Niger River Bank

The banks of the Niger at Segou are the best place to sit and absorb the river city's rhythm. Pirogues (wooden canoes) ferry people and goods across the water, fishermen work the shallows with nets, and the light on the river at sunset is remarkable. The embankment near the port area is the heart of daily life in the city, and watching the activity on and around the water is as good as any formal sight.

Boat trips on the river can be arranged through local guides — a few hours on the water gives a very different perspective on the riverside villages and the floodplain landscape. The Niger at Segou is wide and quiet; the intensity of the Inland Delta, where the river splits into hundreds of channels north of here, begins another hundred kilometres upstream.

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A story
The Niger River at Segou is part of one of West Africa's great anomalies: a river that flows northeast toward the Sahara before turning south and eventually reaching the sea. The Niger Inland Delta, which begins near Ségou and spreads into an enormous maze of channels, lakes, and floodplains upstream, is one of the most important wetland ecosystems in Africa, supporting millions of people and an extraordinary concentration of birds.

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