Once again, we are up very early - 5:15 PM. It is all those animal noises again. But it does give us the pleasure of watching the sun rise as we lay in our sleeping bags in the tent. Shortly after 6 AM, we pack up our tent and stuff and go and have the now usual breakfast. We then spend some time looking at the carvings and continue to work on the price for one of the Dogon carved doors (no Mom, not a big door, but rather a small door - do not worry).
At 9 AM we walk around this village. We visit the chief and then walk to the old part of the village, which is right on the escarpment wall. It also includes a place of sacrifice - painted white - where they will sacrifice chickens and other animals depending on how big the problem is. In the old days, they would sacrifice humans here (or that is what they told us).
Some of us then went for a walk to the next village - most of the people returned to the guest house to wait for lunch. It was about 2 km to the next village - Nini. It was a nice walk and it had not yet gotten too hot. When we got to the village, we walked up to the toguna. We relaxed here for a while under the shade of a large tree and looked at the plains that spread out below us towards Burkina Faso. It was a great view and there was a cool breeze that we enjoyed.
At 10:30 AM we walked back to Banane, arriving at 11 AM. We hang out until lunch, which is served at 12:45 PM. In the meantime, we continue to negotiate for our door. In the end, we buy one with Rick, who also gets one, and get one of the best prices so far for the doors. Now we have to figure out how we will get it to the top of the escarpment and the truck. There are a number of guys running around who want to be our porter and carry it up. We consider it and in the end Lars decides to carry it up himself (the porter we almost came to an agreement with started adding other peoples stuff - at an additional fee - and we were concerned he might break something as he was carrying too much).
After lunch at 1:15 PM we begin our walk to the top of the escarpment. We wind our way up to the slope and around a corner in the escarpment to find a crevice in which they had built crude steps using rocks. This made it a relatively easy climb up - just a bit hot and sweaty.
On our way up we passed scores of people, mainly women, but some girls and a few men, carrying stuff down on their heads. The goods they carried included cases of beer and soft drinks, millet and other goods. One pregnant mother with a baby strapped to her back carried a heavy load down. There was a girl with a load on her head that was almost as high as she was. One women slipped on one of the rocks that was wet and dropped her load. Luckily, it was the dried millet and not the beer!!!
We got to the top of the escarpment and were treated to a great view over the plains below. We then walked towards the truck, that was not parked too far away. We loaded up all our souvenirs and headed off by 2:30 PM. We were pleasantly surprised by the changes that Mark has made to the truck - which included curtains for all the windows and moving the water tap inside the truck.
We got to Sangha 10 minutes later, and as it was the weekly market, we walked around the market. It was very busy and crowded and we had the usual kids following us around asking for presents, bon bon and bics. They were slowly getting on our nerves. We left and drove back to Bandiagara.
We stayed at the same campsite in Bandiagara that we had stayed in before we began our hike in Dogon country. We collected the laundry we had given in, organised our stuff and then took a shower. It was nice to wash off four days of sweat and dust. Even though we had our "no-rinse body wash" with us while hiking, the shower was still very welcome. After dinner we worked on our journals for a while and retired to our tent by 9:15 PM.