The Bandiagara Escarpment runs for about a hundred and fifty kilometres across central Mali, a sandstone wall that drops some five hundred metres to a sandy plain. From the top it looks like the edge of the world, flat and dry and hazy in every direction. Along the base and up the face, the Dogon people have built villages of mud-brick houses and granaries with pointed thatch roofs, many of them tucked into cracks in the cliff itself.
Before the Dogon, the Tellem lived here, and their small square dwellings can still be seen high on the rock, reached by routes nobody quite understands. The Dogon arrived in perhaps the fifteenth century, probably fleeing pressure from other groups, and they used the cliff as defence. Their culture is famous for masks, funeral ceremonies, a complex cosmology that researchers have been writing about for nearly a century, and a tradition of toguna, the low-roofed men's meeting shelter where you have to sit because you cannot stand up and lose your temper. UNESCO inscribed the escarpment in 1989.
This is a tough place for a motorcycle. Tracks on the plateau are sandy and rocky, and heat is serious: from March to May it can pass forty degrees. The rainy season, roughly July to September, turns tracks to mud and can cut off villages. November to February is the pleasant time, dry and cooler, though harmattan dust can leave the sky pale.
Travel safety in central Mali has been affected by conflict in recent years, so check current advice before you plan anything here, and consider hiring a local guide who knows the villages and the proper greetings. The people you meet are generally formal and warm, and the first thing you do on arrival is greet slowly, properly and at length.