Aboard the Desert Cattle Cruncher

This bus has a plow, I realized.

A brush guard, actually, but mean enough that it’s clearly not just for show. All the buses have them, and they’ve definitely seen action. Wandering livestock beware!

The 8:00 bus from Bamako to Mopti left only an hour late, and I’m told that’s actually pretty good. Packed, of course, and I soon realized that bus travel in Mali is different than in other places.

At the Bamako city limits, the bus stopped to cross the police checkpoint. A number of touts got on, both via the front door and the middle-rear ones, hawking their wares. Water! Biscuits! Fresh papaya! Sesame bars! Cakes! Nuts! The bus may have been full before, but now the vendors’ mass edged in to accompany their shouting, and the bus was one big loud swarm of full.

Suddenly, authoritative yelling from the front, followed by a loud snap. As one, the vendors from the front launch themselves towards the rear, a panicked mass of fleeing salesmen.

One of the bus’ “enforcers” had his belt in his hand, whipping the closest vendor across the back. Not a casual slap. As hard as he possibly could, yelling and cursing at the same time. Anyone who felt that belt didn’t just get a nice red welt—they got bloodied.

I don’t know what the vendors did to piss this guy off, but they fled towards the back doors with incredible haste, and what a second ago had been an aisle full of hawking salesmen almost instantly dissolved into just one angry bus enforcer with his whip of a belt. Satisfied, he turned around and sat down. Maybe he was having a bad day.

Bamako may be a city baked into the earth, but in that case the rest of Mali is the oven. Hot, dry, dusty desert. No air-conditioning in the bus.

We drove for 11 hours through the desert, the bus doors open to (thank God) help ventilate. By the time we arrived, I’d lost my sense of color. No more greens, blues or yellows. Only monochromatic shades of tanned dust. The roads, the flat landscape, the shrubs, the houses, and even the trees: all uniformly dust-colored. And when I looked at myself in the mirror, so was I. Coated in a fine, gritty layer of desert dust.

No dead cattle, though. At least there’s that.