Uprooting your life after over a decade of calling a place home is worth talking about, but it is not really the point of this post. For one, I am tired of talking about it. For two, the permanence of this move is unclear. Someone called it a test run and that is what...

Leaving Mali has always been an intangible possibility. It was something we would do eventually. Not now. One day. And it was something we planned on doing – eventually – for practical reasons. Namely, to get Bintou US citizenship and to spend more time with family. ...

pulling into Assomada on the island of Santiago About 5 months ago we took a group of clients to Cape Verde on a Scoot West Africa trip. It was less of a scoot trip and more of a drinking hiking and drinking trip. That's right, we are a very versatile travel outfit....

Hey there. It's been nine months since I last posted here. It feels like years have gone by, though. Given recent events, pandemic, newborn, toddler-now-preschooler, collapsed lung, I am just happy I remembered to renew the domain name. When I last wrote, we were...

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...

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 aller" and...

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...

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...