After one week travelling we arrived in Bamako, the capital of Mali and the original finish place of the Budapest to Bamako rally. Because we are the only participants reaching Bamako I think we won actually the rally!! Everything really fine so far. We enjoy travelling with the Citroen CX. It’s comfortable, fast and very silent compared tot our Mercedes 1113 truck with which we normally travel. We arrived in Banjul a week ago and found the car in good condition at the place of our friend who lives near the airport. Only dust everywhere but no animals, insects or whatsoever. It even started quite easy after nine months waiting. We cleaned the car a bit and did some repairs on the car the next day. Changed a front wheel bearing and the starter, cleaned the spark plugs and fixed a few other issues. The rest we, will try to do on our trip. The screen wiper is completely stuck and not working anymore. Maybe a problem because sometimes it rains a little bit… After two nights we thought the car should be ready to go so we said goodbye to our super kind hosts and drove to Banjul to do some shopping's. The car was not driving really smooth but with a few adjustments on the carburetor and the timing we made it. We decided to have a lazy Sunday afternoon at Pocoloco, a popular tourist beach bar. The next day we drove to Janjanbureh, Georgetown in the old days. Lots and lots of police and military checkpoints but never a real hassle. The CX seems to like fresh petrol because it’s running like never before. From Janjanbureh we drove in one day to Mako in the southeast in Senegal. Mostly the roads and pistes were OK but sometimes it was hell because of roadworks and loads of trucks producing clouds of red dust. In Mako we stayed at the Keur Annick at the Gambia River were we even lucky with a glimpse of a hippo in the river at sunset. After few Gazelle beers and a good rest we drove the next day almost 450 km to Manantali. A very long day indeed including a border crossing which is always time consuming in Africa. Mali is landlocked so all goods have to come by truck either from Dakar or Abidjan. So the borders a quite a chaos. The first thing we discovered in Mali how unbelievable friendly most people are. Quite a difference. No annoying police checks here but giant speed humps in every village. That meant we had to turn the CX in every village in high position, something surprises the locals every time. They never saw a car like this before! The last 100 km were on a beautiful piste through small villages. The last hour we had to drive in the darkness. Something we normally never do but we wanted to reach Cool Camp Mali (http://www.coolcampmali.com) where our travel friend Casper has a campsite at the Bafing river near the hydro power dam. With the help of our four big Cibie rally light beams we drove safely to Casper. It was a nice rendezvous with Casper who we had seen the last time in 2010 in Ethiopia when he was still travelling himself. Now he built a nice relaxing place at the river with lots of nice trees, gardens, a banana plantation, animals, etc. We joined Casper the next day for a visit to a nearby village to do some talking and to fit glasses to the older people which was very funny.
When we arrived back in Cool camp a lamb was just born. We had another nice evening with Casper and slept another night in our little tent. From Manantali it was another long day driving to Bamako, the capital of Mali. First the same beautiful but rough piste of 100 km and then a good tar road. Just before sunset we crossed the mighty Niger river in Bamako and checked in at the Sleeping Camel guesthouse/bar/restaurant next to the German Embassy. I think our car looked a bit like a Mad Max Jihad terrorist car because we were stopped in the road with a policeman with a machine gun. They just had never seen a car like this before. After explaining what we were doing there they let us through. The only signs of a little tense situation in this part of Mali. There still are a lot of foreign soldiers in Mali to protect the people, but not in the southern part of Mali. We spoiled ourselves with a big air conditioned room, a few big Castel beers and pizza’s and cheeseburgers. We will stay another night here, fix some issues on the car, talk to fellow travelers and other interesting people here. Tomorrow, Sunday we will head to Ivory coast
1 Comment
Liesbeth
11/25/2018 03:09:33 pm
Wat een geweldig mooie reis maken jullie . Ook hier alles goed. Liefs, Liesbeth
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Kees and Bien A limousine, a grand lady but also a tough winning rally car in the 1977 -1979 editions of the Rally du Senegal and winning! |