We made it to Mali!

Yesterday we left Ouagadougou at dawn, and continued until dusk in a series of rickety busses and cars, but we made it to Bandiagara! Our glimpse of the Dogon country, an austerely beautiful landscape of red rock, viewed beneath a golden sunset, was tantalizing. I can't wait to start trekking through it. But I will miss Burkina Faso. We visited some sacred crocodiles, watching them snap at the sacrificial chicken we bought, and crouching down above one's tail for pictures. They're smaller than one might suppose, but those jaws look powerful. And they shut with an alarming SLAP! on whatever bit of chicken it could reach. That was our main "tourist activity", but we spent a lot of time walking around Ouagadougou, admiring the enclaves of actual, real art (hidden among the tourist trash. But we did manage to find some gorgeous, unique bronze sculptures! They're made by forming the statuette in wax, then covering that with clay, firing it until all the wax melts away, and pouring molten bronze into the resultng mould. They're really special) and eating good food. What I will always remember about Burkina Faso is how impressed I was by the women there. They do everything! At least a third of motorcycle drivers are women, sometimes a big mama in her boldly-colored traditional outfit, head scar and all; sometimes a young girl in blue jeans and high heels; occasionally even a mother zooming along, revving her moto with a sleeping baby tied to her back. It's fantastic! Women just don't do that in Senegal, that I have noticed. And we were stopped on the road by a female gendarme, welcomed to the bank by a female security guard. Just little differences, but they made a big impression on both Arwen and me. Burkina Faso strikes me as a country that, at least judging from the capital, is moving fast and in the right direction.
But now we're in Mali! And I'm so excited to see it. People have been fabulously warm and welcoming so far, as is usual anywhere in West Africa that I've been, and the buidings are interesting, flat-topped affairs made of red, red earth. How will the Dogon cliff houses compare to Togo's fascinating "tatas", those fortress-houses near the Benin border? They're unlie any other house in the world, made only by this single ethnic group. Each tata is a two-story home, with a single small entrance in front, leading into a room which is designed so there is a staircase, but next to it a dark space where inhabitants could hide to ambush an enemy. Upstairs, a kitchen area, then an open roof, with sleeping rooms shaped like squat circular huts, accessible by a round hole. To get in, you have to slide yourself backwards through the hole! And in the corner, a grainery, raised so high up that vermin would have a hell of a time getting in, and with seperate compartment for each kind of grain. The roof provides a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the surrounding area, a dry plain with a backdrop of stunning hills. And out in the front of each tata are a cluster of tall earthen mounds, which are guardian ancestors of the house and the people in it. Everything made exclusively of the local clay dirt, and wooden branches for support. Those were the tatas. Now for Dogon country!