Recovering in Bamako

Day: 24
Location: Bamako, Mali
Weather: hot, but a dry heat, so not so bad
Kilometers: 0!
Health: exhausted but convalescent
Accomodation: Auberge Lafia
Price, room: 10K CFA
Price, water: 500 CFA
Shower: best of the trip
Morale: 8
Total spend: 31K CFA

Here's a boring one: The couple we stayed with were much too nice. No really, they gave us a nice big bed, and the mattress was fine if not great. I don't remember entering the bedroom let alone getting in the bed. When I got up in the morning to find him and his wife in their skivvies sleeping on the tile floor of the living room with no padding, it felt a little embarrassing.

After we were all up, the wife made us two of the oiliest fried egg sandwiches ever, served with mayonnaise of course, and it became clearer from whence her girth had come. Today we realized that the slow killers, say cholesterol for example, are surely secondary and, statistically speaking, possibly irrelevant given the difficulty of life here. The rational choice is probably to take down all the calories you can afford, even if they come from a can of rancid Bama Mayo sitting in the sun.

Ibrahim asked us to set up his new TV for him, but we could only get through the basics because he had bought one with a British style plug without noticing, and thus had no adapter. We also hooked up an old school VCR, which was weird.

We then checked into the Auberge - one of the best hotels of the trip with a large private room upstairs with two beds already hung with mosquito nets, and a big private bathroom with great water pressure to boot. The water pressure was key given the thick layer of filth we would successfully scrub off.

One the greatest pieces of news: regardless of what the Lonely Planet says, there are functioning ATMs in Bamako! As long as you have visa – it’s like this region has been set up specifically for a Visa ad, as it is the only card that is consistently everywhere we want to be. No seriously, the only place Guillaume was able to use his MasterCard debit was Senegal.

We showered, saw a bit of Bamako, arranged for someone to do our laundry, showered again, used the internet (too slow to make real progress uploading photos), ate at a Chinese restaurant, showered again, and were fast asleep by 7PM. The 4x4 negotiations would begin in earnest when we woke up, 14 hours later.

GB: Not much to add there. Boring, and yet such a restful day was much needed after the past few days. We initially decided to go out at night, but as soon as we laid down for what we thought would be a quick nap, we never managed to get back up until morning. Tomorrow we get back into motion with setting up the new 4x4. Hopefully this time we will have better luck and more discernment in our negotiations. In other news, we heard Paris Hilton is getting out of jail after 23 days of detention. Knowing the poor girl's suffering is at an end pushed morale past 7. TV5 Monde Afrique also confirmed that Nicholas Sarkozy likes chocolate.