The best flights to West Africa are from Paris. It turns out to be cheaper and more convenient in some ways to fly to London, and take the train to Paris, which is what we did. We flew from Paris to Bamako, the capital of Mali, and spent a few days there before the tour actually started.

Bamako has more than 1.5 million people spread out over a large area. It's a very poor city, and its downtown area does not have large modern buildings (except the BCEAO Tower, which houses the bank which controls the currency of the French West African countries, including all of them we visited).

The man second from the right is Assou Sagara, the owner of Saga Tours, who met us personally at the airport, took our passports into an immigration office, which allowed us to bypass the line. On the left is Mohammed Kone, our guide.

We had allowed a couple of days of slack time in Bamako, and Dave took the opportunity to do a little work next to the pool at the Mandé Hotel.

San Toro, a nice African restaurant we went to, featured a kora player. A kora is much like a harp, and the music is completely hypnotic.

Our driver, "Mohamed". (His name is actually Ahmed Mouhmoudoune).

Most of the places we went in Mali, including Bamako, are on or near the Niger River, which starts in Guinea, flows through much of Mali and a corner of Niger before becoming a delta in Nigeria. Bamako was the furthest upstream, and we just progressed further downstream as the trip went on. This monument near the river is the Tower of Africa, said to represent a baobab tree. Here's an interesting article about this and other monuments in Bamako.

We brought 500 eclipse viewers with us to hand out to people so they wouldn't damage their eyes looking at the partial phases of the eclipse. We picked them up in Paris since the ones there were printed with instructions in French. We handed a few out many of the places we went, since even though Mali wasn't in the path of totality, the eclipse would still be very significant. This was the first of several "feeding frenzies" where we were mobbed by people wanting something being handed out, without necessarily understanding what it was or when to use it. We resolved to give them only to teachers from then on.

Driving everywhere in Mali, stuff was sold by the side of the road. Here's a shoe store.

These guys are selling coconut.

And everyone is selling phone cards.

We've parked by the side of the road outside Bamako to inspect termite mounds. Mohamed is saying hello to one of his other driving friends. I have often got the impression there is a relatively small community of travel service providers, and they know each other.

This termite mound was especially mushroom-like. They are hard, like brick. Most of these were about knee-high.

There were several small villages we stopped at various places in Mali. Generally, we'd meet the village chief, and then walk around and look at stuff. Here's the chief of the first village we visited. More sights from the village...

On to Segou