November 12, 2007, Bus from Bamako to Nioro, Mali
A nice elderly fellow on the bus told me the following anecdotes:
- Marbara is the first village of the Peul (aka Fulani) people, located near a hill in the middle of the desert. In this village, you have only to dig a bit anywhere in the ground to find water if you are thirsty. However, if you are no longer thirsty, the water is not easy to find.
- In one village of this region, a white French man came to demand some tax payments that were overdue. The villagers wouldn’t pay, so he struck some of the men. He then demanded some milk, but no one would give it to him until a woman found a cow and got milk for him and his friends. Three of the four of them died from drinking the milk. The last remaining one left the village forever. The village has never paid taxes since that day.
A boy boarded the bus with a live chicken in Bamako. Along the way, he got off the bus without taking the chicken. Eventually, the bus driver gave the chicken to a woman he liked working in a stall in a town along the bus route.
I saw lots of baobab trees and spoke with friendly passengers on this bus, Peuls who speak Peular and are Muslims. A Mauritanian woman on the bus who says her name is Amie is also going to Ayoun el Atrous. The voyage is going much more rapidly than I thought it would, inshallah.
That last pic is one of my favorite ones ever… check out what appears in the boy’s eyes!
Watch how the number of baobabs increases further north and the terrain gets drier.
