The trip into Bamako

Friday June 6th

After finally getting on the plane to Paris, I landed and had to kick around Charles de Gaul for about 6 hours until the plane to Bamako left. Luckily, I was feeling so jetlagged and crappy from the previous flight that I just napped in a chair for about half of it. When I finally went to board the airline, I handed the woman what I believed to be my boarding pass, and she said it wasn’t a ticket, I needed a ticket. Now, when I was in Cincinnati, I had the gate agent put my frequent flyer number in for the flights, and for some reason she took my boarding passes and reissued me new ones, something about new seats or something. The pass for the Bamako flight said FLIGHT COUPON NEEDED, but she said that didn’t mean anything, it was just because it was an AirFrance flight and they were a partner airline. Same thing, when I got off the plane in Paris and had an AirFrance guy check my gate, he said the thing was fine. But this lady was not convinced. She said I couldn’t get on the flight. I sort of flipped out at her, after having already missed the flight the day before, and after calling Delta and looking things up on the computer, she finally let me through. Needless to say, another tense moment.

The flight itself was uneventful. The plane was nearly empty so I got to stretch out on my row and just watch the endless waves of the Sahara pass below. When I landed, I got my baggage without hassle and met Jeff, Abbie, and Minkailou, Jeff’s assistant, outside of the airport. It was great to have people there to greet you. I even felt pretty awake! We grabbed a taxi back to the SIL guesthouse where we were staying. SIL is this missionary linguistics organization, but there guesthouse was very nice. It even had internet, though PangolinWatch was staked out as a dangerous site or something and they blocked it. Thus the delayed arrival announcement.

After showering, we headed out to see Toumani Diabate’s orchestra play at this restaurant/night club. He wasn’t actually there and the orchestra (of guitar, this Malian harp instrument that’s like a giant thumb piano, can’t think of the name, drums, etc.) started playing late, but we got some sort of kabob and fries and relaxed in the cool night air. The music was good, I couldn’t see the kabob so I took a meat leap of faith, and all was well. Headed back to the guesthouse after midnight through air smelling of cigarettes, sewage, and fuel, and proceeded to have my jetlag keep me up until after 3.