On a Proposed Trajectory

Hello folks, please allow me to interrupt your regularly scheduled programming of "The New Moroccan Adventures of Celeste and Tiffany" for my own ramblings.
It was-- jeez, I dunno Celeste, maybe nine months ago that we started talking about this journey? Celeste asked me if I wanted go on an around-the-world-in-80-days trip with her. After four years of disciplined book-learning and freezing winters, she was understandably ready to blow this taco stand called North America. When she asked me, I immediately imagined the long list of E.T.s, A.D.s, S.N.s, and so forth who, naturally, must have been invited before me but who, for some reason, had to decline. It was one of the best older-brother moments of my life to hear that Celeste in fact asked me first. The trip itself got whittled down by reasonable temporal and fiduciary constraints to "just West Africa," although when I look at the six-week, 1,500 mi/2,400 km (albeit half by plane) dogleg through four countries, in middle of the rainy season, it feels pretty substantial. All the moreso for Celeste with her head start in Maroc!
Here's an outline of what we have in store (though flexibility will undoubtedly be of the essence):

• June 22, 23: Arrive in Dakar, where we'll stay with stay with this guy, my good friend Abubakar, the most hardworking barber in all of Dakar, more on him later fo' sho'. We'll live up the nightlife dakarois, see old friends, hit the beach, nab some visas and plane tix for Mali and Burkina and generally live it up.
• July 3: Fly to Bamako, meet some interesting members of the coalition on community forest rights that I worked for until last week, nab another visa.
• July 6: Head to Djenne (potentially by pirogue?), home to the world's largets mud structure and an old friend I met when passing through here in 2005 who has since started a tourist lodge there.
• July 9: Bandiagara-bound, via a stopover in the eponymous town, where we'll hike along the great escarpment and get a glimpse of Dogon-country
• July 15: Cross into Burkina Faso, to Nouna in the northern Boucle de Mahoun region (in'ch'allah, and contingent on road conditions) via San, Mali. Outside Nouna is a small village called St. Jean, which is the site of a model- village-type development intervention sponsored by a small NGO. We connected with them through WWOOF. We'll spend about a week living here and volunteering labor with a reforestation project they have going on.
• July 24: Leave for Bobo Dioulasso, spend a couple of days here and try and check out La Mare aux Hippopotames.
• July 26: Travel south into Ghana at Hamale, and make our way to Mole National Park for what I hear to be excellent up close wild animals and, perhaps more important for some, an excellent variety of insects.
• July 31: Make tracks down the middle of Ghana, probably overnighting in Kumasi, to get to Accra in time to eat at this rad rooftop sushi joint Monsoon and catch a hiplife act and chillax until we leave on the eve of Aug. 4.

Rather substantial, n'est-ce pas? But half the fun [w/c?] will be seeing how the ideal conforms to reality. Stay tuned, gentle people.
yours,
lb