Back in Djenne and onto more important and more pressing problems- the water is coming. It is possible to see it progressing - a few meters per day now, so it won't be more than a few days before it stands by the hotel gates again. Although the rains have been plentiful here in Mali this year, the water that now threathen us once more arrives not only from Mali but from the sources of the Niger, high up in the mountains of Guinea.
Tomorrow morning the hotel goes into emergency mode- there are no guests here, and the whole staff will be filling ricesacks with earth, shoring up the fortifications of last year.