Goodbye to Bamako

We'd clocked up 4992 miles from the UK when we said goodbye to the Patrol last night - it was quite a wrench to leave her in the parking at CRES after the last month's travels!

Unsurprisingly the guy in charge of receiving the vehicles wasn't there when we arrived from Mopti at 10pm, so we left the logbook and keys (and my £2.99 cafetiere) with the cook instead. Forty minutes of packing and we stuck everything we wanted to keep into the back of a Merc taxi and headed for the airport, where the fun began.

When we'd arrived in Mali, we had crossed overland at some random point between two villages and had presented ourselves to the Gendarmes at Aourou. What we didn't do (and the Gendarmes didn't mention to us) was THEN go to the police in Kayes to get our immigration visas (the stamps in our passports from Aourou turned out only to be entry stamps and not visas after all, as I had suspected). So, when we turned up at the airport at around midnight, the police wouldn't even let us into the building to check in for our 3am flight, demanding instead that we go to our embassies the following day to sort the situation out! How helpful - fair enough, we'd made a mistake by not correctly immigrating, but let's just say that the police at Bamako Segou airport made us feel far from welcome. For a while it really did seem that we'd be heading back to Bamako!

During this late-night comedy show, I bumped into a Canadian chap called Tim and his girlfriend, who were having a similar problem, and in the end we offered the police 20,000 CAFs to "expedite the visa process" for all four of us. In return for our money we got a dedicated policeman to lead us through the departure formalities and make sure that everything went smoothly when our passports were required to be presented. It even seems a bit of a bargain - we didn't pay anything else for visa issuance, and I later spoke to some of the other teams who were on our flights, who had all paid 20,000 CAFs each (rather than between 4) to get their visas on arrival in Mali, so all in all I think things turned out well. We definitely didn't get bored waiting for our flight to be called!

We're now in the airport in Casablanca waiting for the second leg of our flight back to London... I spent a bit of time hunting for fresh orange juice, but I've given up now in favour of sleeping instead!