The main activity of the morning, other than the usual packing up of our stuff and having breakfast, is packing away all the stuff that we all bought in Dogon. There was quite a bit of wood carvings and other stuff, and it was a challenge to find space for it all. But, in the end, we managed to find space for everything on the truck.
Shortly before 9 AM we headed off. Our first stop is Songo, where we arrive shortly after 10 AM. Songo is a Dogon village on top of the escarpment, which is famous as it is the village where most of the boys (and many of the girls) will go to be circumcised - the major initiation ceremony for the children. They will go between the ages of 5 and 13, and the ceremony is performed once every three years.
It is a very nice village. We walk through it to get to the base of a rock outcropping. A short way up is where the ceremony takes place. We are shown the rock drawing of a crocodile.
We then head to the rock wall where each boy, after they are circumcised will draw a symbol which will represent him for the rest of his life. There are hundreds of drawings and they have many different figures - including animals, masks, etc. At this spot the boys would line up and await their turn.
We then went to look at where they stored the musical instruments used specifically for this ceremony. They are stored in a small cave - quite available (that is quite amazing in itself that they are just sitting there in the open). They spin it around and it makes quite an interesting sound.
We then walk up to a rock overhang and get a great view over the village, including how it is laid out over all and how each family's home is structured. A man must have one granary for each wife. From there, we wander back down to the village and go to the school. They show us the school and indicated that they are trying to raise money for a new school. We all gave something. Prior to leaving the village, we were shown to a typical house. They first showed us where the old people live. It was built in the traditional way, with low roofs, dark and quite small. We were then shown a new style one, which did not have all the charm of the old one, but was bigger, had more light and higher ceilings.
We left the village shortly after 11 AM and started our drive to the Mali - Burkina Faso border. At 1 PM we arrived at Sevare. We stopped for lunch and to allow the cook group to shop. We had lunch in a nice, small pleasant restaurant where we sat outside under the shade of some trees. The food took a bit longer than expected as we suspect they had to catch, kill and prepare the chickens for the grilled chicken dishes that we had ordered.
At 2:45 PM we headed on our way and drove until 4:45 PM, when we pulled off the road for the night. We set up a bush camp just off the road. Prior to dinner we worked on our journals. After relaxing a bit following dinner, we retired to our tent for the night.
We guess that our achievement of the day (and for the trip so far) is that we crossed the 10,000 km mark on our trans-Africa travels (including truck, ferrys, pirogues and foot).