little miss sunshine van, camels in soccer fields, and more diarrhea

Hello friends and family!!!

Sorry it has been so long since we last wrote; we were on a bit of a marathon tour of mali and have finally slowed down a bit in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.

After Bamako, we travelled to Mopti relatively pain-free thanks to our friend at our guesthouse in Mali who arranged a ridiculously cheap car for us. Mopti was ok, we got to see a cool market where they trade huge slabs of salt from timbuktou (yes, the real timbuktou in the northern part of mali). We then took made our way to Djenné, which took 8 hrs to go less than 100km, but made some friends from holland and france along the way to ease the pain!

Djenné started off great, there is a huge mud mosque and the whole city is made up of old mud buildings on a little island; it's a world heritage site, google it! And they had a very exciting Monday market. Then it was my birthday and everything went downhill! Darl got severe food poisoning the morning of my bday (the doctor at our guesthouse figured it was salmonella) so we didnt do much for the rest of our stay. when Darl was a bit better we had to leave for Bandiagara since we already agreed to meet a guide there for a trek in Dogon country. Our trek was very cool, our guide was awesome except he kept guilt-tripping us for not paying enough even though we had already agreed on the price long before we started (which in our minds was quite generous). We stayed in little Dogon villages and learned lots about the history of the Dogon people. We were starving half the time and totally dehydrated though, because it was a full-on desert! when we finally got a cold bottle of water after 3 days of drinking warm well water that we filtered, it was the best water of our lives! it was fun pulling up the buckets of water with the kids at the well and they were all very excited about our filtering pump!

we then started our arduous journey from mali to burkina faso by public transit. first we waited around for 6 hrs before the van even showed up, then drove to the border town and on the way experienced our first sand storm! it was scary, we were very brown when we arrived! then took a van that didnt have first gear so everyone had to get out and push at every stop! this wouldnt have been so bad except that we had 5 different check points to get into burkina faso! we finally arrived after being in transport for 13hrs and we only covered about 300km in total. Needless to say, we are developing patience everyday in Africa!

So far Burkina is great, the food is much more exciting than Mali, there is ice cream carts everywhere, and we can even get yogurt! Now we get to sit back and relax for a week before our next big journey to Ghana.

Love you all lots!!!