I wrote an email to my dad last week with the subject header "Mali is bloody cold." Nobody had warned me about this. It's in the desert for god's sake.

Still, I have now revised this to parts of it, at certain times of year. I arrived about two weeks ago, but have spent most of the time in obscure villages on the edges of cliffs, or sleeping in the middle of the Sahara, or lying on the floor of a boat clutching my stomach in agony, in none of which places email was widely available, so all the time I spent on the few available (slow) connections was reserved for things like reassuring my hyperventilating parents and trying to find out about bizarre American passport regulations, but I realised that the longer I put off updating this, the worse it would be.

So, I'll try and keep it brief, cos there's nothing worse than 4 pages of name-dropping when you're trying to revise, but it has all been very random and exciting.

First, I went to the Dogon country, where I met a lovely French couple who allowed me to go with them, and we had a great time, walking between all the little villages and scrambling up and down the stunning escarpment. There was a rather unfortunate incident when I got something in my eye, and no-one could see it, so they told me to get a grip and dragged me up the cliff, and by the time we returned, whatever it was was well and truly embedded in my eye. We got back to the campement and I lay writhing on the bed, unable to open my eye, while five men sat secretly around in a circle, and then they came over, pinned me down and shoved a handful of something in my eye. I spent about five minutes crying and clutching onto Julia and Benoît until it was 'finished' and the men told me to sit up, yanked up my eyelid and wiped about thirty black seeds off my eyeball. Bear in mind that it freaks me out to watch other people put contact lenses in... Anyway, it worked, so I have faith in traditional remedies, but, yeah, it was fairly horrific.

After the Dogon country we came to Mopti, a very touristy town on the Niger, which was very pretty but rather full of people trying to sell us necklaces. I did succumb to the temptation to buy 2.5m of gorgeous purple scarf-ness, which is extremely pretty, but transferred a lot of purple dye onto most of my neck and face the following day. It was nice to see a proper toilet again, but we left for Timbuktu the next day... which was possibly the most horrendous journey I have ever made in my life. Except, perhaps, for the trip back from Timbuktu. Basically, we spent ten hours in the back of a jeep with two more people than there were 'seats' and, well, there isn't really a road...

We were quite glad to get there, and had the amazing good fortune to meet the most interesting guy in the world on our first morning. (The guy you recommended, Sarah. Completely by accident. He's fab.) He lives in the northernmost house in Timbuktu, and you really get the feeling you could walk in a straight line north and not see much more than a few tents and camels till you get, well, to the north of Algeria. His wife is a former Peace Corps volunteer and they looked after us very well. Julia and Benoît went home after 2 nights, cos they had no more money, but I stayed an extra couple of days, went on a camel trip into the desert (it was FREEZING at night) and gatecrashed a guided tour of the town with some kindly Dutch people. He also organised my boat ride back, but that was slightly less magical. Obviously, the scenery was amazing, and looking back it's going to be a good anecdote, but certain aspects of it were rather unpleasant. Namely, it is quite difficult to spend three days on a boat, more so when none of the other passengers speaks French, let alone English. Furthermore, well, I was doing quite well with the whole fish thing (I once ordered tuna on pasta and don't mind barracuda) but, well, being in the middle of the river, there are quite a lot of fish, so three meals a day was rice with slimy fish gravy, and I think we're back to square one. In fact, I'm not sure I even want to eat rice again for some time. Also, I was eating with my hands, and washing in the river, and got covered in grease every time I went to the toilet (it was a hole in the back of the boat and involved climbing over the engine), and, obviously, the more unhygienic it got, the more I needed to go to the toilet (not to be too specific) so it was a sort of vicious cycle and I was kind of glad to disembark and sprinted off the boat before anyone could serve me dinner.

I went to a town called Sévaré not too far from Mopti (where the boat went to) and arrived at my hotel, which was run by this American guy, who didn't mind that I hadn't reserved, and I walked into a room full of Canadian medical students eating tortillas, and having people I could talk to (in a choice of languages) and food I could eat was rather a shock to the system, but a very welcome one, and there was even a hot shower. And the next day the medical students were replaced by cynical Americans (who were helpful about visa problems) and Norwegian missionaries. And there was even a pool. And pancakes for breakfast. It was heaven.

And today I am in Djenné, which has a fantastic market and mosque, and I just bought too many blankets, so I now have hardly any money, so am going to hurry along the rest of the trip to get to the bit where I get to stay with people sooner. (Have replanned route to go to stay with new-best-friends, partly cos they're lovely and partly cos they owe me a tenner.) I also had an email from my mum saying 'your father's found you some nuns in Bolgatanga' which is not a sentence you come across very often. (Unless, I suppose, your father has some sort of network of nuns who are prepared to let smelly students crash on their floor. But that is highly unlikely.)

So, yeah, only three weeks to lug my blankets round and then it's back to the boring business of real life and earning money. Meh. And this internet café was quite a trek from town (get 100 m from the market and tourist hotels and this is the most peaceful place in Mali) so I'd better email the boy to tell him when to come and meet me at the airport (armed with warm clothes) and head back hotel-wards before it gets dark and try and find someone to have dinner with. And maybe a beer, if my stomach can tolerate it.

Well, I made it to Saturday 14th in one piece! I did spend, however, approximately 22 hours on a bus, or waiting for the bus at various checkpoints. It was highly unpleasant and I must have managed about 2 hours sleep, not all at once, but once it got light I could look at the countryside, which is very flat, and dusty, and full of donkeys. The Togo-Burkina Faso border crossing, for those who shared that memorable experience with me, bears no little resemblance to the infamous "arsehole of Africa" - except I arrived there just before dawn. This, I will admit in a vain attempt to draw something positive from the experience, avoided some of the problems generally associated with border crossings in Africa, i.e. hundreds of people trying to hustle you everywhere, but did make it all rather surreal. And it was actually cold. COLD. I had been completely unprepared for that and was just wearing a flimsy skirt and top, rather like that bit in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius where he says he's been living in California so long it never even occurred to him to take a coat when he went to Chicago.

On leaving Lomé I had taken Sarah's advice and decided that wearing my 'wedding ring' as soon as I left the house would be by far the best policy, and despite the fact that it is *blatantly* too big for that finger, and *blatantly* was picked up for about £2.50 in a random shop in Lamu rather than symbolising some lifelong bond of love (well, it may symbolise some lifelong addiction to jewellery shopping in hot countries, but that's a different story), I managed to fool the random Nigerian who sat beside me (which he was very excited about because he didn't speak French and hadn't had much conversation for the past two weeks). What actually ensued was probably still more pleasant than fending off propositions for 22 hours, but the upshot of my brilliant plan was that everyone on the bus thought I was married to the Nigerian (nothing could be further from the truth: he was whiny and stroppy and started to seriously piss me off, and after Atakpamé I spent the journey listening to the much more tranquil Snow Patrol) and he spent two hours asking me questions like, 'What's marriage like?' and 'I once saw a film called Titanic - does love like that really exist?' Which at least made the journey fairly comic...

I'm staying in Guillaume's office in Ougadougou, which is v central and nice though extremely dusty. I am extremely tired, however, so I don't mind in the slightest, it's just nice to be able to stretch out in a straight line again.

I wanted to end this with some appropriate lyrics, but on googling, I've just discovered that I've been under the impression 'Catch the sun' contains the line 'I miss the way you laugh' (instead of 'lie') for the last five years, and it's no longer appropriate at all, so I'm going to go home and sulk and catch up on some sleep, and then tomorrow I'm going to lie by a pool and recuperate, and on Monday I'm going to get a visa for Mali and look at the market and find a bus, and on Tuesday I'm going to get said bus, go to Mali, and try and find a guide to take me trekking in 35° heat.

How did I get more tanned sitting on a bus than from spending three and a half months virtually on the beach? Truly, life is mysterious.

Well, this may be the last time I am in Lomé without a Lonely Planet. I have a bus ticket booked for Friday (why I am I getting a bus in Africa, after dark, on Friday 13th???) and a putative route round Burkina and Mali for the next month and a half. (Here I will pause briefly to dance around the internet café singing 'my loan has come through, my loan has come through' and generally being jubilant that my bank account is in credit once more... or will be until I transfer lots of money to my offshore bank account (or my Barclays account, something like that) to fund aforementioned exciting travels.) I am alternating between great excitement (rock formations! woo!) and fear (email from Sarah saying, 'make sure you have a wedding ring) but I sort of feel ready to move on.

Those who were aware that the end of last week was 'rather shitty' and who very kindly felt sorry for me, will now be relieved to know that this week is great and I don't want to leave. The reasons it was shitty included:

• my housemates were at each other's throats the whole time
• I had difficulty understanding an article on French syntax
• I passed the scary ex-housemate on my way home and was bizarrely troubled
• some guy grabbed my arse about fifteen mins prior to aforementioned incident
• I had no money
• the French news made Europe look all snowy and pretty
• I was having shirt issues (not my shirt, shirts for my brothers)
• STAESA were ****ing me around about paying me back my tour deposit from, like, three months ago

and various other reasons, the sum total of this all being that I felt like I was a long way away from everyone I liked. I am now upset for a whole host of other reasons, namely Lomé has been my home for ages, I've learned to be independant and self-reliant here, my housemates are no longer arguing and have been lovely to me, I've been to the beach for the last time till god knows when, Guillaume has a friend staying atm who is LOVELY and musical and funny (and 38 and a software salesman, so the boy doesn't need to worry!!).

Last night was wonderful. After the beach in the afternoon we called on some friends and they have a small pool thing (like a children's paddling pool but *just* big enough to swim in) and we splashed around in that despite the weather being freezing (or thereabouts... perhaps not *freezing* but bear in mind I haven't felt cold, bar a tropical storm in the middle of the night in early November, since Estonia) and then the friend threw Maï in, and later threw the dogs in (he has two adorable labrador puppies I want to kidnap) and we ended up staying for a lovely dinner of Lebanese chicken and rice, and extremely strong Camembert. While talking about cheese, some of the assembled company though I said 'prix' when in fact I'd said 'Brie' and (although this was probably due to the fact that I speak rather indistinctly even when speaking English and sober), inspired by the several glasses of wine I had consumed, I launched into a lengthy exposition of partial versus full voicing in English and French (fervently hope Holly is reading this or my entire reading public will have missed the funny side of this), totally undeterred by my imperfect understanding of phonetics, the haziness of my memories of prelims and the fact that I couldn't think of the French for 'vocal folds', 'vibrate' or 'voiced'. And then Guillaume and Philippe started playing chess (which I played for the first time in about 5 years last Sunday) and Guillaume's friend started playing the drum and Maï was dancing and the power went off so this was all candlelit, and, yeah, I'm going to miss this.

I sort of wish I'd just gone somewhere in October and stayed there all year. I feel like I've been leaving places and people I've grown attached to since the end of Trinity and will keep doing this until the summer. I find it hard to believe that this time last year I was sitting on a train watching 'Bowling for Columbine' with Thomas (we went first class, don'cha know!), and frantically reading Duras books, and getting horrifically drunk on a semi-regular basis, cos that was a brilliant way to cope with the fact that I was feeling unhappy, and that all seems like a very, very long time ago. Tomorrow is exactly three years since I first set off for Africa. How much I've changed since then.

Sorry for the self-analysis. I promise this will soon get back to showing off about how fantastic my life is. I was once told that Christmas could be seen as a time to reflect on how your life compared with the same time last year, and being a long way from home and the library being closed, I spent a lot of time reflecting. Hence pensiveness, nostalgia etc.

Anyway, articles on diglossia and language policy beckon. No rest for the wicked or chronically masochistic. Hope they've fixed the aircon in the library, all my clothes are in the wash, pending imminent departure.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Hope you all spent it in a more riotous fashion than I did. I have now been to an office Christmas party and watched TV on New Year's instead of going out - feel very old. I was also sober enough to remember midnight, which hasn't happened for several years. We didn't spend all night in front of the telly, but went out just after they celebrated the New Year in France (11p.m. here) to try and find some fireworks. There weren't any but we had one of our own that we lef off in the street. Then we went home and had champagne in plastic cups in the car en route. It was still pleasant, if rather peaceful, and the office party was fun, if rather surreal: kind of like a cross between a black tie dinner and a children's party (lots of people dancing round in a circle in between courses). Said goodbye to all my friends and was given a lift home by the ex-husband of the previous inhabitant of my house, who happens to now be married to my colleague Arlette. Small world.

I have now left work. For a variety of reasons, not least that I've finished my stint as a data entry clerk/emergency receptionist (when everyone else is in a meeting) and need time to learn things about African linguistics. I'm not sure what it says about me as a person that when faced with a choice between helping out in a vibrant, friendly NGO that is doing great things to help needy people and sitting in a library selfishly reading about Kabye morphology I choose the latter. I remember writing a letter to Livvy when I was in Paris saying I felt that at some point I'd have to choose between academic/literary introspection and actively trying to better the world, and I fear the former is gaining the upper hand. I am a geek, I may as well embrace the fact. It just makes me feel like I'm putting myself above everyone else, doing something that is of no benefit to anyone, just because I enjoy it, or I'd like to think I'm good at it. Or maybe it's just that the library has really good air-con.

So, as of tomorrow I will be a full-time geek for two weeks before heading off to the desert. And then I come home and my life gets considerably less interesting as I actually become engaged in the business of earning money. This will be rather a shock to the system, I fear.

Keep emailing!

Hannah xx