This post is a couple weeks after the fact but it took a little time to upload all the photos and video (about 900 files total).

Amy and I made plans to go to a music and cultural festival in Mali (Festival au Desert).

http://www.festival-au-desert.org/index.cfm?w=296&lng=2

We decided it may be a bit too much for us to plan on our own so we found an organized tour that was offering a two week tour of Mali prior to and after the festival. Turned out it was a great idea.

http://www.sagatours.com/essakane.html

(Sorry if neither of those links work)

We chose a flight that had an 18 hour layover in Casablanca, Morocco so we got the opportunity to explore. The airline (Royal Air Maroc) got us a hotel and shuttled us from and back to the airport.





We got to Bamako to begin our tour which took us from there to Djenne to Songho/Sangha/Sevare (Dogon Country) to Timbuktu, then on to the festival in an oasis area in the Sahara called Essakane, then back to Timbuktu to Mopti to Segou then back to Bamako. It was a total of about 1100 miles of driving on roads (paved and NOT paved), cliff-sides, on car ferries across the Bani and Niger Rivers and lots of sand dunes. We met lots of different people and tribes in these towns and along the way - Bambara, Bobo, Bozo, Dogon, Fulani, Songhay and Taureg.

(There were several hundred of these termite mounds on the road from Bamako to Djenne; this one was about 9 feet tall)



There were about 5000 attendees and roughly 20 music performances during the three days of the Festival au Desert.

You can begin the photo and video tour here…











Another reason for this post is that we HIGHLY recommend you visit Mali. The country is amazing.

More photos and video in the responses.

Who buys 60 dollars worth of fancy deli made dinners and candy with a non-working EBT card and decides to use the "express" line? The two women in front of me tonight. What makes it even more awesome is that this happened at Whole Foods.