Finalizing the journey.

the next morning we donated the rest of our stuff. Tents, sleeping bags, sleeping mats, our large bug zapper - everything we did not need for the last stage to Bamako. The last stage made people take the top of their cars off - lowering the front windscreen. The airflow would be nice. No such luck with the hearse. We still have hour heater set to full heat - and even if we got to change the direction of the fan that blows hot air into the car it still gives off quite a lot of heat. As we were driving along I believe the highest temperature we measured in the car was 56C. That is hot, even in black suits.

Along the way we stopped at a gas station. Of course we got swarmed with kids that wanted gifts. We really had none - saying "Cadeaux fini" did not really work. As we were about to go off and I got into the back seat they kept pointing at a bag of trash. This mostly consisted of empty water bottles, baby-wipes, wrapping paper and such. I gave our trash to the oldest looking girl there and she took it away ripped open the bag and the rest swarmed around grabbing... Stuff. I am not sure what they found in our trash that was worth it. It was surreal. Then I made the great mistake of thinking that I could leave the rest of our trash right there. I opened the car door and put it on the ground. The car got charged by bunch of kids. Crashing into each other and the car. Ripping the bag apart. Fighting over the scraps of the white man. It was heart wrenching.

The car was falling apart as we were driving. Our center console was all but collapsed. We expected the windscreen to fail at any moment. Our cooling fan had to be turned on with a switch, but it could not be kept running as it would drain the battery. Our extra lights went out when we hit a huge pothole. The power to the gps and other electronic gizmos got caught in the breaking pedal and got cut. Our radio had lost its juice. The right tail light was taped in place after the road to the first Diema. The shocks had all but died in the Atlas mountains. The springs had given up keeping the car up and we had once again the ground clearance of a racing car. And a fine layer of dust covered everything.

The car limped into Bamako. I got up on top of the coffin. I was going to ride the car across the finish line! And I got to ride trough a lot of the detours we made trough various parts of Bamako. Heads were turned. Finally we found the finish line. The journey was finalized. We had made it. All the way. Everybody kept gratulating us for making it - we even got cigars (thank guys!). It felt great. And we could not quite believe it ourselves. We kind of expected to have to go on the next day.