The Sleeping Camel

I have spent nearly a week in Bamako doing useful things, beginning last Thursday morning with my voting for the Swedish Parliamentary elections at the Swedish Embassy.  I then stayed on to photograph the new MaliMali collection and to put it up on the MaliMali website: a task I could not have achieved in Djenne because of the bad internet connection. None of my customary friends and hosts were in Bamako, so I had to cast around for somewhere to stay. I could not quite face the Catholic hostel by the cathedral and its spartan cells so I decided to go up one notch and to stay at a hostel  called The Sleeping Camel, still good value, and well known to the back packer variety of travellers.  A very friendly sort of place where people spread out their Michelin West Africa maps over the tables, drink beer from the bottle and discuss travel plans, mainly in English, since the place is owned by Matt, an Australian and now run by Phil Pauletta, a young American.  It turned out to be a very useful place to stay: I was able to use Djenneba (above)  the chef as one of my models and Hawa the waitress as the other one, and John an English biker on a trip around the world lent us his bike as a prop!