(See also: Festival sur le Niger: Installment the first)

After shopping for pottery, we drove down to the Festival grounds. There were a few dozen stalls selling crafts of various kinds. The schedule said there would be a performance of "marionettes" by the river in the morning, as well as "danse nautique," but we never found puppets or nautical dancers.

We wandered around, doing a little shopping, bumping into people we knew from Bamako. A Segou group called Maya Maya played some catchy music and gathered a crowd. We sat down at a snack bar for a drink, then moved to a restaurant for lunch.

In the late afternoon we moved out to the pier to watch the boat races. People milled about aimlessly.

A pirogue floated around the pier and serenaded us.

Suddenly, the teams started rowing furiously into the river ... in all different directions. Some turned and came back, others kept plowing forward. "I'm not sure what's going on," E said, "but I'm sure we'll find out soon enough." "Or not," I said. Eventually the pirogues regrouped at the shore.

A little while later, this toubab woman came out to the pier with an orange festival flag. Two Malian gentlemen who might have been in charge pointed her first one way, then another. Then, rather unceremoniously, she signalled the start of the race.

And it was all captured for national television.

After all that excitement, we headed back to the hotel for more naps. (We scheduled them, wisely, for before dinner this time.) Rested, we ate grilled capitaine at the Djoliba hotel and walked down to the river for the concert geant. Unlike earlier, police at the gate checked for our festival badges and passes.

The stage was actually set up in the river, just offshore. We sat on the man-made stone banks for the four-hour show (ouch).

Super Biton opened up, as on Friday; then a tall lanky man whose name I've forgotten. After him, Abdoulaye Diabate really got things going. I'm not sure which one was Abdoulaye, because there were four men dancing and singing the entire time. The odd thing was that they were all dressed completely differently: One in coat and tie, one in a traditional mudcloth outfit (with matching hat), one in casual Friday khakis and golf shirt, and I can't even remember what the fourth one was wearing. A boubou maybe?

Finally around 1:00 a.m., his holiness Salif Keita graced us with his presence. I wish I could say more about his set, but honestly it was all I could do to keep my eyes open, and my butt hurt. So. Much. So much that at 3:00 a.m., back at the hotel, the wafer-thin FOFY mattress -- that felt, Friday night, like it was petrified -- was like a soft, dreamy nest.