She Says – Dogon Trekking (part 2)

21-22 October (written from notes taken while trekking)
We leave Endé the next morning for Yabatalou. On the way, we pass through a small village that I never caught the name of. Tiemo stops to pass out photos taken by visitors on a previous trip, and I take photos of a girl pounding millet. To break up the tedium, she throws her pounding stick into the air and claps, before pounding the millet again. As we leave town, we pass the village blacksmith, and this time the action is in full swing. His ‘forge’ was a clay oven built on top of the ground, and the bellows were pieces of leather wrapped over round holes in the top of the oven. You grab the leather and push and pull air through the forge. We both have a go at using the bellows, and beat out some tunes! It was fascinating to watch the blacksmith making wooden sculptures. He took the carved pieces and used red-hot tools to burn the wooden surfaces, leaving them smooth and solidly black. And I always thought that effect was from polished black wood!

We reach Yabatalou before lunch and head straight up to the old town. People have only recently left the old village partway up cliffs here, and some houses still looked like they were being visited or lived in. It was a nice town, with a good altar and paintings, plus a grotto spring hidden in the cliffside. A valley split the escarpment and created a beautiful forest of mango trees, which we followed down back into the main village. We visited a house that had just harvested all of their peanut plants – the entire house was full! The women were inside picking the peanuts off the small plants, which then becomes animal fodder, and grinding the nuts into paste and oil for cooking. We ate some fresh peanuts, and I was surprised they were pretty tasty and juicy. We visited the chief’s campement for lunch, Tiemo got us a yummy watermelon as well, and we enjoyed the chief’s excellent wooden sculptures displayed all over the camp while picking off all the billions of plant seeds that had attached themselves to us!

After lunch we headed for Begnimato, our stop for the night. After trudging through deep sand, then making a stiff ascent up a creek valley, surrounded by beautiful rocks, forests and scenery, I started thinking maybe it was finally time for a ‘Sam-moment’. Our bike-travelling friend Sam Manicom, author of several books, had asked us just before departure to raise a beer in his direction when we found the most beautiful place in Africa. It was a hard hot hike in the dying sun, but so worth it. Begnimato is a beautiful village built on top of the escarpment, and surrounded by stunning rock formations. Tiemo got us into the campement, where many tourists were already gathering, then we raced with beer in hand to catch sunset setting over the plains. We sent our cheers towards Sam for what we think will be the first of many times in Africa. We sat on the edge of the escarpment, gazing over the far distant sand dunes, watching the sunset and the nomadic Fulani camp gathering their cattle into camp for the night. There were burial chambers in the cliffs below us, we could see pots outside them from where people bring up the ashes or each burial. It was a magic place.

We joined the village men in the ‘bar area’ for homemade millet beer, a very relaxed social occasion. And tasty too! It is brewed very quickly, I think what we drank was only a day or two old at most, and it was like ginger beer and fizzy. We joined the main village hunter and a friend, and drank from a calabash that was passed around between our group of five. We had another great meal in the campement, but there were a lot more tourists here – seems to be growing as we move along the cliff. Rain had threatened throughout the day, there was thunder at lunch, and it was cloudy in the evening. We had doubts for our rooftop sleeping but got through! Tiemo was really keen for us to take an extra day and visit another village called Nombori. He’d been saying it increasingly over the last 2 days – “I don’t know why I want you to go, I just really think you would like it!” I had developed a sweat rash through the day’s tough hot hiking, and we ummed and ahhed a lot because of that and the extra cost. But it is almost a once in a lifetime opportunity, and we’re having a great time, so we decided to keep going.

After a tasty traditional hot chicken breakfast stew, we started the next day with a tour of Begnimato. We first went to see the main hunter, who we had drunk millet beer with last night. We took photos of him with his son and their various captures, including a variety of monkeys and wild cats. They also had a young pet monkey, I have no idea why considering monkeys form a huge part of the hunters’ quota. Anyway I put my backpack down to take photos and Dr Otterboro, sticking his head out of my bag, freaked the poor little thing out. Everyone found this pretty amusing. We next visited ‘the big hunter’, the current hunter’s father. We got awesome photos of him proudly smoking his pipe then loading his big gun, but had a scarily Michael Palin moment when his gun exploded with a massive bang and smoke went everywhere! I literally stopped with my mouth wide open, the sound was so incredibly loud. The hunter himself completely cracked up into laughter, he thought it was an absolute hoot. I know it wasn’t supposed to happen like that, because shortly afterwards, we walked above the huts and saw him fire for some other tourists and it was much less impressive! He proudly showed us postcards that had been made of him, and sat for more photos. We walked above the town for a daytime view, and Tiemo pointed out how the Christians, Muslims and animists lived in separate areas of the town but in harmony with each other. We got to visit the little mud-walled church after chasing down the key, and saw fascinating pictures inside of an Arab-black Jesus - much more accurate in my opinion!

From there, we had a 7km solid trek to Douro, originally our end point for the trek. This was mostly along the top of the rock escarpment we had been following from below. We were able to see the famous Dogon onions growing up here, as there is a lot more water for irrigation at the top of the escarpment. I’ve grown very partial to these tasty little shallot-like onions! There were streams, dams, deep wells and trees all over, and I finally saw yam crops growing. Water is easier to hold up here, and much of the crops for the surrounding areas are grown above the cliff. There were beautiful views and valleys as we headed well across the rock-sculptured land, which was so beautiful. Along the way, we stopped in a small village called Konsou-ley for a drink. The man running the drink stop we visited played guitar on basically a open container and some string and got his tiny daughter to dance for us and a couple of other tourists. She was awfully cute, but I have to say she was pretty unimpressed with the whole thing! We walked to the escarpment edge to see the proper town, still perched halfway up the cliff-face. However, like elsewhere, people are slowly moving either up or down the escarpment to an easier life. It’s incredible that they have managed to live perched on this cliff for so many hundreds of years as it is.

We had lunch in Douro, which had all the feel of a proper city and easy vehicle access. After lunch, we trekked on to Nombori and it was sooooooo worth it! The walk itself was not too difficult, across beautiful rocky ground to start with, then descending down a very steep ravine. There were spectacular valleys and rock formations, and a deep rock cleft led us down into the village. The cleft had a very weird feel to it, and apparently the local people sing as they pass through to keep themselves safe. I guess I’m not alone in that feeling! The cleft opened out to the plains and a river, shallow enough to cross now but would be tricky when the rains come. There were fantastic Tellum houses above the current town of Nombori, still perched on the lower slopes of the cliff as they could not go higher and are on fairly level ground anyway. I had the most amazing shower experience ever, with massive bats emerging from either within or over the top of the escarpment. They sounded like fruit bats but I definitely saw insect-feeding behaviour from some. I wonder if fruit bats could possibly live in caves here, or were they just coming from trees above the escarpment? We were camped right underneath the cliff-face, so I’m sure some of the bats must be living within the old Tellum houses. I had seen signs of microbats through all the nooks and crannies of the rock cleft as we came down, I saw loads of poo, and we even disturbing them by talking as walked through tight passes so that they started chattering. I have so seriously been wondering what kind of bat research could be done in this area. I mean, what a place to live?! It’s beautiful, so different, getting to know these people more in depth and how they live in their world would be incredible. And then bats on top of it, and maybe finding out how they fit into their mythology (Tiemo had no stories for me, damn!). Now, how to scale those cliffs…quick somebody make me some baobab rope! The night was wrapped up with some dancing. A large tour group was staying in our campement, and the villagers put on a show for them. We got to sneak in on the side. We pushed Tiemo to dance, he so wanted to dance, people invited him to dance. He originally said no as he felt it was for the tour group and not about him, but he drank enough and eventually went in! Likewise, people invited us to join, but it wasn’t for us to take over from the tour group, they had paid so participating was for them, so we stayed put. It was great fun, if a little staged. I heard the troupe move on to the other campement later on. I just appreciate people are holding onto the dancing traditions and find a value in doing so.

I haven’t got around to mentioning the greetings! These are very long and very detailed, still going at a distance when you can barely hear - in fact all conversations are like that! Everything is yelled around the cliffs. The basics are ‘hello, how are you’, but that extends to ‘how is your family, mother, brother, uncle, donkey, sheep’ etc. Always the answer is ‘serow’ (fine) so the conversations are one-sided – one person starts, the other just keeps answering ‘serow, serow, serow’! Often a group will be part of the conversatin, so if Tiemo walks past a group of women and starts the questioning, then they all answer in unison. It is hilarious and endearing at the same time – just goes to show that our culture of ‘hello, how are you going’ and walking on without REALLY caring what the answer is is not so unusual! Tiemo is chatting and laughing and making silly jokes with people all the time. People think he is crazy! I have to say we’ve been very happy with having Tiemo as our guide. He seems to be well respected in the villages we visit, and people listen to him. He has been looking after us very well, and is a very good guide. Looks like our risk and gut-feelings paid off! I should note he is from the Dogon country himself, so these are his people and his country – it really adds something extra.