by phil | Jul 21, 2020 | Stories
Just when I think I can get off my regimen of valium and bush weed, 2020 drags me back in. When I last posted, we had preemptively shut down the restaurant and hotel and a group of us moved in with essential provisions. Ah, the halcyon days of early voluntary...
by phil | Apr 18, 2020 | Stories
fort architecture Some blog posts will tell you in advance how much time it will take you to read them. I am going to offer a different metric that relates to how much this post will depress you. At the moment, it sits squarely in the middle between “ca va...
by phil | Mar 14, 2019 | Stories
Background: we have a hotel/bar/restaurant in Bamako. We were evicted 6 months ago. A few weeks ago I was standing in the courtyard of a villa. There was an adolescent baobab tree a few meters away from an empty swimming pool. I started having a vision. The baobab at...
by phil | Oct 31, 2018 | Stories
Please get comfortable. With your drink of choice. I am enjoying some rum with bitter lemon. In 1985, Mamady Kanta sold a parcel of land in the Badalabougou neighborhood of Bamako to Gustave Bongo, son of Omar Bongo, the President of Gabon from 1967 until his death in...
by phil | May 7, 2018 | Stories
At the beginning of 2017, I put together a list of things I wanted to accomplish for the year. This is how I did: ✓ Introduce my mom to Andre and West Africa. Mission accomplished in February of last year, right before we left for our first jakarta safari. ✓ X Ride a...
by phil | Dec 29, 2017 | Casamance, Gambia, Senegal, Stories
When I left off, we had just put the clients on the bikes. After tooling around the campement and getting comfortable on the bikes, we rode through a few sandy streets before arriving at a small shawarma shack. After an unexpectedly delicious lunch of chicken...
