Fun at the ol' swimmin' hole

On Saturday, my wife and I and some friends took a trip outside the city to an area near Sibi, which is about a forty-five minute drive west of Bamako. The trip out there is pretty easy once you get out of the congestion of the city, thanks to a very nicely-paved road. Our plan was to do some hiking in the morning, have a picnic lunch, and then go for a swim at a nearby waterfall.

Upon arriving at the park entrance, we paid a small admission fee and met up with our guide for the day. There aren't any clearly marked trails in the area, so we needed his help to get up the arch and to the waterfall. After exchanging pleasantries with the other men working at the entrance, we were off.

Our friend Lynda drove us all in her SUV, so we used that to get up the road towards the natural arch. The road was pretty bad in spots and there's no way our ACME-provided Toyota Corolla would have made the trip without a broken axle or three. After about a fifteen minute drive, we started our short hike to the base of the natural bridge and our eventual destination - the top of it.

Here's a shot of the natural bridge from below, before we got started the climb:

and here's my wife and I, to offer a sense of scale:

See, it's only about twenty feet tall. Actually, no, I'd guess the top of the arch was several hundred feet above where this picture was taken. The hiking wasn't too difficult and thankfully we were in the shade a fair amount, circling amongst the rock formations as we made our way higher and higher.

We had a little bit of climbing to do, but nothing outrageous.

Once we made it to the top, we had a fantastic view of the Niger river valley stretched out below us.

This shot above is looking east, with the Niger River off to the right and the bluffs on the left stretching all the way back to Bamako. The scenery reminded me of Utah, only a lot greener thanks to the rainy season.

After enjoying the view and the cool breezes atop the bridge, we made our way back down and embarked on the forty-five minute drive to the waterfall. The road was probably one of the worst roads I've ever been on. We drove through small rivers, sand pits, and mud puddles on a deeply rutted dirt road. After about twenty minutes, the novelty of off-roading started to wear off and I think most people in the SUV were wondering if we were ever going to get there and once we did, was it going to be worth it?

When we finally arrived, we were greeted with this view:

It's not really the sort of image I'd associate with hot, dusty Mali. The pool was roughly ten feet deep on the right side and about three feet on the left side, which made it ideal for swimming in the strong current from the falls and then relaxing in the shallows

Apart from some locals who came to watch the crazy white people go swimming, we had the place to ourselves. The falls were running strongly thanks to three days of heavy rain and the temperature of the water was perfect.

We ate lunch on the rocks and swam for a few hours, and then made our way home mid-afternoon, exhausted from a long day outdoors.

Ah, the rainy season

We're in the midst of the rainy season, which means a lot of rain (obviously), mosquitoes, and humid weather. Personally, I enjoy a hearty thunderstorm every once in a while and we've had more than our fair share over the past month. On Monday, I was working on my laptop during an especially heavy rain. Every ten minutes or so, I'd think, "Wow, it's really coming down out there" and then return to whatever it was I was working on. It wasn't until I got up to go get a drink from the kitchen that I noticed some water staring to come in underneath the front door. I quickly moved what few things that were on the living room floor onto the furniture. Once I got the the kitchen, I was surprised to see water seeping in under the back door as well. Again, I took whatever was on the floor and moved it onto some shelves. As I headed back toward the front of the house, the water was steadily filling the room and now covered most of the floor. By this point I started running around the house, grabbing everything I could off the floor, shutting off the circuit breakers, and unplugging whatever was plugged into the wall sockets.

Within five minutes, the entire house was flooded to a depth of an inch or two. Outside, the situation was even worse. All around the house the water was at least a foot deep and the street in front of the house was a fast-moving river. The disgusting part was that all the water that had flooded the house was coming in off the street, so there was mud, leaves, and who knows what else flowing around inside our place. I took some old towels and jammed them under the leaky doorframes in the side and back of the house to try and stem the flooding.

Fortunately, the heavy rain stopped after about ten minutes and the water inside the house never got any higher than that initial inch or two. My wife soon arrived home from work and we started the long process of cleaning up. We spent most of the night clearing all the water out of the house and cleaning up the mud and sediment that was left behind. It made for a long, tiring evening but we got a good start on things. By around 8pm, the house was relatively dry. Thankfully, all our floors are tile so there wasn't any worry about flooring getting damaged, and I was at home when the flooding started so I could clear everything off the floor. We didn't lose anything to water damage. I spent all day Tuesday sweeping and mopping the floors down with bleach to clean it up. Oh, and I escorted a frog out of the house on Monday night, too.

We were pretty fortunate, all told, and things could have been a lot worse especially if there had been no one at home. We got some sandbags to help seal up the leaky doorframes so that should help things from getting bad again in the event of another downpour. I confess that during heavy rainfall over the past few nights, I find myself waking up and checking to see if the house is flooding again. Rainy season should be over at the end of September so there isn't much longer that I'll have to worry about this.

I'm over my bout with malaria, though it's taken a while to get my energy back again. Oddly enough, my wife came down with malaria the week after I had it. Maybe we were bit by the same mosquito. She's just about over her malaria, too, though it did sap a lot of our energy.

I substituted at the American school yesterday. In the morning I taught a middle-school English class about literary hyperbole, then supervised economics and algebra classes, and taught some high schoolers how to play the Beyonce song "Halo" on guitar for their music class. The day finished up with me watching part of "An American Tail III: The Treasure of Manhattan Island" with a class of second graders in the library. All in a day's work for a sub, I guess.