All good things…

This is how we spent our final 24 hours in Bamako…

8h: After a speedy breafast, I get on my bike to try to find some spare bike parts. After running through our local market I find what I need and get some new bar ends welded together to ease the strain on our hands when cycling.

8h45: Back home, Mikaela is madly planning our next route while I file down guitar parts to get a road-worthy guitar together.

10h:  With the help of a welder I get an extension to Mikaela’s back rack for carrying her new kamele ngoni.

11h: We take a long taxi ride to Kalaban Coura ACI to say good-bye to Makan and his family, who hosted us when we first arrived in Bamako.

14h12: After going back to the welders for a quick alteration, I start fixing the bikes up.

17h: With only a few hours left we reach the studio to record Mikaela’s vocal overdubs. Kona, the recording engineer, starts to transfer all the files onto a painfully expensive 8GB USB stick (35 euros!).  He tells us we can come collect it later on.

19h33: We guzzle down a final brochette and plantaine meal by our house with our flatmates.

21:13: Jumping in a taxi we race to say good-bye to Souleymane and Coroba’s families in the Badialan neighbourhood.

21:56: We then go the the rap podium that Souleymane helped to organise.

22:45: Souleymane asks us to join him to play is song “Maman”, his mother is in the audience and a few tears are shed.

23:45: Realising we have around 4 hours til we needed to leave the house, we say our goodbyes to the party and rush off to collect our precious USB stick.

00:15: We collect the USB stick safely and say goodbye to Kona and Bob at the studio.

00:30- We rush to meet our friends who will take the USB stick back to the UK. They are playing a gig at Radio Libre and we’re invited to perform a few songs.

1:45: We say our final good-byes and rush back home where most of our packing is yet to be done.

4:10: After some very rapid packing (or stuffing!) we are ready to go.

Bamako, we are leaving you, your dusty streets, crazy roads and friendly faces. It has been sweet, sometimes bitter-sweet, but for now its goodbye, just until next time…

Mango rains…

So, life in Bamako has been busy and as our time in the city comes to an end the music just gets better. We are on a high. Now it’s the end of another mad day and as our beds call us we feel it’s time for an overdue update, in photo form!

Its April, the weather is hot, sometimes the temperature reaches a scorching 45 degrees. Walking from to the kitchen and back makes you sweat. We both sleep and I begin a folder of photos entitled ‘Mikaela naps through the hot season’…

Our friend Sadio Cissokho arrives from Senegal with his kora to work on the album. Sadio is a creative kora player, arranger and soulful singer. Together with Mikaela’s kamele ngoni teacher, Lassine Kone, we jam with Sadio for the first time since we met him in Casamance. Our musical high begins…

The band meet Sadio and one of our best rehearsals follow. We rehearse at Baini’s house and a crowd gathers. The children dance madly to the music and the sky grows stormy. There’s talk of mango rain.

A mango storm hits the city and as the rehearsal ends the sky is lit up with sheet lightening. We head home on flooded roads as the first rain we have seen in more than 6 months pours onto the dusty streets. We grin and laugh as we paddle through the water back to the house. Beautiful rain, perfect day.

Imran builds his ngoni…

From his peaceful pocket of Bamako Waou answered my question, “you want to build a ngoni? It’s very hard!”.

With a little convincing he patiently showed me how to hand build an ngoni, the grandfather of the banjo.

Step 1: Taking a large tree trunk we chopped a log to the rough size of my future ngoni’s body.

Step 2: Putting down our axes we carved out the inside to make a canoe shape and then sanded its rough surface.

Step 3: Then we drilled about 16 holes around the edge of the body before creating a groove at one end for the neck to lay.

Step 4: Cutting bamboo poles we made around 20 wooden nails.

Step 5: Then for the smelly job, we sliced the cow skin (which had soaked overnight) to the shape of the body.

Step 6: Using the bamboo nails, we stretched the skin across the body and pinned it into place.

Step 7: Using a chisel tool we carved the neck to the shape of a broom handle with a spike at one end. We then cut holes into the skin and inserted the neck of the instrument.

Step 8: We then left the whole thing to dry in the blistering 42 degree heat of the Malian sunshine. With the scorching sunshine the skin-drying only takes a few hours!

Step 9: Using a hack saw we cut off the bamboo pins to the body.

Step 10: The instrument finished, we moved onto the strings…

“What was used before nylon fishing line was available?” I ask.

“Horse hair” explains Waou, his eyes scarcely stray from his work. Remembering a story of European violin players having to hunt down cats to make strings from their guts, I tell Waou that his ancestors were far more civilised than their European counterparts.

Waou attaches a string to the neck

After attaching all the strings to the instrument (six in this case), he proudly checks it over, fine tunes it and gives it a play. It is difficult to imagine that a day earlier it was little more that a log of wood, a fragment of calabash, some cow skin and a few metres of fishing line…

For all the photos, click here.

music cycles’ first promo video…

Our first day of recording…

All the musicians pose together for an impromptu group photo

Record number of takes in 100 degree live room before sneaking a break- 5

Spontaneous dance breaks from Baini our electric guitarist- around 5…

Best use of resources- Kona (studio owner) for his ‘egg box sound proofing’

Exclamations of ‘ne nodo’ (‘my mistake’)- countless

Hours worked in studio- something near to 8

Tracks recorded- 3 (and we had only aimed for 2!)

So, with the first 3 tracks recorded, our album is finding its feet, getting its groove on, and taking some kind of shape for its inevitable late-night London mixing in May…

Mikaela and the boys (Madou and Ton Ton)

Mikaela in the innovative ‘eggbox liveroom’

Imran mic’s everyone up!

It’s lunchtime and Andra insists that Mikaela and Baini need their photo taken together (after weeks of warning that he will elope with her)

A few dark clouds: our house is burgled…

Arriving home to find our house had been burgled was a low point of the trip.

Everything gone. The camera, sound recorder, all our money and unfortunately the list goes on. Walking to the police office we noticed, for the first time, the sky was full of dark clouds and as Imran commented on the unusual weather a drop of rain fell to his nose. It seemed the first rains of our trip in West Africa had fallen.

But stuff is just stuff, our time here and on the rest of the trip has been fantastic, our encounters unique and the friends we have made will remain in our lives far into the future. For a moment we considered getting out of Mali as soon as our recording was finished, but that would be turning our backs on something so positive and leaving with clouds hanging over us.

But, we cannot change the fact that we have experienced a financial loss and of course the impact this has had on how safe we feel. These factors combined with a sense that if we continue to Kinshasa we may have to rush on the bicycles so much that we will actually miss seeing the countries we pass through, has led us to make a big decision.

In May we will return. We will fly home from Lagos where we have music contacts and a press passes for Sub-Saharan Africa’s exclusive performance of Fela!

So now with only a few months left and almost all of our valuables gone (except our bicycles and the GPS!) we are actually feeling positive. We are ready for the next leg of the journey, but not ready to come home. It’s not quite time to say goodbye.

Thinking about April: The road ahead…

We both feel it has long been time to change the header of our website ‘From the UK to Mali…‘, and now, after some agonising over what to change it to, the time has arrived.

We have both been investing time towards planning for the next exciting leg of our journey, the visa beauracracy, security situations, FCO advice (and the obvious insurance implications), sending emails to other cyclists, calculating kilometers, calculating days of cycling and rest, the list goes on.

So, right now the plan when April arrives, looks a little bit like this (ambitious and still a work in progress!),

– Pedal out of Mali and into Burkina Faso, where we will met with an Association of Young Musicians.

– Cycle through Burkina Faso and into Benin.

– Crossing our fingers that the Nigerian Embassy in Cotonou issues us a visa (they normally refuse visas to travellers with an Embassy in their country of residence), we will cross the border into Nigeria.

– After enjoying the music scene in Lagos we hope to continue through Nigeria on a carefully calculated route (owing to security issues) and cross the frontier into the green (though rather hilly), Cameroon.

– Hopefully overcoming more expected visa problems, we will manage to obtain a visa for Gabon (known for its lush rainforests covering more than 85% of the country). By this point we are almost expecting to have run out of time and will possibly be forced to fly home from Libreville (Gabon). But if not…

– IF we can secure a visa and time remains on our side, we will cross into Congo heading a few hundred kilometers to Brazzaville.

– At Brazzaville we will take the ferry across the Congo River and border into Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, famed for its rich music scene.

Admittedly the last two stages of the journey are by far the most ambitious and remain in our minds a hopeful extra! But even if we only get as far as Nigeria’s energetic Lagos, I know we will have been slowed down by the best of distractions, as has always been the case on this fantastic trip.

So with many hopeful ‘ifs’…’ hanging in the air, we’ll leave you with a map of our proposed 5000 km additional route, some images of the countries we hope to pass through and the funky sounds of DRC’s Baloji!

Nature reserves of Nigeria

Mount Cameroon, 4,040 m (13,255 ft), we will be cycling its foothills and if we have time, who knows we might even climb it!

Beautiful Gabon

One of DRC’s biggest stars, Baloji

Malick Sidibe: ‘all there’s left to do is have fun…’

‘Next time you should walk.’ Those were the philosophical words given to us by internationally famous Malian photographer, Malick Sidibe.

Malick professed we would see more by walking, and as we looked carefully through his large collection of prints it was not difficult to see why he possessed such a view. Malick has been capturing images of Mali for nearly 60 years, documenting an iconic and exciting era of post colonial independence.

At art school Malick tells us he realised ‘the camera was faster than the pencil‘. He laughs as he tells us of a dream his mother had in the same year he acquired his first camera, ‘she imagined I filled the house with images‘.

Malick proudly shows us his first camera (dated 1956) and some beautiful old prints

‘The Whole Family on a Motorcycle‘ (1962), Malick Sidibe

‘Dancing the Twist‘ (1965), Malick Sidibe

‘During the Great Heat‘ (1976) Malick Sidibe

This photo was taken by Malick Sidibe during a shoot for New York Times Magazine as part of an exhibition showcasing ‘tribal-inspired clothing’.

While others continue to admire his work and stare wistfully at the images of Mali’s past and present, Malick claims ‘all there’s left to do is have fun‘. Sat in an armchair of his Bamako studio, with a lifetime of photography stored around him, it became clear where such philosophising had stemmed from.

Malick in his Bamako studio

The dusty rehearsals begin…

Playing ‘Green Brooms’

Arriving at our rehearsal in Dialakorodji, we remove our Sotrama bus face-masks with a dramatic wipe of our dusty eyes. We walk from the sand piste to find the usual scene of gazing children, tea-making friends and of course, hard-working musicians working intensely. Normally we rely on the far-reaching sound of Ton Ton’s tama to find our way to Andra Kouyaté’s al fresco rehearsal space but today feels different, somehow more familiar and we stroll in the right direction with ease.

As we settle down, we enjoy the last few songs of Andra’s band. The sun begins to set and as a red fog descends upon the streets our audience of children grows, defying the usual 7 o’clock prayer-time curfew.

We say our ‘Nche’s’ and ‘Ekakeneh’s’ before the rehearsal begins.

Hard at work

Ton Ton and Madou get into the groove…

Uncle Fousseyni (the middle brother of the Kouyaté family) joins us for a rehearsal

While the orange mud brick wall behind us radiates the days dry heat and Mikaela’s microphone distorts gently we begin to wonder whether this rehearsal space could not be improved with some relocation work.

Rehearsing in Dialakorodji

But as Aramata waves an offer of porridge in our direction, the children dance and a local farmer passes us with his twelve strong cattle herd mooing loudly into the dusk air, we understand Andra’s choice of space.

In the few rehearsals we’ve had so far, we’ve worked on mixing a couple of traditional songs from home with Bambara songs. The result; the start of someting we hope to record at the end of March.

“You have to get used to the local colours…”

“Yes, yes! It’s a beautiful and modern house, much better than these houses!”, he gestured to the homes that stood behind him.

“Ok, can we have a look inside?”

“Well no, I don’t have the key.”

As we began to grow uncomfortably accustomed to the ways of the Malian estate agent, we had sighed and waited for his moped riding cousin to arrive with the keys. We eventually looked around the flat with its lovely balcony overlooking the road. Beyond the road was a dark expanse (we only made it by evening time), I assumed this was a field or some rocks.

“It might be a huge rubbish heap,” joked Mikaela.

Returning by daylight the following morning we found that it was indeed a huge rubbish heap.

Becoming frustrated, we wandered the streets hoping that a chance encounter with a shop owner might lead us to an empty apartment (which we were beginning to suspect was the modus operandi of the estate agents we were having to pay per viewing).

 

The busy meat market and moped shed in Bamako Coura (New Bamako)

 

Fruit ‘n veg at last!

 

Mikaela happy after a tasty chawarma for lunch (Malian style meat sandwich)

 

The view of the other side of the river Niger and Bamako central- the place we want to move to!

 

The reality of Bamako’s insane roads!

“You have to get used to the local colours” Amkoullel had offered the previous evening. As we sat in the tiny room of an underground bar we had tried to make sense of the sound system cranked up on full volume and realised there was still some distance to make before we could feel at home in Bamako.

The extreme reverb, the delay effects and of course the volume levels…

Only that morning Mikaela had once again woken up with the black clouds of her grumpy homesick mood hanging over both of us and now Amkoullel’s words rang in our ears as loud as the evenings musical entertainment. We just had to get used to the local colours of Bamako.

 

Laughing Amkoullel turned to us once more and with the wisdom only he can sprinkle on a sentence added, “You won’t be growing old with good ears if you come here everynight…”.

From its manic traffic to the extreme sound of its live music, Bamako has an exhausting energy and the only way for us to love this city is to match that energy, with the same colourful smile that it always seems to offer us.

Festival au Désert 2011: airport jamming…

As we rubbed our eyes of a nights worth of sleepy dust and desert sand Imran rummaged to find the ringing mobile phone. It was Bassekou’s brother (and fellow band member) Foussyeni, who had recently become our Malian uncle. Fousseyni seemed his normal relaxed self, though it seemed quite alarming he should be calling at 9am given the life of almost every Bamako musician we knew remained exclusively nocturnal. Then Fousseyni explained that our flight was leaving in half an hour.

As we rushed into the airport building, looking a little bedraggled, we realized the flight would not be leaving for some time and sat down to enjoy a post-festival jam.

We jammin

Engulfed in his grand boubou, Amanou of the band ‘Tartit’, played the three stringed Tamasheq ngoni bringing the sound of the desert into the departure lounge. Next to him Dimitri from the headlining band ‘Dinamitri Jazz Folklore’ added sensitive melodies and solos influenced by his Italian heritage and jazz background.

Amanou from Tartit and Dimitri

As Mikaela improvised vocal lines Amkoullel reminded us all of the young and energetic face of Mali, his Bambara lyrics fusing into the mix. Tiwitine later took Imran’s guitar adding the rich tones of North Mali’s musical culture.

Tiwitine

Mikaela, Amkoullel and Dimitri

For us this was a jam session where the challenges of collaborating with such different musical styles melted away. With such sensitive contributors, we found ourselves, as so often has been the case on this journey, surrounded by a supportive and welcoming circle of musicians.

Outside the tama (talking drum) spoke to the air as dancers from various bands moved like fire, some barefoot, some in killer heels. They moved fast on the hot tarmac, showing us all their passion extended way beyond a ten-minute choreographed performance.

Tamas at the airport

Eventually, as we boarded the plane for Bamako, we couldn’t help but will our delay to continue. Just for another hour or so…

No easyjet flight!

Bamako Musings: The journey of our DHL box…

Cookies, M n’ M’s, spokes and a new Nikon D3000.

Our Christmas arrived a little late. According to the man in the North London DHL shop all the drivers were ‘on holiday’, until he was reminded of our package so it seemed!

The incredible journey of our little box began on December 30th when Imran’s wonderful brother reminded the shopkeeper of its existence having taken the box to him 8 days before…

First our lovely box was flown to Brussels, held for a few hours before being sent off on a flight to Dakar, Senegal.

Next came a connecting flight from Dakar to Lagos, Nigeria.

Then from Lagos our beautiful box flew to Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire.

Then, on its final aeronautical adventure it travelled from Abidjan to Bamako.

‘KHAN?!’ The woman bellowed down the telephone.

Imran glanced at me and we both knew in a second it was the call we had been waiting for. We had been tracking the rather strange route of our box for a few days and, in the knowledge that we would soon need to leave for Timbuktu and the Festival au Desert, we were anxious for the arrival of our replacement camera.

‘KHAN! Ibrahim Khan?’

‘Yes… this is Ibrahim’, it was easier this way.

‘This is DHL Bamako, your package has arrived. You must pay 15,000 CFA if you want the package. You must come to the airport with the money’, the line went dead.

Though lacking in the Godfather-like tone her demands sounded fairly non-negotiable and we set off for the airport.

The door of the DHL office slammed shut and I found myself looking seriously disgruntled as we sat down in front of a large heap of paperwork.

‘Sign here, here, here, here and (after multiple page turning), here.’

It was nearing the end of the working day and anxious to get the package Imran gave the paragraphs a quick read before scribbling away.

‘You must pay 15,000 CFA now to release the paperwork and then whatever customs asks for…’.

Realising that we might have to hand over large sums of cash I began to moan and whine indiscriminately, polishing the performance with an emotional emptying of coins onto the desk of the uncomfortable looking member of staff.

She glanced to her colleague and inhaled deeply before glancing at my quivering face,

‘Well, I suppose we can ignore the 15, 000 CFA here, just this once, but you will still have to pay customs.’

The customs women laughed as we approached, with their feet resting on the table, they moved only in the effort to bark loudly at poor Mohammed who was running frantically around the warehouse floor.

‘What’s in the box?’.

Sighing heavily I began to present them with each item as Imran gave an explanation in French. But, it seemed fate had dealt us a good hand and the women were quickly won over.

The first item was drawn from the box, ‘tampons’ Imran politely translated. The women howled with laughter and grinned warmly in my direction.

‘Cookies, bicycle parts…’, the list continued as did the explanation of our trip, lack of children and subsequent challenge to the claim that the lack of children was resulting from our bicycles.

After building something of a rapport with the formidable team we felt more confident, as the senior member jotted down the customs note Imran smiled. Our new friends had intentionally omitted the expensive camera from our customs list. But now we were told, came the final and most difficult stage, an appointment with Mamadou Ba, Head of Customs in Mali. Admittedly it seemed a little over the top for a DHL package but in no position to argue we set off for the next office.

Busy with a text message the security guard missed us as we marched towards the Chief’s office. A short wait later we were instructed to knock on the door,

‘Come in,’ glittering with colourful medals Mamadou continued to gaze past us and his girlfriend focusing intensely on the television, ‘I am closed for the day, you must come back another time.’

I took a long breath in and turned away resisting the urge to throw something in his general direction.

‘Tell her to calm down’, assuming this was directed at me and not his teenage girlfriend the aging Mamadou asked us again to leave.

Realising it was once again time to call on the distressed-tourist within, I began to look flustered, on the verge of tears.

Mamadou shuffled in his seat and Imran seized the moment to win his signature. Ten minutes later Mamadou lifted his pen and as we relished in the beauty of our victory, signed on the dotted line.

We ran back to the warehouse triumphantly waving the paper at Mohammed and finally as the day came to a close our box was ‘released’ from the jaws of customs.