18.01.2016 - BAMAKO

After a couple of hard days I urgently needed a rest. Next destination was Bamako. When leaving the offroad piste to Manantali I met Casper. He has been a traveller for years as well by truck and choose for place next to river opening the Cool Camping in Manantali. The dutch man is very integrated and was on his way repairing a pump in the village. 

Afterwords it were about 100km only good conditions on track and I finally made longer distances pushing my bike hard and having lots of fun. 

I arrived in Bamako in the late afternoon and went to my spot for the next two days. Sleeping Camel is the adress to go for every traveller passing Bamako. You meet fantastic people from all over the world with all different destinations. Bikers on track: me (GER), Fabrice (F), Bert (NL), Felix (CH), Martin (CZ) and Will (GB). 

Go on Bert's website http://africaallroad.com/ and on Martin's http://www.zivotnamotorkach.cz/  to see other guys' experiences.

Probabely the most outstanding bike is Martin's two stroke  ČZ 175/470 from 1963. 

Thank you Chris for your Lifestraw! This handy device prevents you from dying of thirst. It was designed for disaster areas to guarantee the water supply. You can drink up to 1000 litres of every sources despite contamination. Baba, Dabeli and Diassigui were a bit confused a white man was drinking from the river. But with my fluent french I explained them how the filter works. I hope I have correctly written their names. I often have to notice that they unfortunately can't write their names. Either there basically is no school or they had no money going there. 

I spent there a day to my bike in the Camel to setup the ventils, oil the chain, clean the air filter. Proud again having the right spareparts in my cases when my clutch cable broke this morning. The bike suffered from the head, hard trails and especially the weight. I definitively had to drop off some of my baggage. There couldn't be a bigger destiny then meeting Rose here. She travelled to Mali and took her flight back tonight to Stuttgart. She still could give in one more piece of lugagge and carried a full bag with outsorted stuff home. My bike actually is a lightweight now after saving 16kg on my rear wheel. These are the lucky moments on your travell you'll never forget.