls climbed on to the truck, and it was, indeed, a difficult climb because the truck was not designed for people to be climbing, no ladders, no handholds, nothing but smooth sloping burning hot metal… the truck was overflowing with stuff… concave… and we sat at the tip of the pile crammed with a multitude of Africans, some men were buried with the luggage, some had people sitting on top of them, everyone was overlapped and tangled. They continued to load stuff on top of the people and they placed a metal stove, with sharp-hot metal, right below me so that gravity was pulling me into it. It seemed like all it would take was a tiny bump and everyone and everything would go spilling over the edge of the truck, which was about five feet below all of us at the top of the pile. I wish could have taken a picture of this but I didn’t want to risk bringing my camera out. And so the truck headed out into the desert and we road sand dunes like a ship riding giant waves in a storm. There were some pretty tall trees with very spiky, razorblade sharp, thorns that the truck would drive between, the front of the truck would push the branches back so that they then came whipping along the pile of people and stuff elevated above the bed rim, as the branches clawed along the crowd of men, people cried out in pain, some dug themselves into crevasse, hid behind neighbors, or grabbed objects to use as shields. I saw a spiky branch come whipping right over this man’s face brushing his scalp - his facial expression afterwards was priceless, it was during the first wave of branches so I guess God gave him a lucky break, the next time a branch came this man was well prepared… unbelievable this was… we three PC trainees were at the top of the pile and not in range of the branches… lucky I guess…

The detour was a thirty to thirty-five minuet desert rollercoaster and then we wound back to the paved road where there was a bus waiting for us. Those who decided to “walk it” could be seen coming down the paved road so I guess it was a “doable” walk, but not for Bess in her weakened condition, and how the “walkers” crossed the river of water we avoided with the detour I still don’t understand… but for us who rode the truck… things only got worse when we reached the bus… There were more people on the detour truck than could fit inside the bus. Because Bess’ condition wasn’t improving and we were trying to reach Gao at soon as possible, we had to board the bus early to insure a seat. This meant suffocating in what was indeed a hot, humid, airtight bus. The men outside were unloading the dump truck and loaded everything into the under compartments and onto the roof of the bus, we gave up caring about the girls luggage and just prayed that it would arrive in Gao and more importantly – us also… as all of the free-space on the bus, on top of he bus, and underneath the bus became filled… the worker men started bring cargo items into the bus… can you imagine what they placed in the center isle next to the girls and me… huge bags of manure piled on top on each other and sweaty worker men sitting on top of the manure bags dripping sweat onto my head… and so this is how you can imagine our arrival in Gao… a bus full of the unfortunate Binki travelers along with all of the worker men from Gao who came to move our luggage from bus-to-truck-to-bus and so you can imagine a bus with enough people to barely fill comfortably, two busses! Also imagine the roof of the bus mimicking the Leaning Tower of Piza with all those objects that would make the tower collapse placed inside the bus among the passengers. Bess was passed out on my left – like a beautiful flower whither, eyes closed, as if dead, lifeless in appearance, a bird gone, migrated, before her rightful time, and on my right, three huge bags of manure topped off with a couple sweaty worker men – dripping sweat onto my head… there was one small window open in the entire bus, every once in a while we felt a faint breeze carrying a hint of fresh air, a reminder that somewhere, somewhere??? There was fresh air, something to be breathed that did not taste of manure…

As we reached Gao Natalie called Omar Cisse on his cell phone. Omar said he would pick us up at the Bus station. When Omar arrived we told him what happened, he said, “You should have called me when you were leaving Gossi, I would have come and picked you up after not finding you an hour and a half later at the Binki bus station”

“You would have picked us up”

“Of Course”

We finally arrived in Gao at 3:00pm, having left Gossi at 6:00am. So what was meant to be an hour and a half bus ride ended up taking us a total of nine hours. The next morning (7:00am) we (Natalie, Bess, and I) were meant to set up a bank account in Gao and then take a bus from Gao to Bamako, an estimated 20 hour bus ride. Bess lay in bed at the Peace Corps house in Gao all afternoon and night once she got there, she had a fever of 101.5 F, the next morning we set up our bank accounts and Bess left Gao with Omar Cisse to return to Bamako in a Peace Corps vehicle, in what would be a two day voyage with a somewhat pleasant overnight stay in a Peace Corps facility midway between Gao and Bamako. I left Gao at noon with Natalie and 10 other Peace Corps trainees from the Gao region (noon the day after the day in the desert) we traveled from Gao to Bamako, we also had to go through the desert detour, but in reverse. It wasn’t as bad going in reverse the next day because we used Sonef and they were well prepared for us. On the way back to Bamako, in the middle of the night, around 2:00am, some armed bandits were on the prow up ahead of our bus, so our bus diver pulled over and waited with a number of other trucks and buses for a military escort to arrive. Eventually (after several hours), the military escort arrived and we continued to Bamako in a convoy, but our bus broke down on the “dangerous” stretch of highway and unfortunately the military just left us along the side of the road, they didn’t even stop to check on us, and so we trainees closed all the curtains to bus and had a very frightening experienced waiting for the bus to get fixed, well, others were frightened – I was too tired and depressed to care… For dinner I purchased some meat wrapped up in a paper bag, as I eat the meet a street child stood right in front of me staring into my eyes with a hungry expression, when I walked away the boy came after me, he following me with persistent outstretched hands, since I was so hungry myself, I eat all of the meat except for a piece of fat that I didn’t find appetizing. I wondered if the boy wanted it, and so I lowered it in the paper to see what he would do, in an instant, he snatched at the small piece of meat-fat just as two other boys, I hadn’t noticed, came out of nowhere and fought him for my meat-fat-scrap, they were vicious and only one of the boys walked off unsatisfied with the piece of fat he fought for and won… On the bus from Gao to Bamako… I sat next to a young Toureg man… through communicating in my best Tamashek… I learned that he was traveling with his wife and three children… they had no work or source of income in Gao anymore… and so they were looking for work and hoping to find support from relatives in Burkina Faso, but they only had enough money to make it to Bamko (where they knew no one, and had no family), I shared some food and water with the family, and the youngest daughter slept with her legs stretched out across my lap… I wanted the armed bandits to come and deprive me from all my expensive possessions… but they didn’t… they never came… the entire drive from Gao to Bamako took 25 hours, 25 hours…

The Gao group is already renowned at Toubaniso by the other PC trainees as the trainees who are out-there-out-there in site location. Everyone now knows the story of the Gao trainees who survived the 25 hours bus ride, public transportation, with a desert detour and armed bandits, but what few realize is that there is an even more select group of trainees, the Gossi group, who survived a day in the desert with a wicked detour the day before the notorious trip from Gao to Bamako…

See Pictures Below...

Toureg House by the Road going from Gossi to Gao, Toureg (in shade of tree) watching the Bus people

The disaster scene from the top of the Binki Bus

A motorcycle they took off the roof of the bus and tried to leave on, a Sonef transport (in the background) we did not leave on

Where we broke down... notice Bess and Natalie seeking shelter in the shade of some trees

The Desert Flooding in the Monsoon Rains

Local Toureg House between Gossi and Gao

The Buses... three Sonef (in front) and Binki (in the back)

The Local Toureg boys

A Toureg boy I practiced speaking Tamashek with

This was the dump truck we left in, in this picture it is just arriving to the scene, so all of those men in it are the "worker men" who moved our luggage, now picture that same truck leaving full of our baggage and cargo, all of those worker men, plus a bus load of people...