We arrived in Bamako around 2pm today! First task was to take a shower (yes, we have a bathroom and has even got hot water), then we visited the closing ceremony where the mayor of Bamako welcomed the teams.Now sitting at a very nice (and very expensive) restaurant, we have to finish dinner quickly to be back at the closing party starting at 9pm!

The daily briefing was at 9am today, which meant that the whole team was there for the first time today 🙂

We left quickly after to accomplish our first real charity activity: we stopped by in Makana, a small village of around 1000 inhabitants. After some smalltalk to the village chief (first they were reluctant to talk to strangers) we started distributing our donations (including most of the food we still had, some of our clothes including dirty shirts, our water tank, the second spare wheel, and some antibiotics and painkillers from our own medical kit).

The next and final stop was Diema, a small town 350km north of Bamako, where we spent the afternoon with Pam Young, an English lady whose car broke down here a few years ago, and who, since then, spends 6 months every year here to run her one person charity projects. The people of Diema were waiting for us with nice food (freshly baked bread, goat and mutton, rice, and even beer if our Polish colleagues wouldn’t have drunk all before we arrived), music and dancing. The B2 people donated hundreds of bycicles, 50 sewing machines, computers, and hundreds of kilos of clothes. One team also dug a well here and we had its opening ceremony in the afternoon.

The soccer game planned with the locals fell victim to the 39 degrees C (a slight improvement compared to the 46 the previous day), but instead we managed to screen a Bud Spencer movie for the kids.

We like the people of Mali very much, they are polite and friendly, even big crowds of children are easy to manage compared to the other countries we visited.

Today’s the last night in the tent! (In or beside, Michal and myself are spending the nights outside the tent, because of the heat, not because Pascal haven’t had a shower for days).

The day starts with Moussa guiding us through the national park. The more than 200kms large forest and jungle is under the Unesco Protection since 1981 and is clearly a wonderful place for Hippos, gazelle, monkeys. We will need another visit to know whether the lion foot print are real …

Btw this is better here to enjoy the high price and low quality food from the restaurant; according to Moussa 12 local hunters have killed by the guards last Sunday because they killed a buffalo!

On the way, broken trucks dusty roads and African temperature for this 400kms stage.

The border crossing to Mali was less chaotic than expected (or we are getting used to it, the first border control guy even wanted us to stay over the weekend because we arrived friday afternoon only), and finally around 6:30pm we arrived in our destination country Mali! There are less than 1000 kilometers to go to Bamako and we are confident that the whole team will make it there on Sunday!