To Sindou!

A few kilometres after the lake a man on a motorbike flagged me and Barney down. We stopped and he turned around to shout so,ething at us. I was driving and instantly thought we'd accidentally cut him up, but it turned out he saw the breadsticks poking out of Barney's bag and told us to wrap them up because they would go stale. Being blokes we thanked him, and made a small effort to cover the sticks up. In hindsight, we should have covered them in a plastic bag.

The 51km road wasn't the worst to drive on - the odd cavernous pothole here and there, random moguls in the middle of the road and a few close shaves in the sand at the side of the road - but the worst thing was the dust. It covered absolutely everything and we looked red at the end of the day! Those driving resorted to wearing sunglasses, which helped a bit, especially Dree in his fetching Terminator shades.

We stopped for lunch and found that half the French sticks were hard as rock (the half that was sticking out of Barney's bag!). Nevertheless, had another nice veggie sarnie in the shade at the side of the road. Caused a bit of a stir in fact, as locals passing by stopped and stared with bags of grain and huge dishes of yams on their heads.

Carrying on for another few kilometres we had a big problem - the front tyre on my and Barney's bike was flat as a you'd like. There was no way we could continue, because the wheel kept slipping in the soft sand. Completely un-rideable, me and Barney started pushing (damn heavy beasts, especially over sand) whilst Kez and Dree carried on to find a mechanic. Luckily it was late afternoon and there was quite a lot of shade along the road, but it was still ridiculously hard work. We took it in turns and pushed it for about 5km (YES, FIVE KM) in total before we saw a familiar green moto coming towards us.

Dree had found a mechanic after a few failed attempts at hamlets where no one spoke French! The guy was so chirpy and set right out at fixing the tyre. We decided to just pay for a whole inner tube as the other one was ruined - two punctures, one a massive tear. It was a bit of a pain, as they weren't our bikes, and we had to shell out about a fiver to get the new tube. But we were more than half the 51km to Sindou and had no choice.

We eventually got to Sindou and were greeted by the main attraction - the Sindou Peaks, a group of mountains that shot up straight from the ground and had great views across the valley. Pulling into another campement just on the outskirts of town (recommended by the guys at Boabab) we had a well deserved few bags of cold water before 'Papa', the owner, explained that there was a festival going on that evening with a mask dance. We'd heard of these 'Dances of the Masques' all across West Africa, especially Mali, but had not yet seen one. We didn't want to go to one set up purely for tourists. We wanted the real thing. And that's exactly what we got!

Papa led us out of the campement (telling us not to take any photos of the dance) and through a maze of mud huts. We heard some drumming and saw a crowd with their backs to us. Papa was really kind and took us around the circle of people that had gathered in an opening between some huts. The whole village (300 people) were all staring inwards at a slowly moving row of young men and women, led by some guys playing djembe drums and some orthodox metal bars making a clanging sound. But that wasn't the best bit.

Further into the circle were three people dressed in full costumes - all were completely covered with beige cotton overalls and then had sewn masks and long "hair" in either red or purple. They were pretty weird, and looked like a scarier version of the bad guy in Batman Begins. There was also another guy who was running around the edge of the dancers in a circle who was whipping the legs of anyone who tried to jump into the group. He was running around like a mad man, whipping with a long branch, before squatting by the side of the crowd for a few seconds. They must've been so hot in all that gear - it was easily a 30°C day. The children in the crowd screamed and ran away as all the characters took it in turns to jump into them and blow whistles they had under their masks.

Kez was invited to have a dance with some of the women in the inner circle (men and women were separate), and was taught how to do the strange "shuffle, kick the ground, and shuffle again" dance. She joined in for about five minutes, and not long after she left the three dressed up characters moved to a mound behind one of the houses. The music and crowd followed along, whooping and dancing away. It was pretty incredible to see this dance that nearly no one else gets to see. And even better as it wasn't for us tourist's benefit! Definitely going up there with seeing the wrestling competition two months ago in Senegal.

As the dance died down we snuck away and later learnt from Papa what the dance was about; although he seemed to be confused with our French (easy enough) and we got two stories. Firstly we learnt that the burial mound was for a chief of the village who died at the old age of 78 last month. The dance was therefore part of the remembrance for him, and at the end of the few weeks of mourning a new chief would be chosen.

However, Papa then explained that the dance occurred every few years, and all the youths in the village who were between the ages of 18 and 21 took part in a kind of 'coming-of-age' ceremony. That's why the children were swatted away by the masked man with a stick, and also the reason that the men and women had to dance separately. After the ceremony they could then mix with the opposite sex - not before! He also mentioned an annual dance for the harvest, and said that the two colours meant something in an ancient animist tradition.

Whatever the reason behind the dance, it was incredible to see, and will be a memory for me for a long time to come. We sat around the table at dinner that night reminiscing about what we'd seen, agreeing the whole trip to Africa is worth it for experiences like that.