Bad Taxi, Good Mali

The last few days have been an adventure in travel. It started on Monday, with our cab ride to the airport in Dakar, heading to Bamako, Mali. First, I got into a yelling match with the cab driver arranged by the hotel when he demanded twice the price that was arranged with the hotel. This must have looked funny from the outside as he didn’t speak English, and I know only a few words of French (luckily including the amount of cab fare), so we are standing on the street in the dark at 6am shouting at each other in two languages, barely understanding the other. I won. So we get in, and he seems to be fumbling for the keys. I was so involved with the yelling I didn’t notice what Laura did – that he appeared to be drunk, and even was peeing in the street just as she came out of the hotel. He sets off for the airport, and from the back seat I can see his gas tank is on empty, with the fuel light on. He stops at a gas station, turns around and demands some money. It’s 6am! The gas station is completely dark and closed. I shout “ferme!”, refuse to give him money, and he goes on his way. In route to the airport, there were numerous swervy lane changes, 1 near miss hitting a pedestrian, and two near-miss cases of the engine stalling. But we got there. He refused at first to get out of the car to open the trunk for our luggage, but when he finally did he shoved Laura out of the way, and threw our bags on the ground and stomped back into his cab.

Things got better. Much better. The flight to Mali went well. After we landed I approached an older man with an Audi baseball cap that said “racing” on it. My instinct that he would speak English was right. I asked about how to get a taxi, and we started talking. Loot is from South Africa, Johannesburg, and works in Bamako. From that conversation, we ended up not only having Loot arrange for his Malian colleague, Agibou, to drive us to our hotel, but Agibou also acted as our negotiator for getting a Malian SIM card and phone card so we could have phone access here. Upon arriving at our hotel, neither Agibou or his driver would accept any payment, saying this is the way things were done in Mali. You do good for people. Plain and simple.

We dropped our bags at The Sleeping Camel, met a nice young German couple, and headed out in a taxi for some lunch and to get our plane tickets to Timbuktu. Downtown Bamako is another world – we crossed a bridge over the Niger river to a strange mix of modern and third world. One street would have modern buildings – multi-story banks, offices, etc., paved roads, sidewalks, and general order; the next would be a step back in time to one story mud like buildings with almost hut-style fronts going straight up to the streets, dirt roads, and people selling food cooked from open pots right on the street. The heat was relentless, and made managing the chaos even more difficult. But we took it all in with a sense of adventure.

We ate lunch at, of all places, a Chinese restaurant. Interesting. That’s about all I can say about it. Then we went back and forth between a travel agent and a local airline office figuring out our Mali itinerary. The last travel agent we dealt with was amazing. Bathily spent a lot of time helping us get our tickets, and answering all sorts of questions about the trip. When we mentioned we were going from her office to the main bus station to get our bus ticket to Mopti, she offered to share her cab and went to the bus station with us to help us buy the tickets. This all took about an hour, after a long work day. She apologized (!) for not being able to invite us to her home for dinner, as she had a meeting to go to that evening. When we tried to explain just how amazed we were at her generosity, just as with Agibou, she explained this is how things were done in Mali – you do good for people.

Thailand is known as the land of smiles. Mali should be known as the land where people bend over backwards to help out total strangers without an expectation of anything in return. Or is that too long to fit on a t-shirt?