as I am on a French keyboard. Our hotel here in Sevare has a cyber cafe. Heavily air conditioned and with a robust bqckup power supply; which we saw in action last night when a storm blew into town and took out the power. Rainy and strangely cool today after a week of blistering heat (100s).

Today we visited Mopti. We saw slabs of salt at the port market that come from the Sahara and travel 25 days by camel caravan to Timbuktu. Tomorrow we will go out on the Niger in a pirogue (small boat) and see fish-smoking by the Bozo people (traditional fishers) and pirogue-making.

This typing is excruciating -- more later.