The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

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This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: The River Niger, Mopti

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Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a one-month trip I made to Mali in 2002. This was part of a larger, three-month journey that took me through Senegal, the Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana during 2002 and 2003.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled through West Africa for three months, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

The West

Tambacounda to Kayes

Written: 7 November 2002

There comes a point in every nightmare journey when things have already gone so spectacularly wrong, that you have no choice but to give in and laugh. It’s a huge relief when this happens; it means you can get on with enjoying the awfulness of the trip instead of worrying about whether you’re actually going to get anywhere.

I had it all planned, you see. I spent three days in Tambacounda waiting for the Wednesday express train to Bamako, which was due to arrive in Bamako on Thursday afternoon (though more likely Thursday evening, as the trains never run on time). This would give me Friday to get a visa for Burkina Faso, my destination after Mali, and if everything went according to plan, I’d be able to shoot out of Bamako and into the more interesting countryside at the weekend. ‘This should be fun,’ I thought to myself.

So I got myself up at the crack of dawn on Wednesday, packed and wandered up to the train station to buy a ticket for the evening train. I walked down the main street, by now a familiar sight, handing small change to the urchins and exchanging pleasantries with the proprietor of the shop where I’d bought all my water over the last few days. Yes, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I popped into the train station and headed straight for the chef de gare’s office. And there he was, true to his word, sitting out the back.

«Bonjour» I said.

«Bonjour» he replied.

‘I hope you can help me,’ I said in my chirpiest French. ‘I’d like to buy a ticket for the evening train to Bamako, if possible.’

«C’est supprimé» he said, shrugging.

I didn’t know what supprimé meant, but it rang a bell; I was sure I’d seen it crop up in a menu on one of the French computers in the local internet café, but I just couldn’t place it. Luckily I’d brought my trusty dictionary, so I fished it out, hoping for the best.

‘Supprimer, supprimer, supprimer,’ I muttered as my finger wandered down the page. ‘Ah, here we are. Supprimer, transitive verb, re holidays, bus service etc.: to cancel. Oh shit.’

It took a while to sink in, but there was no train. No train. It didn’t matter how nice I was to the chef, I wasn’t going to be able to buy a ticket, first class or otherwise. The next train wasn’t until Saturday night, and I’d go mad if I had to wait that long. I was going to have to put a brave face on it; the only alternative was a bus into Mali, and I’d heard some pretty unpleasant rumours about that particular journey.

Easy Steps

I didn’t waste any time, and after sending a quick email home with my revised plans I shot back to the hotel, grabbed my bags and took a taxi to the gare routière to see what the options were. The map made it look relatively simple; the first stage, 177km to the Senegalese border town of Kidira, was along a top-class sealed road, and from there to Kayes (pronounced ‘kh-aye’, to rhyme with ‘eye’), the first stop of any significance in Mali, was only 105km along less major roads. After Kayes the road deteriorated into dirt tracks, but apparently Kayes is connected to Bamako by a daily train service, which would mean I could still experience a West African train, something I’d rather been looking forward to.

Things started well. I got to the gare routière at 10am and found a bush taxi heading for Kidira with only three vacant spaces. I took one of them, leaving just two, and an hour later those got filled – a short wait given the time of day – and I started my trek northeast towards Mali.

As if this wasn’t lucky enough, I shared the taxi with a couple of friendly Spanish guys, Steve and Oliver, one of whom had already done the same journey, only the other way round, from Bamako into Senegal. This had to be good news; he’d know where the immigration points were, where to catch buses and so on. Things were looking up, and by the time we arrived in Kidira two hours later, I felt good. I was a stone’s throw from Mali, I was in knowledgeable and pleasant company, and the sun was shining high in a cloudless desert sky. ‘This should be fun,’ I thought to myself for the second time that day.

Welcome to Mali

On arrival in Kidira we got exit stamps from the Senegalese border guard, took a taxi across the border to the dusty town of Diboli on the Malian side, and got our entry stamps for Mali. I was pleased that my Malian visa was in order; the immigration official demanded payment of CFA1000 – which was a bribe, because you don’t have to pay anything if you already have a visa – but I couldn’t be bothered to argue, so I coughed up, got my entry stamp and wandered back to the bus station, an official visitor in Mali. And that’s when things started to go spectacularly wrong.

‘Hello, we’d like three places in a bush taxi to Kayes, please,’ I asked the chef de gare in the dusty stick shelter that is Diboli’s excuse for a station.

‘There are no bush taxis today,’ replied the chef in time-honoured fashion.

‘Um, what about this one?’ I asked, pointing to a bush taxi right next to the shelter.

‘No, there are no taxis today,’ the chef repeated. ‘You must take the bus, over there.’

I followed his finger, and there was a minibus, about the size of a large transit van, that could maybe hold 18 people. That didn’t sound too bad, so we shrugged our shoulders, coughed up CFA3000 each, and settled in to wait for it to fill up. There were already a few hardy locals in the shelter, and I hoped that the wait wouldn’t be too long; this was, after all, the only usable road border between Senegal and Mali, and the train wasn’t running until Saturday, so I had high hopes. It was one o’clock; we had the whole of the afternoon to cover the 105km to Kayes, which would be plenty of time.

By two o’clock I was a bit thirsty, so I wandered over the road to buy some water. It was cold; I was happy. Man can survive on water alone for a very long time, should the need arise. I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t need to prove the theory.

By three o’clock my stomach started to rumble, so I wandered over the road to the shop again, and bought a packet of coconut-flavoured biscuits which tasted as though they’d been sitting in the desert sun for five years. There was no ‘best before’ date on the packet; I was grateful for that, at least.

By four o’clock I was starting to get a bit sick of the view from the hard wooden bench in the bus shelter, so I decided to go for a wander round town. It took three minutes, but at least the people were friendly. Either that or they were laughing at me...

By five o’clock my arse was numb, my brain was numb, and my mind had slipped into that half-waking state when things seem neither real nor dream. If I could only summon up that feeling at will, travelling through the desert would be easy; the problem is that my mind only starts shutting down after hours of doing nothing, by which time it’s already wearing thin. It was around this point that I started visualising my plans gently floating away down the stream of life, with me stranded on the bank, powerless to do anything but watch. At least the visions were more pleasant than the reality of Diboli.

At six o’clock there was a flurry of activity as the bus boys called for our luggage and strapped it to the roof. I was disappointed to see there were no goats or sheep, but having winced in sympathy with the poor donkeys hopping round in Diboli’s afternoon heat, front legs hobbled with incredibly short lengths of rope, I guess it was for the best. Life in the desert is hard for humans, but it’s a darn sight worse for the animals.

The sun went down at a quarter past six, sinking into the dusty horizon with a beautiful silhouette effect. Desert sunsets and sunrises are something else; the sky was a bit too hazy with smoke from all the cooking fires, but we were a captive audience, and in a place like Diboli, you take all the entertainment you can get with good grace.

By seven o’clock I was getting hungry again, but luckily a woman came round selling mutton sandwiches, consisting of a bit of baguette with mutton brochettes stuffed in the middle, along with some unidentified sauce and onions. I ate two; they were manna from heaven in this town of dried biscuits, fading light and dusty lungs.

At a quarter past seven people started milling round the back of the bus, so we grabbed our bags, rushed down and managed to join the queue exactly at the back. Normally this is a bad move, as you end up with the shitty seats, but in this case it was a complete disaster; this was the most crammed bus I’ve yet seen, and we were stuck at the back, jammed against rear doors that looked like they’d fly open at any minute (in the event they only flew open twice in the whole journey, and nobody actually fell out, though it was close). The bus, a standard transit van with windows, had a hard wooden bench down each side, and another down the middle; each end was topped off by a bench too, but you couldn’t see the benches, let alone the floor, because they packed us in so tightly the only thing visible was squashed human.

To pass the time I counted the number of people. Including the babies, children and touts hanging off the back, we had 33 people jostling along in a van that would house a maximum of 16 in the West. I was dovetailed into the rear offside corner, one buttock wedged an inch higher than the other by the way the benches overlapped. In my right armpit was Oliver, and on my left was a young woman with two children, one of them a baby whom she breast-fed every now and then. But at least we were moving...

Under the Stars

Ten minutes into the journey we had to stop at the first police checkpoint, pile out, and show our passports. All those who had identity cards – i.e. the Senegalese and Malians – had to queue up in the police station to have their details recorded, and then we all crammed ourselves back into the van. By now we were getting good at it; in a squash like this you don’t give an inch, and everyone remembered exactly which postage-stamp seat was theirs.

The first tyre blew at 9.15pm, some two hours after we’d initially rolled out of Diboli, so out we piled yet again. Blown tyres are a fairly common event – I’d had one in Senegal and one in the Gambia already – but they’re slightly more fraught affairs on dusty roads where there’s precious little traffic, no light except for starlight, and no settlements. I wondered what it would be like to break down terminally in the desert; luckily I’d seen the bus boys pack a couple of spare tyres, so I knew we’d be fine.

The second tyre blew at 9.45pm, and again we flooded out onto the dusty highway. By this time I was rather getting into the stars; this being the desert, the sky was beautifully clear, and the moon was little more than a crescent, making the stars particularly brilliant. I was quite enjoying these breaks; they enabled me to get the circulation going again in my legs, which was a bonus.

The first replacement tyre lasted until 10.50pm, when a heavy lurch to the right indicated all was not well. By this stage we had our exit plan down to a tee, but this time things weren’t so rosy. We’d run out of spare tyres, and we were stranded. The only solution was for the driver to hitch a lift with a passing truck to Kayes, and to come back with some more tyres. I had no idea where we were, but nobody seemed to mind; throughout the whole thing the busload of men, women and children were delightfully upbeat, and apart from a few resigned shrugs, being stranded in the desert wasn’t going to get them down. Oh no.

While the driver thumbed down a truck, the bus boys went in search of wood. The desert air, clear and fresh after the smoky dust of Diboli, was turning cold, and I soon started shivering, but a few minutes later we had a roaring fire going on the road in front of the bus, and everyone crashed out on the dirt, jabbering away in Wolof, Bambara and French. I loved it; it was just like camping in the desert, if you ignored the occasional truck that shot past, showering us with dust. I lay down on my sarong, my daypack cushioning my head, and stared up into the stars as the party bubbled on around me.

I think I must have drifted off, because by the time the driver came back with another tyre, it was 2am. We poured water on the fire, smiled at each other and shoehorned ourselves back into the bus, heading once more for Kayes. By this time I’d given up worrying about actually getting anywhere, and decided just to enjoy the ride as much as possible; something told me the night wasn’t over yet, so I slumped against my neighbours and watched the starlit world bouncing by in the dark.

By 3.15am I was freezing. I’d been allocated the window seat, which would have been a bonus in the middle of the day but was another story in the middle of a desert night, and I only had a thin shirt to keep me from dying of cold. Then, like manna from heaven, someone turned the heating on, and my legs started warming up. Ah, it was bliss! I idly wondered why nobody had thought of this before, as it had been cold for quite some time, and then a thought occurred to me. African buses don’t have heating, and if they did it wouldn’t reach the back of a transit van packed with people, and with the sluggish logic of the wee hours it hit me that it wasn’t the heating. In a charming display of friendliness, my neighbour’s baby had just pissed all over my trousers.

In the Shit

As my watch ticked on to 4am, we finally arrived somewhere, though quite where that somewhere was, I couldn’t work out. A man opened the back of the bus and asked us to climb out, and I realised it was the customs post outside Kayes; we were close, but the fat lady hadn’t sung yet. We piled out and queued around the police station, showing our documents and smiling our most innocent smiles. And as we stood there, rubbing the sleepy dust from our eyes, our bus pulled away with all our luggage still on board.

The man next to me in the queue yelped and ran after the bus, and frazzled by the cold and the time of night, I ran after him. ‘Stop, stop,’ he yelled at the bus, and then he suddenly tripped, fell and completely disappeared. I screeched to a halt, wondering where on earth he’d gone.

I heard him yelling, somewhere down below; it turned out that in the pitch blackness he’d run straight into an open sewer. Open sewers are a common feature of the developing world, and are nothing more than water channels down the sides of the road that carry everything away to the nearest river; in the heat they’re active enough to be creating new life forms, and the one he’d fallen into was particularly big. Torches appeared, and there he was, apparently unhurt apart from a few grazes, standing knee-deep in raw sewage at the bottom of a 20-foot trough. ‘There but for the grace of God,’ I thought, and shivered with something other than the cold.

Thankfully he managed to get out, and after some more immigration time-wasting and a token unloading and loading of the luggage to satiate the custom official’s ego, we packed back into the bus and trundled along to the bus station, which we reached at 4.30am. Then it was a quick taxi ride to the train station, and I could almost smell success, as the train was due to leave for Bamako at around 7am. I might just make it to Bamako in time after all.

As if. Bounding up to the ticket booth, I smiled the smile of the terminal insomniac and asked about the train to Bamako. ‘There is no train today,’ said the chef. ‘Today is a Thursday, and there is no train on Thursday. The next one is tomorrow, on Friday morning.’

By this time, though, I wasn’t fazed. Instead I simply shrugged the shrug of the African traveller, found a flop-house to crash in, and collapsed into bed.

‘Welcome to Mali,’ I thought, as I slipped into dreams populated by buses, hot sun and – worryingly – warm, wet patches.

Kayes

Written: 8 November 2002

There isn’t a great deal to report about Kayes except it’s a dusty, distant town in the middle of nowhere which hasn’t been destroyed by the tourist trade – and that’s not surprising, as there’s not a lot going on. I spent my bonus rest day washing my clothes (which dried in under an hour in the dry desert air), writing, eating, buying train tickets, and hoping that I wasn’t going to have to spend too long out here.

I did see one thing of note, though. After I’d successfully secured our tickets for the Bamako train, Steve and Oliver suggested we hop in a taxi to visit the nearby Chutes de Felou, a scenic collection of rapids on the River Senegal some 15km from town. I had nothing better to do, so after a bit of bargaining at the taxi rank, we found ourselves bouncing once again into the outback.

It took some finding – the taxi driver didn’t realise we wanted the rapids, and stopped in the village of Felou where we had to persuade him to ask for directions and keep going – but what we found was a bizarre wonderland of water-eroded rock, forming a huge honeycomb effect across the entire width of the river.

It was frankly bizarre; we waded across a side stream towards the rapids, and found ourselves on an expanse of smooth rock, pock-marked with deep holes full of bubbling water and churning waterfalls. The river was low enough for us to be quite safe hopping around the rock, but it was high enough for the holes to be welling with dangerous-looking currents of green water. The effect of years of pounding river water was evident; the rock was as smooth as a baby’s behind. It was distinctly picturesque, and the locals seemed to agree; one by one men wandered in from the dusty savannah, stripped off and soaped themselves down, jumping into rock pools to wash off the heat of the day while the women did the same thing further downstream. As local bathrooms go, the chutes were pretty spectacular.

This was good news for Steve and Oliver, who turned out to be camera nuts. They each had cameras that bore little resemblance to mine; the picture size on each camera was professional, the negatives being 4cm by 6cm, miles bigger than my standard 35mm film; the camera manufacturers were Russian or somewhere equally scary; and they appeared to be completely manual. The two of them took such care over posing their shots, using tripods and filters and waiting for the exact moment to click the button, that my more cavalier approach of snapping relatively randomly seemed wholly inadequate. I’d exhausted my photographic patience in ten minutes, but they were still setting up shots an hour later, when we had to return to the taxi. I was impressed; this kind of photography is truly for the dedicated.

Then again, that night, as I hammered away on my keyboard in the hotel bar, they sat there doing Spanish crosswords from a book. I guess their approach to photography mirrors my approach to writing, and vice versa; whatever, it felt good to know others have similar dedication to their hobbies out here on the road.

Kayes to Bamako

Written: 8 November 2002

In retrospect, yesterday’s forced rest day was a good thing; the thought of going from the Kidira-Kayes bus journey straight onto the Kayes-Bamako train doesn’t bear thinking about, though at the time we’d have jumped onto the train if there’d been one. Thank goodness there wasn’t.

It wasn’t that the train journey from Kayes to Bamako was stressful – actually, it was great fun – but I would have spent most of it asleep if there’d been a Thursday morning train, and that would have been a shame. Taking a train trip in Mali is an experience you don’t want to miss.

I’d been told we could buy our tickets at three o’clock on Thursday afternoon for the 7.15am train on Friday morning, and sure enough there was the queue – not too long – in front of the ticket booth with the ‘Kayes-Kita-Bamako’ sign. Excellent, I thought, there’d be no pissing around with the inshallahs and head wobbles I’d been subjected to in Tambacounda. Queuing I can handle; every queue has a front, after all.

Unfortunately the touts were out in force, and they leapt at the chance to earn a buck or two. ‘All the tickets are sold out,’ they told me. ‘This ticket booth is closed for the day,’ they chimed. ‘I can buy you a ticket and you won’t have to wait,’ they said. I smiled, wobbled my head and said I was happy to queue; the one thing I had was plenty of time, and as they were hassling everyone in the queue, not just the toubabs, I figured that either the touts were talking rubbish, or nobody else in the queue was going to get a ticket either. I just ignored them, much to their consternation.

The queue, which was about 30 people long when I joined it, took one-and-a-half hours to grind its way to where I was standing, by which time the French for my order was etched in my skull. I’d offered to buy three tickets in first class for Steve, Oliver and me, as my French was supposedly better than theirs, and it couldn’t have gone more smoothly. It might have been the slowest queue on the planet, but I came out clutching three tickets for the 7.15am train, a snip at CFA12,000 a seat. Brandishing them like trophies of war, I caught the eye of one tout who had insisted the tickets were sold out, and slapped him on the back with a big smile. He laughed; being economical with the truth is one of the rules of African touting, after all.

On the Train

We got to the platform for 7am, just to make sure we didn’t miss it, and we found our seats with a minimum of fuss. The seats in first class are generously spaced with two sets of two seats across the width of the carriage, and as I settled in after the fiasco of my hat I idly wondered how long it was going to take to cover the 510km southeast to the capital of Mali. When Steve had gone from Bamako to Kayes it had taken him 12 hours, and that was after the train had sat in Bamako station for five hours past its scheduled departure time; but every journey has its own story, especially when the only thing you can say about the timetable is that it is never right.

In the event we only sat in the station for two hours before the engine tooted and the train lurched forward with a screech, and so started a long crawl through a dry, dusty landscape that would see us arrive in Bamako ten hours later at 9.15pm, a remarkably good time compared to some of the stories you hear. Steve was also an expert on the Dakar-Bamako train, for which the scheduled timetable says the train leaves Dakar at 10am on Wednesday morning and arrives in Bamako at 3.30pm on Thursday afternoon. I don’t think this has ever actually happened; Steve finally arrived in Bamako in the wee hours of Saturday morning, which made me rather relieved that I’d been unable to experience that for myself.

Unlike the express train, the local train stops at loads of places on the way, and it makes life much more interesting, because that’s when the excitement starts. When the train rolls in, the market comes to town, literally; women run up to the carriage windows with all sorts of food and drink balanced on their heads, and people spill out of the windows and doors to buy whatever they need to keep them going to the next stop. People pile off the train at every stop to stretch their legs, pray to Allah or chat to their friends, and with a blast of the horn and a screeching jolt, the train eventually pulls off again and everyone scrambles back on. It’s a hoot, watching the world go by from the comfort of a first class seat.

It’s pretty comfortable, too. Judging by the multilingual sign on the toilet door, the Bamako train once plied the rails of Europe, and the carriages feel like slightly faded but perfectly pleasant versions of trains from another generation, which is exactly what they are. My seat was properly sprung and barely ripped, the windows were smothered in dust but were all present and correct, and compared to the buses, this was luxury indeed. The ride was considerably smoother, too; the train went through some bumpy patches where we were bounced around on our leather seats like eggs on the back of a bicycle, but I was impressed by the quality of the service. And who needs punctuality when you’ve got the desert outside your window?

The landscape is fascinating, if only because it is so desolate. This is the semi-desert of the Sahel, a dry and dusty band that’s sandwiched between the Sahara to the north and the coastal rainforest of Ghana to the south, and it’s pretty harsh stuff. It’s hot, dry, dusty and remote, and its light brown hue is broken only by the occasional river that meanders through the parched landscape, leaving greenery in its wake. Villages of circular thatched huts and crumbling concrete buildings line the track, and lone farmers, wandering through their fields, stop and wave as the train rumbles past.

Another interesting sight on the way is the proliferation of bush fires. Everywhere along the route are the scars of fire, the blackened earth and broken trees poking out from under new growth. We even went through a couple of active fires, and the heat as we shot past the flames – which went right up to the edge of the track – was intense.

The one we went through after the sun had set was particularly impressive; it felt as if we were crossing the plains of Mordor, but it also showed how localised these fires are, as the area covered by the fire was quite small. It’s common practice in West Africa for farmers to start bush fires intentionally, as it kills off old vegetation and encourages new growth for cattle to graze, as well as flushing out wild animals and killing off crop-eating insects; these fires had all the hallmarks of manmade fires, much like the fires in outback Australia. Then again, judging by the number of cigarette butts that got thrown from the train into the tinder-dry scrub, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were quite a few unexpected bush fires out here, too.

There’s plenty of evidence of burning inside the train, too, but this time it’s from the engine at the front. I don’t know what kind of engine the Kayes-Bamako train uses, but it throws out clouds of black smoke every time it accelerates, and light, fluffy bits of soot float in through the windows throughout the journey, layering everything in a fine layer of black. I made the mistake of wearing my cream-coloured trousers for the journey, so it wasn’t long before I was a fetching two-tone colour, with dirty grey on the front and clean cream on the back.

But it didn’t matter; we arrived in reasonable time – despite an hour’s stop just outside Bamako to change the engine – and by 10pm I’d found a comfortable bed in a friendly mission catholique and could finally celebrate my arrival in Bamako.

A Serious Loss

Written: 8 November 2002

As I settled into my spacious seat and waited for the Kayes to Bamako train to start the long journey to the capital of Mali, I slipped into that quiet reverie you get when you’re settled in a comfortable seat and you know you don’t have to do anything for hours. I remembered the nightmare bus journey from Diboli, I thought about the heat of the desert, I wondered whether the open windows would provide much respite, and I decided I’d probably need to wear my hat when the sun was high enough to strike my side of the train. And with an icy shard of clarity I realised I had no idea where my hat was.

Ah well, you’re thinking, that’s a bit inconvenient, losing your hat like that, but you don’t know about me and my hat. My hat and I have been together through almost all of my travelling days, and I have grown so fond of the old bugger that it’s not an it, he’s a he, and he’s not just a hat, he’s my friend. We go back a long, long way, and we’ve been through a great deal together.

I first met my hat on 25 December 1995, when Laurence and Mary, my wonderful hosts in Melbourne, gave me the best Christmas present a traveller could have. Folded up inside a cotton bag bearing the name ‘The Great Australian Bush Hat in a Bag’ was a brown, leather bush hat with a spring around the inside of the wide brim. When you took it out of the bag it sprang into shape, but it was floppy enough to squash up into a little bag with no ill effects. It was perfect for my backpack-based travels, and I wore it constantly throughout Australia and New Zealand; it might be a cliché, but wherever I laid my hat, that was my home.

I was devastated, then, to find that when I pulled my hat out of my luggage after an ill-fated sailing trip across the Pacific, the salty sea air had dissolved the poor bugger’s rim, and had turned half the leather into a hard, brittle mess. There was nothing else for it; I gave my hat a burial at sea, wondering what I was going to do without him. It was like saying goodbye to a dear old friend, but at least I was going back to Australia, so I could no doubt get something else there.

In the event I found an exact duplicate in Brisbane, complete with the same cotton bag and the same moniker. I snapped him up faster than you could say ‘reincarnation’, and I was a happy man with my hat once more. We stayed glued together until I got back home in 1998, and we hit the road together every time I took a holiday. My hat – he’s a mate.

And that is why it hurt so much to realise he’d disappeared. I checked everywhere – on the floor, in my bag, under the seats – but I’m organised enough to know when something is missing, and my hat was well and truly gone. Perhaps someone had swiped him when I’d been stuffing my pack on the luggage racks? Or perhaps I’d left him at the shop when I bought my water for the trip? Whatever, I was desolate, and it showed; people thought I’d had my whole bag stolen, not just my hat, but they were genuinely sympathetic when I told them he was more of a friend than a piece of clothing. They knew what I meant.

I rushed out of the train and back to the shop, hoping that they might have seen my wide-brimmed friend, but they shook their heads. By now it was 7.30am and the train was supposed to have left at 7.15am, and I frantically looked up and down the platform, straining to see if anyone was wearing a bush hat. The panic started hardening into a sense of loss, and I realised that this was one of the worst things I could have mislaid. It’s annoying when things like cameras and sleeping bags get stolen, and it’s inconvenient when travellers cheques and passports go missing, but to lose something with such emotional value is far worse. I was never going to be able to replace my hat, and I slumped into my chair, no longer so happy at the prospect of sitting there all day. I could feel my mind settling in for a good, serious wallow.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ came a voice from behind me. Oh no, I thought, I’m really not in the mood for polite conversation with my fellow passengers, not just yet. ‘Is this yours?’ it said, and I looked round. I couldn’t believe it; a young man in a yellow shirt had found my hat, and my face must have said it all. He grinned back, handing him over, and explaining that I must have dropped him when I was boarding the train; he’d been trying to find the owner ever since, and the story of my desolation had spread through the station. I think I hugged him; I certainly shook his hand until it was about to fall off.

I raised my hat to the sky, and all around me my fellow passengers cheered. I guess people will watch any kind of soap opera while they’re waiting for their train to pull out of the station, even one with such a soppy ending.

Black Music

Written: 8 November 2002

My choice of accommodation in Bamako was ironic, given earlier events on the train. Inspired by the fires of hell outside the window of the Kayes-Bamako train, I plugged into my Walkman to soothe away the rest of the journey. For my African trip I’ve recorded five compilation tapes, each created according to a specific mood; they are Up (uplifting, happy stuff), Mellow (for those chill-out moments), Folk (hey, nonny nonny), Hard (air guitar optional) and Pot Luck (a random mix for random moods). Given the harshness of the environment, the satanic screeching of the train’s wheels and the fires raging outside, I chose Hard.

Half an hour into my foot-stomping trance I felt a tap on my shoulder; it was one of the locals who were standing in the section between carriages, along with the squawking chickens, sacks of rice and the somewhat fragrant toilet. He pointed to my headphones and wobbled his head. I couldn’t ignore him and he looked friendly, so I took off my headphones and smiled back.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hello,’ he said, and we launched into the pleasantries. Mohammed was a student from Bamako, but he went to university in Casablanca in Morocco, he was a Muslim observing Ramadan, and he was really interested in music.

‘Can I have a listen?’ he asked, and I handed him the headphones. He put them on, did a double take, but slowly started to settle into the riff-laden rhythm. A couple of minutes later he was grinning madly and giving me the thumbs-up sign, but inwardly I cringed; I knew which song had just started, and I knew the vocals were about to kick in.

‘What is this?’ he asked.

‘Err, it’s Black Sabbath,’ I said, just as Ozzy Osbourne launched into the first verse of the Sabbath’s seminal track ‘War Pigs’:

Generals gathered in their masses

Just like witches at black masses

Evil minds that plot destruction

Sorcerers of death’s construction

‘Blah Sabbah?’ he said. ‘What is that? The name of the song?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s the name of the band. In French it would be Dimanche Noir.’

‘Ah, Dimanche Noir,’ he nodded. ‘And the song?’

‘That would be “Les Cochons de la Guerre”, I suppose,’ I said.

‘It’s good,’ he said, and tapped along as Ozzy continued:

In the fields the bodies burning

As the war machine keeps turning

Death and hatred to mankind

Poisoning their brainwashed minds

Oh Lord, yeah!

I sincerely hope he didn’t understand Ozzy’s lyrics, especially the bit that goes ‘Satan, laughing, spreads his wings’ as Tony Iommi’s guitar arpeggios down through the octaves. I doubt that listening to Black Sabbath preaching about satanic war is one of the recommended observances during Ramadan – especially given the current tensions in the Gulf – but at least Mohammed seemed to enjoy the experience, which was the main thing, I guess.

Just don’t blame me if he decides to grow his hair, paint his bedroom black and talk in monosyllables. I was only being polite...

Bamako

Written: 12 November 2002

If selective hearing has a spiritual home, it must be Bamako. Never in my life have I known such a large proportion of people who are completely unable to grasp the words, ‘No thank you, I do not want a guide for the Dogon Country, I don’t want to buy any necklaces, and I don’t want to hear any authentic African drumming.’

This is a pity, because being white and being in the capital of Mali seems to attract potential guides and jewellery sellers like a light does moths; they circle round and round and bash into you again and again, seemingly unaware of how utterly futile their actions are, but still the dance goes on.

To be fair, it’s all pretty polite stuff, and if you’re courteous but firm, most of them give up after a while and find someone else to pester... but I couldn’t believe how quickly another tout would flit into view, punting exactly the same stuff; it was so incessant that it felt as if I was the target of a slickly orchestrated military operation. One evening I was sitting in a restaurant, waiting for my poulet yassa to arrive, and no fewer than five touts slid alongside me on the bench and regaled me with photos of the Dogon area, showed off their handicrafts, or tried to persuade me that the thing I wanted more than anything was to come with them to see some – wait for it – genuine African drumming at a special performance that very night.

The biggest problem with tout fever is that you have to make a concerted effort not to turn into a complete bastard. All your senses scream, ‘Go on, tell this idiot to piss off, tell him you’re sick of being constantly hassled, and tell him that he’s putting you off ever hiring a guide, especially one as patently stupid as him – he can’t even understand the word “no”, for pity’s sake.’ But you have to hold yourself back, because they’re only trying to make a buck; Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world, and who can blame the locals for trying to suck a bit of cash out of the fabulously wealthy tourists who slope into their country, with their Rolexes, smart clothes and credit cards?

So you keep your cool, you keep saying ‘no’ politely, and you keep on resisting the urge to snarl at everyone who introduces themselves to you in the street. The chances are high that most of the strangers who start chatting to you in the street are going to try selling you something, but not everyone is a tout, and you owe it to the silent majority to keep your cool. And when you meet a Malian who isn’t trying to offload a necklace or tour, it’s a wonderful thing, if only because it’s so novel.

Touts aside, Bamako is a lovely little place. Sure, when I say ‘lovely’ I’m not using it in the rich European sense – like most cities on this planet, Bamako has piles of litter in the streets, open sewers with that authentic open sewer smell, and pollution that you can cut with a knife and which gives you a sore throat after an hour’s stroll through the city centre – but once you get used to the city atmosphere, it’s a friendly place.

It’s also nicely compact, so walking round the centre is not only a possibility, it’s a great idea. Some areas of Bamako are smothered in stalls – sometimes it feels like one big market – and some areas have wide boulevards and businesslike buildings, but there’s normally something going on that’s worth watching. The grand marché is a particularly mad old place, full of stalls, colour and touts, and the area round the River Niger is surprisingly green for such an urban setting. I loved it.

Shopping in Bamako

At times, though, it wasn’t easy, especially when shopping. I hate shopping anyway, but I really wanted to buy a map of Mali so I could draw lots of pretty lines on it as therapy for spending hours cramped into Malian buses. You’d think this would be pretty easy in the country’s capital, but you try telling that to the shopkeepers. Bookshops aren’t exactly rife in West Africa – literacy rates are low, after all – and the few you find rarely sell maps, so I eventually found myself wandering into the grand marché, where I was pounced on by first one man, then his friend, and then another guy, all of whom wanted to know what I was looking for.

‘A tourist map of Mali,’ I said, and they went into overdrive, signalling for me to wait while they busied themselves asking around. I knew this was going to end up in a commission of some kind, but when I tried to go with them in their search, they weren’t impressed. ‘You should stay here and relax,’ they said, and disappeared into the market. I figured I might as well give them a shot; I hadn’t exactly had a lot of success on my own.

The first place they took me sold huge maps of Mali, carefully painted onto what looked like animal skin. They were nice, but nothing like the tourist map I was after; I explained that I wanted a fold-up paper map of Mali, for driving and tourism, and they signalled their understanding, tried to persuade me to look around the skin shop anyway, and when I insisted that I wasn’t interested in buying anything made of animal skin, they marched me off into the market once more.

This time the stall owner proudly presented me with a glossy hardback book full of pictures of Mali, which happened to have a small map at the front. Yet again I explained that I was looking for a fold-up map of Mali, not a book, and yet again they wobbled their heads and whisked me off, deeper into the market. I was starting to wonder if maps of Mali even existed, but sure enough one of them soon came back, brandishing a map of sorts. It was a transport map of Mali, showing all the major routes in a style so outdated that I figured it would be worth buying, if only because it was so utterly pathetic. I showed a slight interest, and they smelled blood.

‘What’s the price?’ I asked.

‘For you, seventeen thousand five hundred CFA,’ said the weediest of the three, who was obviously the main negotiator. I laughed; that meant the map cost about £17.50, a huge price, even when you consider that maps aren’t as common in Mali as they are in car-dominated Europe.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said.

‘Then how much you pay?’ he asked.

‘Four thousand CFA,’ I said. ‘And it’s barely worth that.’

‘Four thousand?’ he screamed. ‘That is far too low a price!’

‘Then make me a better offer,’ I said.

‘Fifteen thousand,’ he said. ‘It is a good map, look. It has Mopti, Timbuktu, Djenné, everything.’

‘Five thousand,’ I said.

‘I cannot go lower than fourteen thousand,’ he said, ‘and then I make a loss.’

‘Then we don’t have a sale,’ I said, and made to walk away. ‘We’re not even in the same ballpark here.’

‘Then you make an offer,’ he said. ‘How much you pay?’

‘Six thousand is all I would pay for this,’ I said, relishing the bargaining. This was more like it; we were actually creeping towards a price somewhere between our opening bids. I could tell he really wanted to make a sale, unlike the miserable buggers I’d tried bargaining with in Senegal. ‘Bring it on!’ I thought.

‘Twelve thousand is my final price,’ he said.

‘Seven,’ I said.

‘Eleven,’ he said.

‘Eight,’ I said.

‘Ten, and I cannot go lower than this,’ he said.

‘Nine thousand is my final offer,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I’m just not interested.’

‘I cannot go lower than ten,’ he repeated. ‘If I sell for ten, then I only make one hundred CFAs for myself, and I need to eat.’

‘And I need to buy some soap, and I can see a soap shop over there,’ I said, making for the shop. ‘I will buy it for nine thousand, final offer.’

‘Ten thousand,’ he said.

‘OK, never mind, thanks for your time,’ I said, and walked into the soap shop. One of the men, a guy called Ibrahim who hadn’t been involved in the bargaining, followed me in. ‘Uh oh,’ I thought. ‘What does he want?’ But he helped me buy the right kind of soap and a toothbrush without getting in the way, and as I came out of the shop the negotiator sidled up to me and whispered, ‘OK, nine thousand five hundred, my final offer, but don’t tell anyone.’

I knew I had him on the ropes now; he was still tumbling but I’d stuck on my price and it was only a matter of time. ‘Nine thousand, take it or leave it, your choice,’ I said, ducking into another shop, this time for washing powder, a snip at CFA100 a sachet.

‘OK, nine thousand, you take it for nine thousand,’ he said as I blinked my way back into the sunlight, laden with Omo; and seconds later I had my map of Mali. No doubt CFA9000 for a map is still a stupid price, but it felt good to be bartering properly after the strangely reticent grumpiness of Senegal; if I did get ripped off, it was worth the price just for the fun of having a good old bargain.

Meanwhile Ibrahim helped me find a shampoo shop, didn’t give me any grief when I said I was heading back to my hotel, and even refused my offer of a Coke as a thank-you for his help. This turned out to be because it was Ramadan, of course, and he couldn’t drink anything until sunset, so I gave him the price of a Coke so he could buy one later, but the point still stands; he hadn’t insisted on any remuneration. I was amazed; of all the places to find a genuinely helpful local, I’d found one in the grand marché. Allah moves in mysterious ways...

Bamako turned out not only to be a handy place for maps, soap, toothbrushes, washing powder and shampoo, it was a simple matter to pick up a visa to Burkina Faso (the next country on my list), a slightly more involved but still pretty painless affair to secure a bus ticket to Mopti, and a peaceful spot to catch some rest. If you can ignore the touts – and after a while, it becomes second nature – Bamako’s a great place.

Though just imagine how much more fun I’d have had if I’d also had a bejewelled Dogon guide drumming for my pleasure. Never mind; perhaps you can have too much of a good thing...

Saturday Night at the Movies

Written: 9 November 2002

As I wandered back to the mission catholique after a day exploring Bamako, I bumped into Steve and Oliver. They were going to the movies, so I tagged along.

The Vox cinema on Rue Bagayoko is an event in itself. Before the ticket booth opened, Oliver asked the patron if we could check out the projectors, and with glee he led us around the back, up some crooked steps, past a man boiling a teapot on a charcoal stove and into the projection room, where two monstrous projectors stood, each loaded with a massive roll of cracked and dusty celluloid. The projectionist was busy cleaning the mechanisms, an ongoing job in the dusty dryness of Mali, and he laughed throatily as we wowed at his babies and peered through the exposed frames at the tiny writing Paramount Présente.

The film we excitedly paid CFA250 to see was none other than Danger Immédiat (or, in English, Clear and Present Danger) starring Harrison Ford. We’d all already seen it, but none of us had seen it in French or in an African cinema; we’d definitely have remembered if we had.

The ticket booth opened its shutters at 9pm, and the film was due to start at 9.15, but by 9.30 there were still no signs of life except for a single bulb shedding murky light on the proceedings and some distinctly Cuban-esque music blaring from the distorted cinema speakers (Cuban music has been a major influence on West African pop music for decades; the mix of Cuban rhythms and African vibes is hypnotic, especially when blared out through completely distorted speakers, which seems to be the preferred method of broadcast). I idly wondered if we were going to have to wait for the cinema to fill up before they’d show the film, but I figured even the craziest tout couldn’t wait that long; there weren’t many people about.

To pass the time I counted seats and heads. The cheap seats, where we’d ended up without really noticing, took up the front half of the cinema, where there were ten rows of 30 hard metal seats welded into long rows. The block at the rear of the cinema, roughly the same size, was obviously for the big spenders as the seats were padded, though most of them looked as if they’d seen better days. I counted around 25 people in the front half and about 15 in the back, which meant the house was pretty far off its capacity of 600 people.

I also noticed that the screen wasn’t so much a screen as a huge whitewashed wall at one end of the room, and as my eyes got used to the gloom I saw that at the front above the screen, the cinema was open to the sky; stars twinkled through the sizeable gap at the top of the screen, and that, I realised, was how the bats had got in.

Full House

There might have been only a handful of humans willing to experience the delights of French-dubbed Harrison Ford, but there were dozens of bats cheeping round the auditorium, quite a few crickets chirping loudly under the seats, and most memorably of all, at least one rat scampering around in the gloom, tickling our feet. I also noted there were quite a few mosquitoes lurking in the dark, but before I could get too worried about them, the film coughed into life.

Despite the scratched picture and somewhat muffled sound, the film worked surprisingly well. It was dubbed in French, which meant I followed almost none of the subtle plot twists, but there was enough death and destruction to keep me going, and it was worth the effort just to see a film in which Harrison Ford, cast with a deep bass voiceover, had a lower voice than James Earl Jones, whose French counterpart was almost squeaky. It was also bizarre watching scenes set in the White House with everyone speaking French; it felt like the aftermath of a twisted world war, and I found myself feeling hugely grateful that I speak the same language as Hollywood and Rock ‘n’ Roll. French is a beautiful language, but it just doesn’t suit Harrison Ford or Elvis Presley.

Apart from a five minute segment where the sound died and was replaced by an eerie hum, and a slight re-ordering of some of the film’s scenes that hinted at an earlier mix-up on the projection room floor, the film ran smoothly, right up until a few minutes before the end. The lone light bulb came on well before the end of the film and everyone got up to leave, and the second the credits started to roll the screen went blank. I guess people in Bamako watch action films for the explosions and car chases, and once they’re over, you might as well go home.

Especially with a film where James Earl Jones sounds like his balls have yet to drop.

Along the River Niger

Mopti

Written: 14 November 2002

Poor Mopti. It has such a pleasant name, the sort you’d give to a particularly endearing floppy-eared dog or a favourite teddy bear, but the odds were stacked against it from the start. I was never going to like the place.

The problem was that I didn’t exactly turn up in Mopti in the most optimistic frame of mind. I decided to take the overnight bus from Bamako because it was by far the easiest option; as the buses are ex-European coaches with pleasantly padded seats – some of them still sporting stickers showing regions of faraway places like Germany, so they even feel European, if you ignore the driving – it’s a comfortable way to get from the nation’s capital to the nation’s centre of tourism. Unfortunately my guts decided to throw a spanner in the works, and on the morning before leaving Bamako, I encountered my second bout of African belly. It wasn’t as savage as the first one – I was nauseous but I wasn’t actually throwing up, for which I was extremely thankful – but when you’re cooped up in an overnight coach, wincing with the spasms, it doesn’t bode well for a good night’s sleep. And that’s before the constant all-night music, played at full volume, starts to hammer the outside of your skull like a particularly irritating child.

By the time I arrived in Mopti at 4am I was practically jelly, and the last thing I wanted was to have to take on the brunt of Mali’s tourist trade. Mopti is a largish town, pleasantly situated on the banks of the River Niger, but its position between the world-famous mud mosque of Djenné and the world-famous trekking area of the Dogon Country means it’s the busiest stop-off point for tourists in Mali, and as a result the touts are spectacularly keen. I thought Bamako had been a little too full of guides trying to offload their wares, but Mopti makes Bamako look like a pleasant stroll in the park.

As I stood there by the side of the road, wondering why I was having to wipe the sleep from my eyes when I hadn’t actually had any, a conveyor belt fed irritatingly ingratiating touts right to my door, dumping them so thick and fast by my feet that I felt like a guest speaker at a Star Trek convention, surrounded by unrelenting weirdoes with bad breath and no social skills. I couldn’t get my brain into gear, so I simply stared into the middle distance and ignored them with polite, vacant smiles. They could try all they liked; I wasn’t physically up to a reaction, even if I’d wanted to communicate.

Luckily sharing the bus ride with me was Brook, a friendly Canadian who was also hoping to get to Timbuktu, and while I stood there guarding the bags and peering at the touts through the soupy haze of my gunked-up eyes, he strode off to ask about transport to Timbuktu along the River Niger. The roads to Timbuktu don’t really deserve that title – they’re four-wheel-drive tracks that take a good couple of days to navigate – so the river is a much more pleasant alternative, and that was why we’d come here. We needed to find a boat.

Thanks to some sterling detective work from Brook and some pathetic dribbling noises from me, we finally worked out the choices. Cheapest at CFA10,000 per person, and easily the most primitive, was a pinasse (a large pirogue) that was heading direct to Timbuktu the next day, taking three days to float downstream along the Niger and providing sleeping accommodation on top of a bunch of rice sacks on the lower deck; next up the scale, at CFA12,500 per person, was a larger and more luxurious pinasse with a sheltered upper deck for sleeping, which was also leaving the next day, but which wasn’t direct – we’d have to change onto another pinasse in Tonka, about two-thirds of the way to Timbuktu; and finally there was the CFA19,500 public CMN ferry, where third-class accommodation was in 12-bunk dorms, meals were included, and there was even a bar, though the smell from the toilets managed to curb any pretensions to luxury the ferry might have.

Unfortunately I was too frazzled to make a decision, so avoiding the issue and the touts, I found myself a bed and nearby toilet in the local mission, and Brook headed off to do battle with the banks. I couldn’t handle Mopti without regrouping and forming a battle plan; hell, I couldn’t even handle standing up...

Decisions, Decisions

I sunk into a coma for a few hours, and it helped; after a shower, another colonic symphony and some rehydration salts, things looked a lot better. I decided I wasn’t going to be able to handle the cheaper pinasse as there simply wasn’t enough shelter from the baking Malian sun, and Brook fancied a pinasse trip over the more touristy ferry, so we took Buddha’s middle way and chose the larger pinasse. Of course, by this time the price had shot up to CFA15,000 – ‘Morning prices are different to afternoon prices’ was the irrefutable excuse offered by the man in charge of the tickets – but we’d both had enough of negotiating and just wanted something booked, so we coughed up the money, took the tickets, and prayed for a swift exit.

For Mopti is quite unrelenting. As a white person there’s nothing you can do to hide that fact that you’re a tourist and therefore fair game for the touts, and this earns you the magnetism of a lump of iron the size of Manhattan. As soon as you stretch a toe outside your hotel you’re accosted, and it absolutely doesn’t matter what you say as it will all fall on completely deaf ears. The mantra is uninventive, but at least it’s consistent:

‘You going to Dogon? I am from Dogon, I can show you the best sights. You’re not going to Dogon? Maybe later, maybe you want to book a guide for later? I am Dogon myself, I know the area very well. What? You’re going to Timbuktu? Aha, do you want a guide to Timbuktu? I am from there, I have many friends there, I can show you the best sights. Do you want to book a guide? Maybe later?’

‘You want a ticket for the bus to Bamako? Ah, OK, you’re not going to Bamako, you want a ticket for Gao, Timbuktu, Dogon? You’re going by pinasse already? But I can sell you a ticket for the bus! You want a ticket for the bus for Bamako?’

‘What are you looking for? Camera film? No problem, I show you the shop, it’s here, yes, I know you like to shop alone, but I will help you anyway. There is some film, in the shop that you were about to go into anyway. Here, let me pick it off the shelf for you and talk to the man in the shop so I can get a commission for bringing you here, even though I didn’t. By the way, do you need help breathing, or perhaps you need help eating? I can help you with everything! Whatever you want, I can get you a cheap price.’

‘You want to buy water? I can sell you twelve bottles for CFA6000 – water is very expensive in Timbuktu. If you buy a case it will save you money. Yes, it is heavy, but it is a good deal. Perhaps I bring it to you this afternoon, do we have a deal?’

‘You want a pinasse trip? Oh, you already have one, with which pinasse? What, that one? But that is not going today, and it is not going to Timbuktu; you must change. You know this? Why not change to my pinasse, over there, it is quicker and is going today. What’s that? You’d rather travel in a chicken coup? No problem, I can find you a chicken coup if you’d rather. Come this way...’

‘Where you from? England, I have many friends in England. How long in Africa? First time in Africa? First time in Mali? What’s your name? You visit Dogon? You visit Timbuktu? I have many friends in Timbuktu. You like Mopti? Ha, you joke well. Yes, there are many guides in Mopti. Is good, yes? Hello? Monsieur? Where you going?’

‘Ah, I see you are walking. Yes, you can walk this way, this way there is a market, what do you want, food, water, maybe tickets? I can get you anything. Yes, we meet before, you remember me, I help you buy film. Perhaps now I talk to you about Dogon Country. You like Dogon Country?’

It’s sad, but every tourist you see is fighting the same urge, the urge to scream ‘Just fuck off!’ at the constant barrage of intrusions, but this won’t get you anywhere. The only solution – if it can be called a solution – is to try to be polite but firm, in the hope that they’ll realise you aren’t going to give them any money, and will head off to pester someone else. But boy, it doesn’t half take it out of you, especially if you’re feeling ill to start with.

Exploring Mopti

Even if you can ignore the touts, Mopti unveils itself as a pretty grim little place. The River Niger is its saving grace as it flows gently past, flat as a pancake with gently sloping banks on either side leading up to the concrete bunkers that pass for shops and houses in these parts. It’s a busy port, and boats and pinasses smother the shore, a constant barrage of loading and unloading stirring up the mud while women do their washing by the water’s edge. A little to the south of the ferry terminal is a U-shaped harbour that’s lined with hundreds of pinasses pulled up onto the shore, making it look like the rim of a particularly dirty toilet, for there is the detritus of human cargo everywhere – dead fish rot in the sun, black plastic bags choke the waterline and the Niger turns a dirty shade of grey as it laps against the boats.

It’s interesting, though, if you can see past the ugly exterior. Boats arrive from Timbuktu laden with slabs of salt from the salt mines in the north of Mali, dug out of ancient lakes by people who live in terrible conditions that equate to slavery in all but name, and pinasses leave for the north weighed down with barrels of petrol, sacks of rice, watermelons and so many people that the lower decks sprout arms and legs like oars. It’s busy, bustling, hectic and hot, but that’s what you get when you’re perched on the Niger as it starts its bend north towards the Sahara, before curving right round through Niger and to the sea in Nigeria. Junction towns are rarely beautiful, and Mopti is no exception.

‘It’s a place to pass straight through, as quickly as possible,’ said one traveller I met in the melee. If only my food hadn’t applied exactly the same sentiment to me, I might have enjoyed Mopti a little bit more...

Mopti to Timbuktu

Written: 17 November 2002

Despite the hassle of buying anything in Mopti, Brook and I managed to book ourselves on the public pinasse to Timbuktu, leaving on the afternoon of Thursday, 14 November. It was scheduled to be a long journey; Timbuktu is famous as a remote place, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s a long, long way from anywhere.

The River Niger is the lifeblood of Mali. Its source is in Guinea, to the west of southern Mali, and the Niger enters Mali in the southwest, flows east past Bamako and Mopti, and then curves northeast to touch the southern edge of the Sahara at Korioumé (the nearest port to Timbuktu, some 15km south of the legendary town); it then curves back to the southeast past Gao and over the border into Niger, before flowing due south through Nigeria and to the sea. This huge loop makes the Niger a great way to get around Mali (especially as the roads to the Sahara are awful), and the portion between Mopti and Korioumé is a classic journey. I just had to try it.

It’s no luxury cruise, though. Your choice is between the crowded public ferry that heads downstream once a week, or the various pinasses that ply the same route every few days, carrying passengers, cargo and anything else that turns in a profit. We chose a public pinasse because it looked more interesting than the ferry, and that’s exactly how it turned out.

Pinasses are long, motorised wooden canoes that curve up at the ends and tend to boast a couple of open-sided decks, a roof, and precious little else. On a typical pinasse the bottom deck lives in the belly of the boat, raised above the bilges by horizontal struts; this is where you can find the cargo, usually sacks of rice and barrels of petrol, with passengers on the cheapest fares huddled amongst the freight. The deck above is split into a covered area towards the front of the boat, for the most expensive accommodation, and an open area towards the back, for everything else.

It’s basic stuff; the only seats are a couple of rickety park benches in the covered top deck, the toilet is a hole over the river at the back of the boat, and you sleep where you sit, on the corrugated iron deck (for the top deck) or on rice sacks (for the lower deck). Loud music blares out of the obligatory speakers day and night (yes, all night), if the breeze stops or the pinasse slows down then black engine smoke pours through the boat, people are crowded together so closely that you end up sleeping with your face in someone else’s feet, and the journey lasts for days. But once you get used to it, it’s a fantastic way to float through Mali, clocking up those kilometres while kicking back and watching the desert landscape roll by.

The River Niger is wide, brown, slow moving and serene. It carves its way through the flattest landscape you’re ever likely to see, and beyond the low banks, barren scrubland stretches all the way to the horizon. The river might be carrying a huge amount of water, but this is a seriously dry landscape, and beyond the green strip of fertility that the river supports, the land is brown, featureless and hostile. To watch it drift past from the, er, comfort of a corrugated iron deck is a constant exercise in amazement; I found it hard to believe that people manage to scrape together a living out here, and more than once I found myself thanking my lucky stars that I don’t live here. It’s a harsh place.

But lots of people do live here, as the large number of stops demonstrates. The pinasse stops constantly, dropping people off and delivering rice, butter, petrol and other necessities to the tiny villages perched on the river banks. The arrival of a pinasse is a big event round these parts, and when the captain starts to slow down and turns into the current, ready to drop the anchor, the whole village starts yelping and screaming its way down to the river to greet the new arrival. Just like on the train to Bamako, women arrive carrying goodies on their heads – drinks, peanuts, bananas and all sorts of other sustenance for the cooped-up passengers – and they wade into the water, sometimes waist-deep, to sell their wares. Meanwhile small canoes wade out to ferry passengers on and off the boat, each of them yelling out for business while kids splash round naked over by the shore. It’s a hell of a sight, and the further down the river you get, the more excited the villages seem to get. The arrival of a pinasse is like the circus coming to town, and it’s just as entertaining.

Perchance to Sleep

All this floating takes it out of you, though. The river is serene and placid and the flat landscape rolls by, unchanging and hostile, but all the time the sun beats down, roasting the air that flows through the open sides of the boat, and there’s precious little room for stretching your legs. I was jammed into a corner of the deck, sandwiched between the edge of the boat and a chain-smoking man who ploughed through his packet of Liberté cigarettes like there was no tomorrow (which, for him, there probably won’t be, because Liberté are strong, filterless, and don’t bother with things like health warnings or tar levels; it’s obvious enough from the smell that they’re going to kill you pretty quickly). He constantly brewed sweet, green tea on a little charcoal stove, coughed heartily, and smiled at me pleasantly while we tried to engage in small talk. As neighbours go I couldn’t complain, except when the wind turned to give me a lungful of Liberté.

Sleeping on corrugated iron is another challenge altogether, and throughout the trip I was incredibly grateful that I’d decided to buy four squares of foam mattress just as we left Mopti. If I arranged them in a row, then I ended up with something that approximated a bed, and I could only feel every other corrugation; Brook had a tough old time getting to sleep on the hard, ridged deck, and Sean, the only other tourist on our pinasse, looked pretty damn rough after the first night too.

It also gets cold and surprisingly damp on the River Niger at night. The sun sinks at around 6pm, and as soon as it dips below the horizon the scorching heat of the day collapses into the cool of a delightfully fresh evening, and it’s a wonderful time to be on the river. A couple of hours later, though, the humidity level shoots up and a mist appears, and the temperature drops right down; after the searing intensity of the day it’s a shock to the system, but it’s even worse when you’re sleeping on corrugated iron. I always travel with a sleeping bag, even in hot continents like Africa, and it’s times like these that make it all worthwhile; I slept fitfully in my sleeping bag on my foam mattress, and woke after our first night feeling reasonably human. Brook and Sean, shivering under their cotton sheets with only a thin reed mat between them and the metal, didn’t look quite as rested, but that’s pinasse travelling for you.

Tonka

The first night was just the beginning. Halfway through our second day we stopped at a desert town called Tonka, and the captain informed us that this was the end of the line for our pinasse and that there would be another one along in the morning to take us to Timbuktu. Meanwhile we had a day and a night to kill on our now stationary pinasse, moored in the middle of nowhere, two-thirds of the way to Timbuktu. We decided to explore Tonka; there wasn’t much else to do.

Tonka is a desolate town if ever I saw one. Its streets are wide, they’re full of drifting sand, and unusually for Africa they form a regular grid, like Milton Keynes; the buildings, meanwhile, are nondescript one-storey concrete blocks that have bolted metal doors, a colour like dirty sand, and no redeeming features whatsoever. As soon as the river drops out of sight you can imagine there being no water for miles around; it’s dry, dusty, and utterly, utterly harsh. I couldn’t believe it; Tonka is as close to hell as I ever want to get.

But the people are friendly, as is so often the case in the harsher parts of the world, and they enthusiastically greeted me and my bush hat with, ‘Bonjour American cowboy!’ It took all of five minutes to explore Tonka’s compact town centre and another ten minutes to explore the irrigated millet fields outside town, fed by the river as it pours through a set of sluice gates and into the surrounding farms. It was peaceful, it was desolate, it was in the middle of nowhere and it was starting to get a little boring. We celebrated by sitting on the boat, doing absolutely nothing.

That night we didn’t have the advantage of a breeze blowing through the pinasse, and the mosquitoes decided to join us for a bite to eat. I hung up my mosquito net and slept pretty well, but poor Sean and Brook ended up being bitten to hell as they squirmed on their corrugated beds.

Weirdly, though, they couldn’t get enough of it; they adored the slow, serene sailing down the river, they loved being cramped on a deck of corrugated iron, they found the incessant Malian pop music amusing – even at 2am – and they smiled as the mosquitoes hummed around their ears. I practically had a proper bed and the mosquitoes couldn’t get to me, but I just wasn’t that thrilled by the experience... and we still had another day to go.

On the other hand, while we were sitting admiring the sunset on our night in Tonka, the public ferry chugged into view and docked on Tonka’s concrete quay. If I’d thought our pinasse looked a bit cramped, the ferry looked like it wasn’t much fun either, with booming music shaking the water round its bows, people crowding the three decks, and a loud, throbbing engine rattling the rivets. I figured that whichever way you get to Timbuktu, it’s hard. Then again, that’s the point of trying to get to remote places; they’re remote.

Pinasse Number Two

Saturday morning awoke to a beautiful sunrise and the arrival of our second pinasse. I sat up and watched it drift into view, a mass of bodies and cargo, belching out clouds of black smoke. It looked like our first pinasse, only with more people. ‘Whoopee,’ I thought, ‘another day crammed into a corrugated chicken coup.’

But as it pulled alongside, I heard something that made me sit up straight. Out of the jabbering of the locals selling food and whatnots to the passengers, I heard an Australian voice shout out my name, and there, sandwiched on the top deck, was Chris, whom I’d left for dead on the main highway in the Gambia. I couldn’t have been happier; his cynicism matched mine perfectly, and I felt sure he’d be feeling pretty resigned about this boat trip too. I was right; he was hurting from the effects of the corrugated iron, and suddenly I had a partner in crime.

Saturday was more of the same. We floated along the river, its unchanging scenery unfolding in front of us as we stopped off at villages along the way and watched them watch us. Music blared out from the ship’s speakers, some of it excellent, some of it abhorrent. We ate rice from the kitchen – a table and some pots on the open part of the top deck – and we sat on the roof for short bursts, baking in the hot sun and marvelling at the harshness of the cloudless desert sky. We talked about our various travels since splitting up a few weeks earlier, concentrating on the nightmares because it’s more fun like that, and managed to occupy ourselves quite satisfactorily until we pulled into Korioumé at 11pm on Saturday night. At last, we’d finally arrived somewhere.

But we still weren’t at Timbuktu, and faced with a 15km journey into town and the uninspiring thought of trying to find a hotel in the dark, we asked the captain if we could sleep on board until the morning. He said that would be fine, and so started the worst night of all, with the mosquitoes attacking constantly and from all directions, leaping on any exposed skin and biting through sarongs, sheets and clothes. At least, this is what the others told me; I was smugly snug under my mosquito net, thankful that I was able to get any sleep at all while my fellow toubabs tossed and turned, smothered in itchy bites.

And so the next day we got up, hopped into a bush taxi, and arrived in Timbuktu just in time for breakfast. We’d left Mopti on Thursday afternoon and arrived in Timbuktu on Sunday morning, after three nights of fitful sleep, two days of sailing, and one day sighing with relief that I wasn’t born in Tonka. Even corrugated iron beds are preferable to the Milton Keynes of the desert.

Marmalade!

Written: 17 November 2002

Heading out into the chaos of West Africa can feel like going into battle. You might want to do something relatively simple – buying some toothpaste, checking out boat timetables or tracking down an internet café, perhaps – but in some places simply stepping outside your door is asking for trouble. Touts appear out of thin air like mischievous pixies, dancing round you like overacting extras in Les Miserables; the traffic throws clouds of noxious gas into your face, making you feel as if you’ve chain-smoked a whole packet of Liberté cigarettes; and when you finally find the shop, office or café you’re looking for, actually making the purchase can be like playing chess with a blindfold on. It’s not designed to be easy, living in the poorest area on Earth.

One survival instinct that I find useful is a rallying call, something to raise my spirits before heading out into the madness of Africa, and I’ve been on the lookout for something suitable ever since I stumbled out of the plane into the streets of Dakar. I found my answer on the pinasse from Mopti, courtesy of Sean, the Californian with whom Brook and I shared floor space, corrugations and mosquitoes on the way to Timbuktu.

Sean had come with a number of books in his bag – he’s studying at the University of Ghana in Accra, where they speak English – and as the only book I had was a lame romance novel, I was seriously relieved when he offered to lend me a book for the journey. I chose Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, a classic sixties anti-war book by one of America’s most famous satirists, someone I’ve been meaning to read for ages. I wolfed it down as the Niger floated past our pinasse.

It got us talking about war and the wisdom of approaching life with a satirical bent, and Sean told me a story that instantly struck home. Back in World War One, the story goes, a company of British soldiers was preparing to go over the top and into certain death. The situation was pointless, hopeless and unavoidable, and the soldiers knew that they were walking straight into the crosshairs of the enemy, who would mow them down to a man. They needed some way of dealing with this, and they opted for the absurd. They chose a rallying call that they would all shout as they went over the top, but they didn’t choose ‘Tally ho!’, ‘Charge!’, ‘Aaargh!’ or any other traditional battle cries. Instead, this company of British soldiers chose, as their last words on this earth, the battle cry of ‘Marmalade!’

And now, whenever I set foot outside the haven of my hotel and dive into the trenches of West Africa, I punch my fist in the air, stare the first local I see right in the eyes, and shout ‘Marmalade!’ at the top of my voice. It sets me up a treat for the battle to come.

Thank you, Sean.

Timbuktu

Written: 18 November 2002

Everybody has heard the name Timbuktu, but an amazing number of people don’t know that it’s actually a real place. Before I first went travelling and met people who’d actually been here, I didn’t know whether Timbuktu was a myth – hell, I didn’t even know where Mali was until I fished out a guidebook to Africa and started researching this trip – but one thing that everyone knows about Timbuktu is that it’s famous for being in the middle of nowhere. How right they are; Timbuktu is surrounded by lots and lots of nothing.

That’s the whole point of the place, and it’s the main appeal. Timbuktu doesn’t have anything particularly spectacular going on; it’s a hot, dusty town on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, 15km north of the River Niger and a long way from anywhere else of note, and on the surface it’s just another town with sand for streets, a bunch of khaki-brown mud buildings sweltering in the harsh desert sun, and precious little else. But the one thing it has in spades is atmosphere; after all, this is Timbuktu, and nowhere else can lay claim to that.

It’s Timbuktu’s saving grace, this sense of history. I loved it straight away, though it’s hard to say exactly why. From the second we rattled into town in the back of the bush taxi from Korioumé, I kept looking around and thinking, ‘Wow, I’m in Timbuktu!’ I wandered down the main street, past shoddy markets with hardly any goods for sale, and thought, ‘Wow, check out the markets of Timbuktu!’ I sat on the roof of my hotel, looking over the squat collection of mud buildings, dotted with nomad’s tents, and thought, ‘Wow, so this is what Timbuktu looks like!’ It felt great.

A Famous History

If Timbuktu wasn’t Timbuktu it would still be an interesting place to visit, but its fame is what makes it special. Timbuktu was once the most important trading post in the Sahara, a meeting point for caravans of camels as they carried salt, ivory, slaves, gold and untold riches along the Saharan trade route, in the days before European sea power reduced the trans-Saharan trade to a trickle. It’s still an important destination for salt from the mines in Taoudenni in northern Mali, but the days when Timbuktu was important are long gone.

Timbuktu was founded in about 1100 AD around a small oasis; tim means ‘well’ in the local language, and Bouctou was apparently the name of the woman in charge of the well, hence ‘Timbouctou’, or ‘Timbuktu’ as the Europeans transcribed it. Given its strategic position between the kingdoms of West Africa and the marketplaces of Europe, Timbuktu soon boasted a population of 100,000; it’s now back down to around 15,000, and had already dropped to this level by the time the first Europeans reached here in the early 19th century. Indeed, the legend of Timbuktu was already ancient history by the time the white man arrived.

However, these early explorers didn’t always make it home to tell the tale, perpetuating the mystique surrounding the town. The first European visitor, the Scotsman Gordon Laing, set out for Timbuktu in 1825 and arrived here on 18 August 1826, but he was killed shortly after leaving the city in September; the second visitor, the Frenchman René Caillié, reached Timbuktu on 20 April 1828 and managed to return home safely, but he only managed the journey by disguising himself as a Moor; and the third visitor, the German Heinrich Barth, took five years to get there, disguising himself as an Arab and finally reaching Timbuktu in 1853 (and he very nearly didn’t get out again). No wonder Timbuktu gained a reputation for being remote and impossible to reach, and thus became a byword for the middle of nowhere.

It’s this history of exoticism that still blows through the streets, drifting against the buildings and adding colour to the ubiquitous brown of the desert. Despite the television aerials on the houses, the internet café on the high street and the airport just outside town, it doesn’t take much imagination to travel back to the old days, and that’s the appeal.

Mosques by Moonlight

About the only buildings of note in Timbuktu are a few Sahel mosques, strange mud towers that look like huge desert hedgehogs; this distinctive type of architecture is dotted all over Mali, and the wooden spikes that cover the mosque’s conical towers enable locals to pack more mud on the surface when it starts to wear out. They’re a delightful sight, but apart from that Timbuktu doesn’t look like much.

But among the monotonous brown lies a town that pulsates. When the sun goes down and the temperature drops to the bearable, people come out into the streets and fill the markets, and the town comes alive. By the light of the full moon you can wander through the winding alleyways behind the main streets, being careful to step over the streams of raw sewage that flow from the houses, and light peeps out from half-open doors, where locals sit and work, prey, eat and chat. It’s easy to imagine that Timbuktu has hardly changed since the old days – well, apart from the advent of electricity and associated mod cons – and for this reason alone it’s a moving place.

The people are friendly, too. Sure, lots of them sidle up to you trying to sell you trinkets – mainly people from the Tuareg tribe, with their distinctive indigo turbans and light brown skin – and the kids still try the old «Donnes-moi un cadeau!» routine, but compared to Bamako or Mopti the hassle is incredibly low key, and they do take ‘no’ for an answer. Perhaps it’s the heat, which is intense, or perhaps it’s just that Timbuktu is too remote to be a Mecca for armies of young men trying their luck, but I found it a refreshingly tranquil spot.

Or perhaps it’s the effect of the surrounding desert. The land round Timbuktu isn’t full of rolling dunes – you have to head a few days’ north by camel to see the classic desert you associate with camels, mirages and oases – but it still seems to deaden the noise, the sand sucking up any sound and leaving the dry, still air in total silence. The streets are made of sand and are therefore totally quiet to walk along, and in the afternoon, when most sane people are inside cowering from the sun, Timbuktu is reverently serene.

Very little happens here as the ancient stories blow along the sandy streets, forming drifts of history against the walls. It’s the perfect place for sitting back and thinking of camel caravans, nomads drinking sweet tea in their tents, and the slow passage of the sun across the perfect blue sky. What a place.

The Waiting Game

Written: 18 November 2002

If West Africa has a national sport, it must be sitting around and waiting. I’ve spent so much of the last few weeks sitting on my arse, waiting for something to happen, that it’s practically become the raison d’être of my trip. Every day I find myself playing the waiting game, and the only way to cope with it is to adopt the local attitude that waiting is the only thing worth doing properly. If you let it get to you, you’ll go mad.

West Africa is the poorest region on Earth, but one thing the locals are rich in is time, and they sure like to spend lots of it. Everything takes time, from waiting for buses to fill to waiting for people to show up, and the concept of punctuality is completely alien. If something has a timetable associated with it, then the only thing that is certain is that the timetable contains the one time when things are guaranteed not to happen. If someone says they will meet you at a certain time, then the only thing that is certain is that they will appear some time after that time, but certainly not before, and certainly not at the appointed hour. If you order food in a restaurant, it may arrive quickly, it may arrive slowly, or it may not arrive at all. Time isn’t money here, or everyone would be rolling in it.

I guess if I’d been brought up in a continent so insanely hot as Africa, I’d take my time too. I’m sure there’s a reason for it all, but I’m still waiting...

Camel Trekking in Timbuktu

Written: 20 November 2002

I don’t know why I love camel trekking; it’s the most uncomfortable experience this side of Mali’s buses, but I thrive on camel treks. Naturally, the first thing Brook and I did on arriving in Timbuktu was to talk to the Tuareg camel trekkers outside our hotel about exploring the Sahara, and we soon settled on a three-night, four-day excursion to the surrounding area. I just can’t seem to say no to camels and deserts.

I’ve done two camel treks before – one in the Thar Desert in India and the other in Merzouga in Morocco with Peta – and each time it’s been an exercise in pain. Camels aren’t comfortable creatures to ride and the fierce heat of the desert is no joke, but there’s something endlessly appealing about lolloping through the desert on the back of such ponderous beasts, and even the sorest arse is a small price to pay for such a delightful experience.

I think it’s the desert itself that really appeals to me; camels are just the best way to get around them. Deserts are so utterly hostile they’re beautiful, and they command complete respect. You would die pretty quickly if you got caught in the middle of the desert with no water and no shade, and the very fact that you’re surviving is half the appeal. Of course it’s hot, and of course it’s uncomfortable, but that’s the whole point.

The Sahara of Timbuktu

Timbuktu isn’t really in the Sahara, it’s in the northern edge of the Sahel, the area of scrubland south of the desert itself. There’s a lot of sand around Timbuktu but it doesn’t drift into the endless rolling dunes one normally associates with the desert; instead it’s dotted with squat trees, olive-green bushes and hardy little plants that look too dry to be alive but which seem to grow quite happily in the sand. More than anything the country around Timbuktu looks like the kind of dune system you’d find behind a beach; it’s sandy, but it’s also covered in vegetation. I half expected to see the glint of the ocean over the next gentle slope; the sea may be a very, very long way away, but Timbuktu still feels like a run-down seaside town.

We met up with our guide, Ibrahim, on Monday afternoon, and as the sun sloped towards the horizon and the heat started to dissipate, he introduced us to our camel man, Barraka, and our two camels, Abza and Owrah, who smelled like wet blazers and burped and belched their way through mouthful after mouthful of regurgitated cud. I hopped onto Owrah, with Brook taking Abza, and before you could say ‘Giddy up!’ we headed out west and into the desert. From that moment I’ve been in heaven.

As I’ve said, camels aren’t the most comfortable creatures to ride, partly because their legs fold up in such bizarre ways. Each leg has two knees, making them walk like a combination of a horse and a Swiss army knife, and the consequent rocking back and forth is a great way to wear out your inner thighs. But it’s precisely this rocking motion that gives camel trekking its unique appeal, as you find yourself entering a strange meditative state that’s not unlike the hiker’s high you get when you walk for miles and miles without a break. Camels walk slowly, no quicker than humans at a sedate pace, and when you combine this rocking motion with the deadening effect of the sand sucking up all the sound around you, you get a truly relaxing calm. After the hustle of West Africa, it’s especially beautiful.

As is the desert, even if it isn’t made up of classic dunes. On the surface the desert looks practically lifeless, with the few hardy trees you see looking like casualties of a particularly harsh blight, but after a while you spot signs of life. People wander through the desert, their heads hidden beneath their turbans and the bodies smothered in flowing robes, and you soon realise that these guys live here; the distinctive domes of nomadic tents dot the horizon, big enough to house entire families and designed to keep the desert at bay; herds of goats and donkeys wander through the dry scrub, nibbling on anything edible while young boys herd them with little more than sharp sticks; strange piles of green balloons turn out to be watermelons, which the Tuareg farm on the outskirts of town; hobbled camels, their front legs tied together, stand motionless beside bushes, surveying the view; big bugs fly past with a noisy clatter, and black scarab beetles wander among the dunes, sniffing out dung for their supper; and all around on the sandy slopes of the desert floor you can see the footprints of birds, bugs and rodents, signs of life in an apparently dead environment. The Sahara, for all its harshness, is surprisingly full of life.

Base Camp

From Timbuktu we rode out into the desert and stopped at Ibrahim’s house, where we’ve set up camp. Ibrahim, his wife, his daughter and his three sons live on a square patch of desert that they’ve cleared of scrub and surrounded with a makeshift fence of dry, dead wood, made up of thick branches of spiky, thorny desert bush. In the middle of the patch lies the family’s tent, a traditional Tuareg tent that’s the same colour and shape as an immense turtle, with patterned mats blocking up the sides below the roof; apart from a separate hut for cooking, that’s their home. For our three nights out in the desert Brook and I are living on a large plastic mat draped in one corner of the compound, and that’s it; we’re camping under the stars, for our sins.

I love it. It gets fiercely cold at night and it takes a while to get used to sleeping on the sand – sand is, after all, just rock in a different form, and it’s always harder than I imagine it will be – but there’s almost a full moon that lights up the desert so we can see for miles, and the deadening silence of the sand makes it a wonderfully peaceful place to rest. We’ve been returning to Ibrahim’s home every night for a meal of rice with bits of goat, and we’re drinking water from the nearby hand-pump, miles away from the hustle and bustle of the outside world. (This is more than Ibrahim does, during daylight anyway. The Tuareg are a fiercely Islamic people, which means they respect the laws of Ramadan to the letter. Ibrahim eats and drinks nothing during daylight hours, even out here in the desert, and when we walked here on our first day, he was so weak he had to lie down for a while. I can’t imagine what it must be like to voluntarily avoid drinking water in the desert; I drank gallons of the stuff, and still the dry desert air made my throat feel like sandpaper. The Tuareg are most definitely a hardcore people.)

Each of our two full days in the desert has followed the same format. I wake up with the sun at about 6am, lie staring at the sky for a while, and finally roll out of bed, stiff but alive. Barraka brings over a breakfast of coffee and bread with apricot jam, and I wake Brook – a much sounder sleeper than me – before ploughing through breakfast and downing half a bottle of water. We then saddle up the camels, fill up our 20-litre jerry can with water from the pump, and ride for a couple of hours until about 11 o’clock, when we pick a good tree to shelter under. Barraka then makes traditional Tuareg tea – strong Chinese green tea with lots of sugar, brewed up in a small metal teapot on a wood fire and served in tiny glasses – and cooks up a lunch of spaghetti or rice in tomato sauce with bits of mutton, and we sit under the tree until four o’clock in the afternoon, when we saddle up and ride back to camp. It’s a simple little routine, and it’s just what I need; I’ve been spending the middle of the day sitting, writing, thinking and drinking copious amounts of water and tea.

The ambling trek to and from camp has turned out to be a perfect way to relax. My mind wanders, sometimes happily, sometimes morosely, but the important thing is the serenity of it all. The desert is, above everything else, peaceful, and I’ve found it a haven after the hectic pace of the last six weeks. For the first time I feel myself relaxing into the experience, and I look around at the khaki sand dunes, the olive scrubland and the light blue sky, and realise, as I always do, how much I love deserts. Perhaps this was why I decided to come to Africa; if so, it’s a bloody good reason.

What a shame it has to end tomorrow. One day, maybe, I’ll do a huge camel trek across a real desert, where the dunes reach to the horizon and beyond. That would really be something; the Timbuktu desert is beautiful, but I’m sure the classic Saharan experience, for which you need to trek for days on end, would be something else entirely. For the time being, though, the Timbuktu desert is exactly what the doctor ordered. It hasn’t quite managed to shake me out of my miserable mindset – the desert is not only a great place to pontificate, it’s a great place to brood and wallow – but it has given me something to remember. I feel I now have the first real memory of my trip, and for this small mercy I’m grateful.

Down on the Upside

Written: 18 November 2002

You might like to skip this one. It’s probably nothing more than self-indulgent pap, but I feel like I need to get it down on paper. After all, dumping one’s brain means that sometimes you write rubbish; so be it.

As I write this I’m six weeks into my trip, and I’m absolutely stunned at how difficult I’m finding travelling in West Africa. This morning I woke up with lead in my veins and an awful realisation that I was thoroughly depressed. It was actually tangible, which I wasn’t expecting.

This isn’t without precedent. I clearly remember a similar experience during my trip through the Australian outback in 1995-1996. It happened in Karijini, the idyllic gorge-filled national park in northern Western Australia, where I was as happy as I can ever remember being; I was exploring one of the most beautiful continents on the planet, it was under my own steam, at my own pace and well within my budget, and I had a huge number of amazing sights yet to come. I’d found my stride, I’d discovered just how much I like being me, I was making friends as I drove round Oz, and I didn’t want to change a thing. And then one day I woke up feeling utterly, utterly miserable, so bad that I had to force myself to get out of bed and start my exploration of the park’s northern gorges.

The thing was I had absolutely no reason to be depressed. There was nothing bugging me, nothing had changed from the day before, and yet I’d gone from grinning the grin of the terminally happy to moping around my camp, wondering why on earth I was feeling so blue. It was obvious; my brain was simply having a bad day and had somehow got its chemicals out of sync. There couldn’t be a psychological reason for my blues as there was nothing I could blame it on, and I was evidently just suffering from a mood swing that was totally beyond my control. And sure enough, by the end of the day I felt much happier, and by the next morning it was all in the past. I was back to being me again, a happy traveller and writer of copious waffle.

I’m telling you this because I desperately want to believe that the awful sinking feeling that’s hit me in Timbuktu is the same thing. I want it to be something that’s beyond my control, which occurs naturally, and which goes away quickly. But I also want to get it down on paper, because it’s also possible that it is down to something tangible, and if so it’s interesting to document it, if only so we can all have a good laugh at my expense when I’m back in the land of real ale, pies and gravy. Here are four things that might have something to do with my batch of blues... or they might not. Only time will tell.

A Soppy Interlude

First up, I might be six weeks into my trip, but I still can’t stop thinking about Peta, my girlfriend, my best friend and my soul mate. I’ve never tried to conduct a long-distance relationship before – the last time I went travelling the only long distance was between me and the merest hint of anything remotely approaching a relationship – but this time it’s different. I’ve whinged about this before and I’ll probably whinge about it again, so forgive me, but I miss my girlfriend more than I thought possible.

My morning routine goes something like this. My brain wakes up, and five minutes later I manage to slump into something resembling consciousness (I’m not one of life’s morning people, as anyone who has been unlucky enough to meet me before midday will confirm). I open one eye – my left eye – and assuming the sky hasn’t fallen in and killed half the planet, I gently pull the eyelids of my right eye apart; I have to do this because my right eye suffers from Recurrent Corneal Erosion Syndrome, which means that if I open it in the normal fashion, it hurts like buggery. (That’s just a colloquialism; I can’t vouch for its authenticity.)

I then wonder where Peta is. She’s not there in the bed next to me, so I presume she’s not round at my flat today, but I’ll probably see her later. I then root around the bed trying to find my teddy bears – hell, yes, I’m 32, I sleep with teddy bears, and I don’t give a damn – but instead of the usual suspects I find the little Snowman my sister sent me when I was in New Zealand in 1996, and the floppy little Panda that Peta made for me for this trip. And that’s when it hits me that there is no Peta in my bed, not for a whole year, and it hurts more than my Recurrent Corneal Erosion Syndrome ever does.

On bad days I realise this before I’ve gone through my morning routine, and I sit up, suddenly hit by a huge sense of distance, followed by a huge sense of pain in my right eyeball. On these days I can at least blame the welling-up in my eyes on my syndrome. I haven’t thought of a good excuse for all the other mornings.

Bring It On!

Second, I’ve been talking to lots of people about West Africa, and I have yet to find anyone who has anything really positive to say. I find plenty of people who think it’s a reasonably interesting region, and plenty of people who don’t like it at all, but I haven’t met anyone who raves about it or who would recommend it as a must-see part of the world. On the other hand I keep bumping into people who rave about Asia, especially India, and I think back to the happy times I had there, waking up every day to something else that would completely blow my mind. After six weeks in West Africa I’m still waiting for something – anything – to make my jaw drop, and I’m not alone. It seems that most people find that travelling here is difficult, tiring, expensive and devoid of life-changing experiences.

I desperately want to enjoy West Africa, and I don’t want to simply jack it in because of the vague hope that East and Southern Africa will be better (I meet plenty of people who rave about the likes of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, Botswana and so on). It’s just that after six weeks I really thought I’d have something amazing to report, and I genuinely haven’t. It’s been OK so far, but nothing to write home about, which rather neatly brings me to my third point...

Write Off

Perhaps because of the area, but perhaps not, I’m suffering from artistic apathy. I’ve set myself the target of writing a reasonable amount about my trip, and I’m meeting my target in terms of the number of words I’m writing. The only problem is that it’s not flowing, and I’m not that enamoured with what I’m churning out. I’ll keep on writing, because it’s a good discipline to do so, but I have yet to put the finishing touches to anything that I’m really proud of. So far it’s all been travel writing by numbers, and it’s not that satisfying.

I’d like to think this is because I haven’t had much to write about, and my enforced work ethic means I have no choice but to churn out the same old stuff. But I’m not so sure if this isn’t a cop-out, because plenty of writers manage to wax lyrical about places far duller than West Africa, and if I can’t pull out a bunch of interesting threads from somewhere like Mali, home to the legendary Timbuktu, then will I actually be able to produce anything from this trip other than a load of old waffle that simply gets slapped up onto my website along with all the other travel writing I’ve done?

I guess only time will well, but so far I don’t feel I’ve achieved any targets other than quantitative ones. I even scrapped an article the other day – the first version of my piece on Mopti – because it turned out to be little more than vitriol, written to exorcise the long bus journey and a lack of sleep. I sincerely hope this turns out to be a reflection on West Africa rather than me, but whatever the reason, I’m not yet inspired to write about this trip.

Loopy Pills

Finally, and here’s the really paranoid one, I’ve been talking to people about the anti-malarial pill Lariam. I’ve been taking my weekly tablet for nine weeks now, and it doesn’t affect me at all... I think.

I’ve now met three people who’ve had to stop taking Lariam because of serious side-effects, and a whole load more who’ve said they wouldn’t touch it in the first place. The three who reported side-effects each took it for a couple of months and thought they were fine, but then they started getting depressed and moody, and in one case the Lariam even caused hallucinations. I don’t really think I’m suffering from Lariam-induced mood swings, but it’s always a possibility, and I have to at least consider it.

The problem with this theory is a psychological one. When I was walking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal I noticed a kind of group psychosis that affected all the walkers above a certain altitude. Above 3000m people can start to suffer from altitude sickness, and one result is that everyone starts to believe that they’ve got the symptoms. It becomes the subject of every conversation from dawn to dusk, and people discuss the possibilities so much that it’s no wonder everyone is suddenly paranoid about headaches, cramps, breathing difficulties and so on.

The same is true of Lariam. Those who aren’t taking it suck in their breath when they hear you’re on it, as it has a fearsome reputation. Those who are taking it say they’ve found no problems so far... but they always add the ‘so far’ part. And then there are those who’ve reacted badly, and their stories simply add fuel to the fire.

Meanwhile, I have a bad day, and I worry that it might be the pills. It’s weird.

End Game

Honestly, it’s pathetic, really. The fact is that I’m only six weeks into my adventure of a lifetime, I’m on budget and on schedule, the best is definitely yet to come, and I’ve still got an entire continent to explore at my leisure. This whole trip exists because I wanted to do it, and because I decided to fly to Africa, and here I am whinging about feeling a little bit blue. What on earth do I have to be miserable about? Nothing, that’s what.

Still, I felt bloody terrible this morning, I still do, and I can’t pin down the cause. I could be feeling unimpressed with West Africa and unable to write because I’m missing Peta, and the Lariam could have nothing to do with it; I could be obsessing about missing home and unable to care about writing or travelling because the Lariam is screwing with my head; West Africa could actually be rubbish, and not distracting enough to stop me thinking about home or inspiring enough to produce good prose; it could be a combination of any of the above; or, like in Australia, I could just be suffering from a temporary glitch, one that will naturally go away. Depression doesn’t come clearly labelled with causes and effects, so I guess I might never know exactly what’s going on.

Still, if it doesn’t go away, I’ll stop taking the Lariam; if that doesn’t work, I’ll fly to Kenya as quickly as possible; and if that doesn’t work, I can always come home. God knows it’d be better than waking up again with lead in my veins.

Tuareg Tea

Written: 22 November 2002

Tea is one of the most universal of all drinks; I can’t think of a country that I’ve visited that hasn’t had some kind of tea on offer, even though sometimes it’s barely recognisable as such. Drinking tea of some kind is a global phenomenon, and the world is a better place for it.

Teapots and tea bags are common in most western countries – probably the most vexing cultural question is whether or not to put the milk in first – but throughout my travels I’ve come across local tea that’s quite, quite different to tea at home. My first seminal tea experience took place in Hong Kong back in the early 1990s, where I discovered that green tea is simply the best accompaniment to Chinese food, but it was Indonesia that gave me my first taste of a tea that I couldn’t get at home. Indonesian tea is slightly aromatic and they serve it weak, in tall glasses and in large volume. After a hot day stalking through the tropical heat of the Indonesian islands there’ll always be a flask of hot tea waiting for you outside your hotel room – even in the cheapest places – and although it’s identifiable as tea, it’s a distinctly Indonesian thing.

India is another great tea experience. Although famous for producing such subtle teas as Darjeeling and Assam, served in silver and with colonial elegance, real Indian tea – or chai – is practically unrecognisable. It’s brewed for ages by boiling up milk and sugar, and dipping what looks like an old sock into the mixture (the tea leaves, it turns out, are stashed in this sock). The tea is poured many times and from a great height throughout the brewing process, and the result is a sickly sweet, dark brown concoction that almost totally fails to quench the raging thirst that the Indian climate produces. It’s a fantastic drink, and sitting on a charpoy drinking chai with your mates is practically India’s national sport. It’s wonderful.

Tuareg Tea

Tea is huge in north Africa, too, where it has assumed a social significance that makes the English habit of taking tea at four o’clock look positively blasé. The north African tea ceremony is well known to be the oil in the cogs of commerce from Morocco to Egypt; it spread along with the Sahara’s nomadic tribes from the Berbers in the northwest to the Tuareg in the Sahara, and if you ever try to buy a carpet in a carpet shop or a pair of slippers in a souq, you’ll be offered tea. It’s an unavoidable part of life in desert Africa.

The Tuareg are particularly into their tea ceremonies, and as you wander through countries where the Tuareg proliferate, such as Mauritania, Niger and Mali, you see people brewing tea everywhere. The process goes a little bit like this:

- Take your time. If you’re in a rush, then making tea will drive you nuts. Kick back into African time – perhaps by pretending that you’re waiting for a bus to fill up – and slow down your actions. Making Tuareg tea is a ponderous, plodding process, and if you try to rush it, Allah will simply find a way of forcing you to slow down. Relax, take a deep breath, and procrastinate.

- You now need to light your charcoal burner. The best models are made from clay and consist of a shallow bowl with holes in the bottom, supported underneath by a cylindrical column with a large hole in one side. The charcoal sits in the top in the shallow bowl, so the wind can blow through the various holes to keep it red hot; stack some charcoal on the top, slap in some paper impregnated with lighter fuel, and light it up like a barbecue. If you’re in the desert and don’t have a stove, a small wood fire will suffice. There’s normally enough wood in the scrubby Sahel to start a fire; if you’re in the dunes, you’ll have to carry your own fuel.

- Wait for the coals to start glowing, while fanning the stove with a flag-shaped fan made from weaved grass. If you’re feeling efficient you can start preparing the teapot at this stage, but feel free to sit around doing nothing while the fire settles, if you prefer. There’s no rush, after all.

- Once the coals are glowing red, you need to fish out your teapot. This all-metal affair, normally painted blue, is shaped like a normal round teapot, with a long spout, a hinged lid on top and a handle at the opposite side to the spout. Put a heap of tea leaves into the pot, along with a little water, and pop it on the stove, directly onto the coals. The tea you choose depends on who you are; some people, like the Berbers of Morocco and Algeria, like mint tea, whereas the Tuareg prefer green tea. It’s up to you, really; you can even brew up a pot of each, if you want. There are no rules.

- Soon enough the water starts to boil and froth out of the teapot’s spout, and this is a sign to start brewing the tea. Fish out up to three glasses, each of them the size of a shot glass and made from thick, colourless glass, and start the concoction process. Pour water into one glass, filling it right to the top, and tip this into the pot. Do this three times, put the teapot back on the coals, and if you’re looking for something else to do, rinse the glasses in water, making sure you don’t waste more water than you have to. This is the desert; water is precious.

- It won’t be long before the pot is boiling again, spurting steam out of the spout and quite possibly bubbling around the sides of the lid. Pour white sugar into one glass, filling it right to the top, and tip the sugar into the pot. Fill this glass with tea from the pot, starting to pour from a low height and raising the teapot as high as you can before bringing it low again as the glass fills, and take the glass and pour it back into the teapot with a flick of the wrist. Repeat.

- And repeat. And repeat. This part of the process can go on for ages, with some tea pourers pouring and tipping 20 or 30 times to get the tea to the right strength. When you think your tea is ready, leave a little bit in the glass and taste it; if you want your tea to be stronger, or you want it sweeter, then keep on pouring or adding sugar as required.

- If, however, the tea is ready, fill the glasses with the same high-pouring action, so each glass gets a good frothy head on it, and pass them round. You should get three glasses from each pot, and it’s important that they’re all drunk; if there are two of you, pour a glass for your guest, then another one for them, and then one for yourself.

- Drink the tea in short slurping sips. It won’t be too hot to drink, as all the pouring will have cooled it down to a drinkable temperature, and before you know it, it’ll be gone. And then it’s probably time for another pot, if you have time... which you almost certainly do.

And that’s the Tuareg tea ceremony, a routine you see performed everywhere, all the time, from the side of the road to the deck of a pinasse. It’s not so much the tea as the whole ceremony that goes with it; it’s the tea drinkers’ equivalent of rolling your own cigarettes, and it’s just as satisfying.

Bloody Nora

Written: 23 November 2002

Travelling makes you stoop to new lows in a number of different ways – sleeping on corrugated iron, using toilet facilities that don’t facilitate anything, or bitterly arguing over price differences that equate to a pittance, to name but three – but one of the things that really hurts is being forced to read trash. In countries where waiting is an essential part of travel – Africa being a prime example – it’s important to have a good book to while away the hours, but if English isn’t an official language of the country you’re visiting, finding a book that you can actually read can be a real challenge.

The most obvious source of books in English is other travellers, but even then you have to bump into travellers whose primary language is English and who also happen to have a book they’d like to swap. Unfortunately this kind of exchange requires a bit of forward planning; to increase the chances of getting your hands on a decent tome, you need to carry two books – one to read and the other to swap – but they’re so heavy most people only carry the one, so they’ll only start looking for a trade once they’ve finished the book they’re reading. This all conspires to reduce the English-language book trade to a trickle in French-speaking countries like Senegal and Mali.

You may be lucky enough to stumble across a hotel that has a collection of books left behind by other travellers, and if you’re really lucky there may be one or two novels in English. I arrived in Bamako ready to part with Martin Amis’ Money, which I’d got from Chris, and there, on the shelves of the mission catholique, I spotted the spine of a book in English. It was the first English book I’d seen since the Gambia, and I leaped at the chance. Out went Money and in came The Stanislaski Brothers by ‘#1 New York Times best-selling author’ Nora Roberts.

Nora Who?

Of course it was only later, when I pulled out my new book, that I realised I’d picked up a romance novel – or, to be accurate, two romance novels in one handy package. I read the blurb on the back and realised I was about to enter a world I’d hitherto only laughed at: ‘Mikhail Stanislaski’s work-hardened hands aren’t what wealthy ice princess Sydney Hayward is accustomed to,’ it warbled, ‘till the classy beauty discovers this earthy stranger’s rare talent for Luring a Lady...’ I couldn’t bring myself to read the blurb for the second book, Convincing Alex, but I noticed it contained the phrases ‘headstrong Bess McNee’ and ‘sexy detective’, which was enough for me.

It got better. The last few pages of the book were given over to a biography of Nora Roberts – according to the Los Angeles Daily News she is a ‘word artist, painting her story and characters with vitality and verve’, and ‘with over 100 million copies of her books in print world-wide and 14 titles on the New York Times best-seller list in 1999 alone, [she] is truly a publishing phenomenon’ – but the most entertaining part was the section selling other books available in the same series. Check out these synopses:

A struggling waitress discovers she is really a rich heiress, and must enter a powerful new world of wealth and privilege on the arm of a handsome stranger...

(Honor’s Promise by Sharon Sala)

Ornery cowboy Faron Whitelaw is caught off-guard when breathtakingly beautiful Belinda Prescott proves to be more than a gold digger!

(The Cowboy and the Princess by Joan Johnston)

A beauty queen whose dreams have been dashed in a tragic twist of fate seeks shelter for her wounded spirit in the arms of a rough-edged cowboy...

(Always a Lady by Sharon Sala)

Fantastic stuff! I knew these kinds of books existed – Mills and Boon is a brand name that everyone has heard of, even if they haven’t read any of them – but I didn’t realise just how atrocious they were. I couldn’t wait to get stuck into the book itself; I could already picture the hot-blooded Mikhail melting the heart of the ice princess Sydney, and I hadn’t even got past the sales talk at the back of the book.

Feel the Romance!

The problem with me and romantic novels is that I’m not female, turning 40, overweight or single, which would appear to knock me out of the target audience for Nora Roberts’ publishing phenomenon. To enjoy The Stanislaski Brothers requires one to drop all pretensions to literature, and to regress to pre-pubescent ideals of romanticism that bear little relation to reality. Bizarrely, I found this a rather easy state of mind to slip into in Africa, perhaps because playing the Waiting Game makes the brain go soggy enough round the edges to make practically anything entertaining. The Stanislaski Brothers is one of the worst books I’ve ever read, but I loved it, and I genuinely can’t work out why.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I liked it because it was so bad, it was entertaining. I found myself folding down corners of pages that contained particularly corny lines, so I could turn back every now and then and have a good laugh. I came across wonderfully sweeping statements like this:

His hair flowed over the collar, so black, so untamed no woman alive could help but fantasize about letting her fingers dive in.

Marvellous! I love the delightfully patronising tone, and there’s more, much more as things between Mikhail and Sydney start hotting up:

On an oath, he tore his mouth from hers and buried it against her throat... Whatever slippery grip he had on control, he clamped tight now, fighting to catch his breath and hold on to his sanity.

‘Damn me to hell or take me to heaven,’ he muttered. ‘But do it now.’

But even the corniness of the entire theme behind the book – beautiful businesswoman is seduced by swarthy Ukrainian sculptor – pales into insignificance compared to the following four words, which Nora uses to paint a word story of the second time Mikhail and Sydney get it together in the bedroom. Here it is; it’s sheer poetry:

He filled. She surrounded.

Isn’t it fantastic? Any author who can make sex sound like a tree-planting ceremony is all right by me, so bless you Nora. I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in ages...

Timbuktu to Gao

Written: 25 November 2002

Now that I’m on the public ferry from Timbuktu to Gao, I finally understand why the guidebooks rave about the River Niger boat trip. I spent most of the pinasse trip from Mopti to Timbuktu shifting my weight from one corrugated cheek to another while trying not to inhale high tar cigarette smoke from my neighbour’s Liberté, and although the view out of the side of the boat was pleasant, it wasn’t that exciting; on the ferry, though, it’s a completely different experience.

The difference is mainly one of luxury, though I use the term ‘luxury’ in an extremely loose way. I’ve had enough of sleeping on corrugated decks, so I splashed out on a bed in the third class cabin, which cost me marginally more than the pinasse, but which enables me to take a bunk in one of the 11-bed cabins on the lower deck. Brook, younger and obviously made of sterner stuff, has made me feel rather wimpish by opting for a fourth class ticket – deck class – which comes in at under a third of the price of the Mopti-Timbuktu pinasse, but which gives him space on the pleasantly flat top deck, without a corrugation in sight. For both of us this signals an increase in luxury level that we’re treating like Christmas; this trip is going to be fun.

Operated by the Compagnie Malienne de Navigation (CMN), the public ferry Tomboctou wouldn’t win any prizes in the West – judging by the signs in German dotted round the place, it’s from ex-European stock like the Bamako-Mopti buses – and some aspects, like the toilets, are best left unexplored, but the advantages over our pinasse are manifold. Starting from the top, there’s a large, flat roof which you can reach via a ladder, and which provides a far more stable sunset viewing platform than the pinasse’s shaky roof; the top deck is open, airy and uncrowded, containing the first class and luxury cabins, as well as a bar that sells cold beers, soft drinks and water, none of which were available on our pinasse; the second deck contains the second class cabins, which only have four bunk beds in each room, and the second class toilets; and the bottom deck is home to the engines, the cheap toilets, the showers, the third class dorms, lots of rice sacks, families sleeping on reed mats, ambling goats and chickens, and a few dark, satanic rooms that I’m worried might be the kitchens. After the chicken-coop effect of the pinasse the CMN ferry feels like a floating hotel, albeit one with a distinctively African character.

Easy Does It

Things have gone smoothly from the very start, which I really wasn’t expecting. We were told the ferry would be arriving in the old Timbuktu port of Kabala at 11am, and after just five minutes by the side of the southbound exit road from Timbuktu, we found a couple of donkey carts who were only too happy to take us to the grand bateau in time for the arrival. People waved and grinned us as we bumped along the 7km road to the port, and when we arrived I found the ticket office, asked for tickets, and managed to buy them without any arguments over the price, any discussions as to when – or whether – the boat would be leaving, or any hassle whatsoever. The ticket man was formally polite, and as I handed over the money I heard the ferry toot its horn and saw it glide into view, bang on time. I wasn’t expecting this kind of efficiency; indeed, the only thing that went remotely wrong with the whole process was the name on my ticket, ‘Mark Moxxon’, which I rather like because it makes me sound like a character from a science fiction B-movie.

I’m just not used to the luxury of a bed, a lockable cabin or proper toilets (though, to be fair, a hole into the river is preferable to proper toilets, as holes tend not to smell quite so bad). The ferry’s height over the river makes quite a difference too. On the pinasse we were only a few feet above the water, so we couldn’t see very far beyond the shoreline, especially as Mali is so flat; on the ferry, though, the top deck is about 7m above the river and the roof is even higher, so the view from my pleasantly comfortable plastic chair is stunning. This is what I missed on the pinasse when burying my aching and bored mind into Kurt Vonnegut, and although the ferry might not be such a uniquely Malian mode of transport, I vastly prefer it.

On the other hand, Mali is never very far away. On the first night of this three-day, two-night trip, I was relaxing on the top deck, watching the landscape float by, and a grinning little kid plonked himself right next to me, pulled out a pocket radio and an amplifier the size of a practice guitar amp, and started thumbing his way through the airwaves until he found the most annoyingly jabbering programme available; he turned this up to full volume, distorting the voices to hell, and smiling at me he promptly disappeared downstairs, leaving me to watch the sunset with his radio blaring white noise into my right ear. Luckily he came back before I managed to work out the best angle for kicking the whole caboodle into the river without making it too obvious that it was me, but it made the point that even on a beautiful river cruise, Africa is just on the doorstep.

The bar has an equally cavalier attitude to music, blaring out a raucous mix of hip-hop and Malian blues at such a bass-thumping volume that it makes the windows rattle in their cracked putty. I can’t work out who this is aimed at; the toubabs on board aren’t remotely interested in listening to music at such a belligerent volume, the locals seem to snooze on deck regardless of whether anything is playing, and it clears the bar quicker than the effects of real ale and curried baked beans, but it’s just possible that it’s for the benefit of the locals out there in the fields. They certainly wave a lot as we boom past.

There’s a surprisingly large number of people along the River Niger, despite the harshness of the landscape. At a number of places on the way to Gao the desert comes right up to the river, and you’re presented with the beautiful sight of yellow Saharan dunes lapping against the light green Niger, while the hot sun beats down from a cloudless blue sky.

Most of the time, though, there’s a fertile strip alongside the river, supporting bright green fields of what looks like rice or millet, with locals dotted throughout the fields, their conical hats looking positively Asian at times. Fishing pirogues ply up and down the river banks, a surprisingly large number of them punted along by young boys, and every now and then you pass isolated villages consisting of three or four mud buildings, surrounded by children yelping and screaming along with the ferry’s hip-hop. It’s a mishmash of greens, yellows, blues and browns that’s beautifully relaxing to watch rolling by, and as the ferry approaches Gao, the bright green fields to the north of the river contrast with the deep red dunes to the south in a colour scheme that’s uncannily reminiscent of the Australian outback.

I adore it, especially when the music stops vibrating my bone marrow. It might not be a luxury cruise, but compared to the pinasse it feels like the QE II, and sitting on the roof, supping a chilled Castel beer while the sun sinks into the red-green landscape, is heaven. On the pinasse I noticed that whenever the crew hopped onto the roof to pray to Allah, the whole boat would tip to one side, the pinasse joining in with a respectful nod to the creator of the universe. On the ferry the crew repeat a similar performance every night at sundown, ten of them standing and kneeling in unison in the direction of Mecca, and we sit on the roof with them, sipping beer in the manner of infidels while the ferry remains as steady as a rock. This boat is a different beast altogether; it even behaves itself at prayer time.

And despite this more normal mode of transport, I’ve at last found that feeling of being somewhere exotic; I feel as if I’m travelling, and this is the first time I’ve felt that in seven weeks of exploring West Africa. As the stars rotate round the clear night sky above the River Niger, I finally feel as if I’ve arrived in Africa. It’s about bloody time, too.

The Floating Market

Written: 25 November 2002

As the public ferry slopes into the remote town of Bamba, some 280km west of Gao on the northern tip of the River Niger’s long arc through Mali, the market literally comes to town. For concealed in the belly of the steel CMN ferry are the women and children of the Niger’s floating market.

When you board the ferry and pick your way over the piles of strange-smelling herbs and between the bulging sacks of fruit, you could be forgiven for thinking that the lower deck is total chaos. Women lie on woven mats thrown on the oily steel floor, boiling up strange looking meals, cleaning their children’s faces or stacking plastic containers into neat piles. It looks as if they’re classic fourth class passengers, roughing it out among the rattle of the engines and the smoke from the nearby kitchen, but these families live on the bottom deck for a reason; it’s their job.

I found out all about it from a cheeky little Nigerian boy, who’d moved to Ghana and then Mali as his family circumstances had slowly deteriorated, and who cheerfully sold us oranges and bananas from his stash down below. He and his adoptive family ply their way up and down the Niger on the ferry, selling fruit at all the stops, and paying their way from the proceeds, turning in a profit and therefore a living as they float between ports. As offices go, there are worse places than the belly of the Niger ferry.

The Market Arrives

As the boat judders into port, sliding in the current until it’s facing upstream, the crowds on the quay are poised, frozen like a scrum just before the ball is thrown in. There are maybe three or four hundred locals crowding on the quay, splashes of colour beside the light brown mud houses that squat round the port like ancient, weather-beaten castle turrets, dwarfed by the dunes that lead off downstream. Everything is surprisingly still, wound up with anticipation, until finally the ferry draws alongside. As soon as the first person can jump the gap between boat and quay, the levee breaks and all hell breaks loose.

A fat mama sets up shop right beneath the side of the boat, selling bags of the Ghanaian staple fufu from a big plastic bucket, and taking absolutely no shit from the people queuing up to buy her bags of doughy goo. A confused-looking boy pulls a goat on a string through the melee, the goat as tripped out by the chaos as the boy. A young woman manages to control five baskets of busy buying, one of them containing something that looks exactly like wood chips, and which rustles as she scoops it up in an old Nestlé tin and pours it into her customers’ black plastic bags; the other baskets contain onions, red chillies, dried beans and small yellow limes, the colours blurring as people throw CFA coins at her and she drops handfuls of goods into their bags.

One woman walks through the throng carrying what look like slabs of marble on her head, but they turn out to be slabs of salt, mined in the north of Mali by the Bella and Haratin tribes, who work for their Arab and Tuareg masters for a pittance, in a relationship that is slavery in all but name. The salt slabs are shot through with veins of purple and black, impurities from the beds of the ancient dried-up lakes where the salt comes from. More modern, a young girl sells plastic scoops and buckets, right next to an old woman who waves straw hats, mats and shoes around, trying to smile her way to a sale. In the distance the meat vendors lay out their cuts of prime beef in front of a block of wooden stalls, which on closer inspection turn out to be school desks.

While there’s a chance, groups of kids dash on board and run up the stairs to talk to the passengers or just wave at their friends down below, each of them dressed in something completely different; some are smart and clean, in shirts and trousers, and some are in ripped T-shirts and dirty shorts, clothes that probably started life in the West before being dumped in a charity box and being shipped out to Bamba.

Suddenly the ferry’s horn blasts once, twice, three times, and the already hectic scene changes into one of sheer pandemonium. The stall holders leap up and rush to get their buckets of merchandise stowed safely back on the lower deck, while locals try to catch last-minute bargains, handing over coins in return for hastily packaged bags of lemons, onions and dough. As the ferry starts to pull away from the quay a woman leans dangerously far over the water, managing to catch the thrown money in her bucket with expert precision. Finally the ferry drifts far enough away for the bartering to die down, and slowly people wave goodbye to the ferry for another week, while the lower deck counts the profit and gets ready for the next frantic port of call, a few hours downstream.

Gao

Written: 26 November 2002

As the ferry pulled in to Gao, the last port on the Niger that’s served by regular transport, I felt a familiar sinking feeling. After a delightfully laid-back and hassle-free three days on the ferry, it was time to plunge back into the chaos of urban West Africa. I didn’t really want to bother with it; I was thoroughly enjoying lounging on the deck, watching the world go by from a comfortably safe distance.

It didn’t help that I hadn’t heard anything particularly positive about Gao. I met one couple in Timbuktu who thought it a pretty boring place that had precious little to offer except lots of annoying touts, and the guidebook seemed to back this up, saying that apart from a mud mosque, there wasn’t a great deal to see. How wrong they both were; I loved Gao, more so because I wasn’t expecting to.

Gao used to be a fairly popular travellers’ haunt before Algeria slid into civil war; the classic trans-Saharan route through Algeria and into Mali is now only an option for those on a suicide mission, but back in the good old days of peace in northern Africa, Gao was the oasis at the end of the long haul through the desert. As oases go, it must have been a real sight for people crossing the Sahara, because the River Niger is at its most beautiful here. The huge pink dunes we passed on the ferry are visible on the horizon, and the river is wide, flat, calm and dotted with green vegetation, a lovely contrast with the light brown desert and the clear, blue sky.

But it’s Gao itself that holds the biggest surprises, as it’s African to the core. There might be a few overenthusiastic touts who latch onto anyone white, offering to guide you to restaurants, hotels, shops and buses, but once you set yourself to ‘ignore’ mode and make it clear that you don’t want to buy anything, they soon drift off to let you enjoy things. Sure, there may not be any real tourist sights, but that’s half the charm; Gao is a real African town, and that’s why it’s great.

The Tomb of Askia

However, like plants to light, tourists are drawn to tourist attractions, even if they don’t sound like much on paper, and answering the genetic call of the toubab I set out to track down the Tomb of Askia, Gao’s one claim to fame. Situated out on the northern outskirts of town, this tomb of a 16th-century ruler is a classic Sahel-style building in the shape of a pyramid, made from dark grey mud and sporting the porcupine spikes that make Sahel mosques so distinctive.

Excitingly (if you like this sort of thing) the wooden spikes on the Tomb of Askia are particularly big and bristling, giving it the air of a Sahel mosque with a few extra days’ growth, and most of the spikes are frayed and gnarled, adding a flavour of split ends to the mix. I liked the effect; it makes the tomb look different to other, neater examples of Mali mud mosques, and as an added bonus I found I could climb to the top, crouching to fit through a mud tunnel halfway up to find unspectacular but inoffensive views over the town. Somehow the Tomb of Askia manages to look unkempt, like a man waking up on a sofa after a night on the vodka, and I figure that any place where the main tourist attraction looks hung over is all right with me.

The Backstreets

If the Tomb of Askia is the after-effect of a night on the tiles, the backstreets of Gao are Alka Seltzer and strong coffee. There aren’t many pretensions to tourism in central Gao and it’s all the better for it, as the riverside market is authentically busy, swamped with interesting things to see, and is easy to walk around without constant attacks from people selling Tuareg pipes, woven carpets or treks to Dogon Country. All you get is the odd strange look and kids shouting, «Ça va, toubab?» while holding out their hands for a quick palm slap. It’s delightful.

There’s plenty to see, too, as the sandy paths criss-cross their way through the bizarre sights of Gao’s market. Salt sellers peep out from behind piles of salt slabs, looking more like purveyors of fine marble than ancient sea salt; huge stacks of dried grass are brought into the hay market by donkey, the sad little beasts practically invisible under the huge bundles strapped to their backs; entire stalls are devoted to the humble flip-flop, the preferred footwear of the modern West African, and a quick flick through the options reveals none other than a pair of McDonald’s flip-flops, no doubt created without the permission, let alone the knowledge, of the trademark owner; women bake small round pancakes in large skillets containing holes for the batter, making 20 at a time over small glowing fires; half-made pirogues and pinasses lie by the water’s edge, surrounded by piles of wood, ready to be hammered into place; and through all this chaos wander goats, goats and more goats, chewing on god-knows-what in the piles of rubbish that haven’t yet made it into the stagnantly green sewers running through town.

Away from the market lie the backstreets, providing a fantastic microcosm of African life that’s both beautiful and starkly harsh. Dotted along the river banks, sandwiched between square mud houses and the green-brown pond of the Niger, are dozens of squat tents, each of them with a little porch area that’s home to a cooking fire and the odd grass mat. On the surface it looks idyllic – the huts provide good shelter, and the porch area is always clean and freshly brushed, a marked contrast with the rubbish-strewn street – but this is prime mosquito territory, and the people living here are obviously incredibly poor, scraping together a living from whatever they can find. It’s a harrowing feeling wandering past these beautifully simple huts, your money belt stuffed with enough cash to buy an entire village of huts like this; it makes you feel guilty, but at the same time immensely thankful for what you’ve got.

In Gao, I had a lot. Not only was the town fascinating, but the campement we tracked down on the outskirts of town was great; not only were all the buildings made of mud, but so were the beds, providing a rigid but comfortable place to sleep once our hosts had added a mattress and pillow. To cap it all, in town we discovered a restaurant that did incredibly cheap and incredibly good green salads, the first greenery I’ve seen in weeks, possibly months; hell, the place even kept pet rabbits, so the lettuce must have been good. I could feel the vitamins flowing into my skin cells, it was that healthy; it was just one of many surprises in Gao, the fact that I liked the place being the least of them.

Gao to Mopti

Written: 26 November 2002

Given the distance involved, getting from Gao to Mopti turned out to be relatively easy. It took me a total of seven travelling days to get from Mopti to Gao via Timbuktu, slowly floating along the River Niger in crowded pinasses and luxurious ferries, but thankfully it only took one day to return. Brook and I hopped on the bus in the morning, leaving only one hour late, and by seven o’clock this evening I was back in Mopti, fending off the touts like I’d never left. Sure, the bus kept stopping en route to pick up passengers (after the obligatory arguments over the price and where exactly the seven bundles of hay were going to fit), and at sundown we pulled over into the desert so the Muslim contingent – the whole bus minus the toubabs, that is – could pray to the east, but compared to some of the bus journeys I’ve taken in West Africa, today’s was practically efficient.

The journey was interesting, too. Just outside Gao the bus pulled onto the ferry across the Niger and we piled out, sharing the ferry with a herd of cows, a couple of donkeys, a handful of goats and a tremendous smell, chugging slowly across the river, flat and tranquil in the shimmering heat. Back on the bus we plunged back into the desert, a desolate landscape of flat, barren plains, punctuated by wandering goats and cows who entertained themselves by playing chicken with the bus. Halfway through the trip the landscape changed into the same harsh environment I’d seen from the Kayes-Bamako train, with huge escarpments rising vertically out of the desert, flat-topped and murky in the dusty atmosphere. Here we stopped for a few minutes in the village of Hombori, where the 1155m-high rock formation of Hombori Tondo is the highest point in Mali; I just stood there marvelling at the fact that people manage to live out here in the Malian Sahel.

As bus journeys go, it was almost pleasurable, and even the connection to Mopti was trouble-free. I’d been told that the bus was going direct to Mopti, but of course it wasn’t; instead it stopped at Sévaré, a junction town some 12km from Mopti, so I sadly waved goodbye to Brook and jumped down into the darkness. Wondering how – or if – I was going to get to Mopti at this time of night, I started walking in the general direction of the gare routière, keeping an eye open for hotels in case all the taxis had given up for the night. As if answering my prayers a local man pulled up on a motorcycle, asked me where I was going, and insisted that it was far too far for me to walk, and that me and my backpack should hop on the back of his bike. He was right – it was a long way – and he dropped me off right next to a bush taxi for Mopti, asking for nothing in return except a polite merci. Touched by his kindness, I was even more surprised when the bush taxi driver let my luggage travel for free, and it wasn’t long before I was back in the mission in Mopti, where I’d spent the day before our river trip feeling far worse than I do now.

If only all transit days were that easy. Irritatingly, they’re not.

Sahel Food

Written: 28 November 2002

The reason I haven’t talked much about food in the Sahel is because it’s generally pretty nondescript – it’s not terrible, just uninspiring, and if you’re used to travelling among the beautiful smells of Asian or European food, then you’re in for a shock. The Sahel is incredibly poor, and inevitably it shows in the diet.

Once you get beyond the staple meals of rice with some kind of sauce, couscous with some kind of sauce, fried chicken and chips, and (if you’re in a posh restaurant) steak, then you should prepare yourself for disappointment, because there’s practically nothing else. Vegetables are a genuine rarity, and apart from white bread, that’s your lot; there really isn’t a great deal going on in Sahel cuisine.

This isn’t that surprising when you look at the countryside. It’s a marvel that anything grows here in the first place, but what is surprising is the lack of products that you’d think would be freely available. For example, Mali’s neighbour Côte d’Ivoire is the biggest producer of coffee in Africa and the third biggest producer in the world, but throughout the Sahel coffee is sold as instant Nescafé rather than freshly ground beans. This instant coffee is made in Côte d’Ivoire, but real coffee just doesn’t seem to exist in the Sahel.

There’s precious little in the way of dairy produce, either. The chances are that your instant coffee will be served with powdered milk, or if you’re particularly lucky, sweet condensed milk from a tin; in two months I’ve only come across one place that served real coffee with real milk, and that was a posh tourist patisserie in Mopti. You sometimes see kids selling bags of fresh milk in the street, but more often than not the only milk you’ll see is UHT milk in the shops, and even that’s not that common. Cheese is only available as triangles of processed crap, and yoghurt might make the odd appearance on a menu, but it’s mainly wishful thinking; it’s always out of stock. Yet when you drive through the desert there are always plenty of cows willing to tackle the bus head on, and beef is one of the most popular meats, along with mutton and chicken. It’s weird that milk only seems to come in tins when there are cows everywhere.

Add to this a distinct lack of greenery – apart from onions, tomatoes, potatoes, cassava, the odd bean and maybe some peanuts you’re hard pushed to find any vegetables worth writing home about – and eating in the Sahel can sometimes feel like being on an extended camping trip. You’d think that fruit would save the day; this is Africa, after all. But outside the large cities, your choice is limited to the odd bunch of bananas, green and surprisingly dry oranges, possibly some guavas in season, and small lemons... and that’s about it. I haven’t seen mangoes since Dakar and St-Louis, which is a shame as they’re a heavenly taste sensation; it’s possible that they’re simply out of season, so I could just have missed the boat, but they’re nowhere to be seen.

All of this makes the discovery of a good restaurant an experience to savour. I’m taking daily multivitamins just in case, but sometimes – as in Gao – you find a restaurant that seems to have found the only supplier of quality food this side of the Sahara. In Gao I ate genuinely succulent lettuce for the first time since arriving in Africa, and I could feel the nutrients spreading through my body like a benign drug. When you’ve reached the point when you can actually feel vitamins, you know you’re in gastronomically choppy waters.

On the Street

There are some saving graces, but they come at a price. Street food is a hoot, and if you’re willing to take your life in your hands, it breaks up the monotony of rice with sauce and mixes in lashings of atmosphere. In every town worth its salt you’ll find a bunch of dibieteries, small roadside shacks that sell meat straight from the source. Your average dibieterie consists of a mud oven – normally a grill over a wood fire – on which you’ll find racks of mutton, done to a turn, and precious little else except a roof and maybe a wooden bench. You rock up, take a pew, and ask for a certain amount of meat; CFA1000 is enough for a reasonable meal. The chef gets to work straight away, hacking the cooked mutton ribs to bits with a blunt machete and shaking salt and spices over the result. It’s normally served in brown paper, and you simply tuck in, ripping the meat from the bone with your teeth. In the classiest dibieteries you’ll also get treated to tea, but this isn’t the norm; street food is fast food, and you can be in and out in minutes, fed to the gills with wonderfully fragrant barbecued meat.

Of course, dibieteries represent the Russian roulette of African cuisine. Most of the time you’re sharing your meal with thousands of flies, attracted by the piles of raw meat that sit alongside the cooked, waiting for their turn on the barbecue; at other times you’ll be munching through your mutton, only to be stopped in your tracks by a change in the wind that brings you a heady nose of open sewer. But perhaps the most risky experience – and also the hardest to resist – is bisap. This gorgeous drink is made from water, hibiscus leaves and lots of sugar, and it’s sold by kids pretty much everywhere. It’s easy to spot; bisap is ruby red and is sold in clear plastic bags, and often it’s frozen solid, providing you with a deliciously refreshing slush-ice drink for CFA25 (about 2.5p) a bag. Bisap tastes a bit like very sweet Ribena, and it’s to die for.

Unfortunately, because it’s made from local water, this is all too often exactly what happens. Drinking the local water is the best way to get ill, but if you want to experience the delights of bisap you have to go through the initiation at some stage, and the chances are your first few bisaps will affect you in some way. One way of getting round it is to stop drinking mineral water and switch to tap water, pop down to the local dibieterie for some freshly cooked mutton, eat some unwashed guavas, and round it off with a few frozen bisaps. Then, once the after-effects have subsided, your body will be set up to repel bacteria from all four quarters.

It worked for me, anyway, and I’ve been sampling the delights of street food and drinking local water for a few weeks now. The only side effects I’ve encountered are all those vivid dreams of steamed broccoli, banana milkshakes and ham and cheese pizzas... and a nagging desire to head for the Ghanaian coast, where apparently things get a lot better.

I hope they do, anyway. If I’d wanted to look like Twiggy, I wouldn’t have bought such baggy trousers.

Djenné

Written: 29 November 2002

I had three reasons for returning to Mopti, hardly my favourite place in Mali: I wanted to extend my visa; I wanted to visit Djenné; and I wanted to work out the best way to get to Dogon Country, the famous trekking area to the southeast of Mopti. Given the amount of hassle I encountered in Mopti the last time I was lucky enough to wash up there, I didn’t relish any of these tasks.

Luckily, extending my visa was no problem. At first the policeman at the desk turned me away, asking me to come back in 20 minutes. I did just that, when he informed me that the immigration officer still wasn’t here, but I could wait if I wanted. I had nothing else to do, so I sat down in the corner next to a large pile of boxes labelled ‘Tear Gas – Highly Toxic’ and sat there with a fixed and incredibly subservient smile on my lips until the man I needed to see hobbled into view five minutes later. After some more smiling, some idle chit-chat and a couple of signatures, he stamped a week’s extension of my tourist visa into my passport, and I walked as fast as I could back to my hotel.

Next, I needed transport to Djenné. Of course, the man at the gare informed me that there were no bush taxis heading to Djenné; this is an irritating aspect of Malian transport that seems to be random – sometimes there are bush taxis, sometimes there aren’t – so I went for the other option of buying a ticket for the 20-person bus and waiting for it to fill up. Four hours later it finally pulled out of town, rattled for three hours through the dusty outback, and deposited me and my numb bottom in Djenné.

The Mud Mosque

Djenné is an incredible place. I was expecting tourists and touts galore, but I got neither. Sure, I was befriended by Assiké, a hopeful guide on the ferry across the River Bani who stuck with me until I got to my hotel, but he was pretty pleasant and I was planning to take a guide to explore the town anyway, so I humoured him, as at least he kept the other guides away. Meanwhile, Djenné appears to be totally devoid of other tourists; I saw two toubabs leaving just as I arrived, but that’s it. This is a surprise, as in Mopti I shared the mission’s dormitory with about ten other travellers, the largest number I’ve seen in one place in my whole trip. I thought the tourist season must be starting in earnest, but Djenné seems to have missed the boat.

This could be because most tourists come to Djenné on a Monday, in time for the busy market that wakes the town up after the weekend; but luckily Djenné is a lovely place at any time of the week. After tracking down the Residence Tapama, a picturesque hotel with a tranquil courtyard which I figured would be perfect for a spot of writing, I made arrangements to meet Assiké at 8am the following morning for a tour of the town, and set off for an evening stroll. I fell for the place instantly.

Djenné is perched on a small island in the middle of the River Bani – not a big river at this time of year – and it’s almost entirely made out of mud. Its main claim to fame is the massive mosque overlooking the market, the biggest mud building in the world and surely one of the most beautiful.

Because the mosque gets re-coated in mud every year, it’s in excellent condition, though as it was only built in 1905 it’s not exactly ancient. The design, though, is based on the original mosque that was built here in the 11th century, so it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to picture yourself in an ancient mud city from yesteryear.

The Djenné mosque is a classic Sahel-style building. It has the usual wooden spars sticking out of the grey-brown mud walls, but for some reason they look particularly attractive. Perhaps it’s because they’re totally neat and regular, jutting out perpendicularly, each of them almost the same length. Compared to the messy stubble effect of the mosque in Gao, the mosque in Djenné is a work of art. Most Sahel mosques look like mangy porcupines; Djenné’s looks like a neatly trimmed Mr Potato Head.

The wooden spars have a purpose other than the aesthetic, though. They’re part of the supporting wooden frame around which the mosque’s mud bricks are clustered, but they’re also useful as instant scaffolding for the month-long period each year when the mud that covers the bricks is renewed. Around 4000 people smother the spars with ladders and planks, slapping on the mixture of mud and vegetation that gives the mosque its chocolate gateau exterior. Djenné isn’t just a great sight, it’s a monument to the dedication of the locals.

Friendly People

The mosque might be spiky, but the people aren’t. I found Djenné to be the friendliest place imaginable, and wandering round the streets in the evening was completely delightful. There are tiny children everywhere, and they are astoundingly cute; I don’t know if there’s a reason for their politeness compared to other tourist destinations in Mali, but as I wandered around town the kids all shouted «Ça va toubabou?» and all but a hardy few stopped short of asking for a cadeau, the local euphemism for money. Some kids tried to persuade me to take their photos, but the vast, vast majority were simply delightful; indeed, while wandering down one street after dark, I was accosted by a group of about ten tiny kids, who insisted on dancing round me, singing a happy little tune until their mothers chased them away. It was enchanting.

The adults were equally pleasant, saying hello and steadfastly refusing to ask me about treks to Dogon Country or whether I’d like to buy any authentic Tuareg jewellery. I couldn’t believe it; sure, there were some younger men who were obviously intent on selling me their services as guides, but when I told them I’d already booked a guide for the morning they left me alone. Instead I was able to wander the winding streets alone, free to stop every now and then to marvel at the beautiful sight of mud houses silhouetted against a stunningly starry sky.

What a place...

Spiky Guide

Unfortunately Assiké turned out to be a crap guide. When morning came, gone was the upbeat sales talk of the day before, and instead I ended up with a sullen youth who sounded as if he was reciting by rote. I found him hard to understand, as his English seemed to have deteriorated considerably overnight, and the tour – which he’d said would start at 8am and last until 12.30 – kicked off at 8.30 (he arrived late) and finished at 10. To be honest, I was quite glad; sure, we popped up onto three roofs for views over the town and mosque, and we walked down a lot of winding roads, but I soon tired of his monotonous recitals and his inability to enthuse about the town, and I was glad it ended up being shorter. I didn’t learn anything that hadn’t been in the books, and to be honest I would have had a better time wandering around aimlessly on my own, so I paid him less that we’d originally agreed and didn’t bother to discuss Dogon trekking with him. There was no way I was going to take a sullen bugger like him on a week-long trek, and I figured I’d just have to look elsewhere for a Dogon guide.

Still, not even Assiké could put a dampener on Djenné. It’s got it all – an amazing centrepiece, atmospheric mud buildings, friendly people and at least one good hotel – and I loved it. Mopti could learn a thing or two from its sleepy neighbour.

Djenné and Dogon

The Best Laid Plans

Written: 30 November 2002

I’m one of life’s compulsive planners, and I’m not too proud to admit it. I travel with a computer and I’m endlessly creating fancy schedules of places I’d like to visit, all laid out in the kind of spreadsheet accuracy that would make your average flower-child traveller squirm. In a sense I run my travelling like a workplace.

This is for two reasons. The first is that I like it this way; I’ve always been tidy, as is evident from my backpack, which is home to lots of plastic bags, each containing various categories of item, from the clothes bag to the toiletries bag to the bag of maps, books, pens and camera film. It makes things fit better as well as keeping things dry (though I’ve only seen rain once since arriving in Africa, back in the Gambia), and it means I don’t have to keep pulling everything out of my bag just to find my insect spray, toothbrush or map of Mali. I know exactly where everything is, and that makes me happy.

The second reason is that when you’re travelling, you have a lot of time to kill, especially in Africa. If you add up all the time spent waiting for buses, waiting for tours, waiting for visas and waiting for banks, I reckon I spend about one week out of every four killing time. There’s a lot more waiting around in Africa than, say, Asia, and it’s good to have something constructive to do, especially if you’re like me and get bored at the drop of a hat. To stop my brain leaking out of my ears while waiting for things to happen, I spend my time planning.

Planning is basically where the fun starts. I’ve got three hefty guidebooks sitting in a bag in the bottom of my pack – one for West Africa, one for East Africa and one for Southern Africa – and although they add significant weight, it’s worth it because I can spend lots of happy hours reading about the places I hope to visit, playing with various itineraries and chopping and changing my plans at the press of a button. The only problem with all this is Africa.

After two months of juggling schedules, reading guidebooks and talking to other travellers, it’s obvious that Africa doesn’t lend itself well to careful planning. Indeed, it doesn’t lend itself well to someone with my mentality, as the concept of ‘having a plan’ seems pretty redundant here. The hardest part of my trip so far has been the growing realisation that I’ve got to change my approach if I’m to avoid a whole world of hurt. Coming to Africa with a plan is not only pointless, it’s downright frustrating.

The biggest difference between the way I think and the way Africa thinks is in timing. In Africa, the answer to the question ‘When will the bus leave?’ is ‘When it’s full.’ The answer to the question ‘When does the meeting take place?’ is ‘When everyone gets here.’ And the answer to the question ‘Is it possible to leave here tomorrow morning, travel to this place, spend a day there, then move on to here, check out this village and this park, and end up in this city before the end of the week?’ is ‘Inshallah,’ which literally means ‘God willing,’ but effectively means ‘God knows.’ Basically, things don’t run like clockwork in Africa, because that’s not how people think. Punctuality isn’t an alien concept, it’s simply irrelevant.

I’ve experienced this before, notably in India. IST, which stands for ‘Indian Standard Time’ and which refers to the single time zone that illogically covers the entire country, is locally referred to as ‘Indian Stretchable Time’ because things don’t happen to a fixed schedule. You can buy timetables for India’s amazingly huge train network, and sometimes some trains do run on time, but unlike in the West, where a late train causes mutters among commuters, in India you just wait; the train will arrive when the train arrives, and that’s how everything works.

In West Africa, though, the way time works is even more bizarre than in India, and to help it all make sense the locals have developed the amazing ability to switch themselves off while waiting for something. You often see people at the bus depots sleeping where they sit, and even when the bus departs, rattling along potholed roads like a tin barrel rolling down a hill, people manage to sleep, squashed into convoluted shapes that would prevent a pampered westerner from even contemplating forty winks. I really wish I could do that; it would make waiting so much more interesting.

But instead I plan. I read the guidebooks again and again, soaking up the background on countries I might visit, working out the best places to see in the time I have, creating mental pictures of the lines I might get to draw on my map. I know it’s pointless and I know the concept of African time will instantly render any plans I make obsolete, but I still do it. It’s like being Sisyphus rolling his boulder up to the top of the hill only to have it fall back down again.

No doubt the locals think I’m mad, which I guess makes us even.

A Financial Perspective

Written: 1 December 2002

While killing time in Mopti, waiting for my trip to Dogon Country to start, I found a haven that was perfect for reading, writing, planning and generally killing time. Its name was Bar Bozo.

Bar Bozo overlooks Mopti’s port. The port is a U-shaped mess, a clash of pirogues, pinasses, smells and colours that’s fascinating to watch from the distant comfort of a bar, as the boats unload their cargoes and women peddle fragrant dried fish in the hot sun. Sipping a cold beer in the shade while the madness of Mali unfolds in front of you is a pleasant way to spend time, and with a bottle of beer costing CFA600 (about 60p), it’s a pretty cost-effective way to spend the afternoon.

Or it is until you get a reality check. I made friends with the waiter, a lovely chap who introduced himself as Marcel Manzi from Togo. This may or may not be his real name; most people who work with tourists round here adopt a stage name that’s easy for westerners to remember, because it’s good for business to have a unique name that stands out from the millions of Mohammeds, Ibrahims and Hammadous that fill Islamic Africa. The majority pick relatively normal names – if your real name is Issa then you might call yourself Isaac, for example – but here in Mopti I’ve already met John Travolta and Omar Sharif, both of whom seem to be in a bit of a career slump. Whatever, Marcel smiled as he brought me beer after beer as the sun slowly crawled across the sky, and when the lunchtime rush of package tourists died down, we got chatting. What he had to say soon sobered me up.

Marcel moved to Bamako from Togo to pursue his studies; he wants to qualify as a mechanic, but he had to put that on hold because he ran out of money to pay for the course. To try to save up enough money to continue his education he moved to Mopti and found this job, where he’s earning CFA20,000 a month. His rent comes to CFA4000 per month, and from the remaining cash he has to pay for food, clothes, medical expenses and goodness knows what else. Saving is difficult, but it’s still his plan to go back to Bamako, as a qualified person can earn higher wages. Primary school teachers, for example, start on CFA35,000 per month, a lot more than a waiter in a restaurant.

On the surface this all sounds fine and dandy, but a bit of maths puts this in perspective. The exchange rate hovers around CFA1000 to £1, so this means that Marcel earns £20 a month (compared to a primary school teacher earning £35 a month), he pays £4 a month in rent, and he’s struggling to save for his studies. I’m sitting in Bar Bozo, drinking beer at 60p a pop and eating meals costing £2-£3 each, so in one lazy afternoon I’m blowing the equivalent of Marcel’s wages for a whole week. In my money belt I have the cash equivalent of three-and-a-half years of his salary, plus the equivalent of 23.5 years’ salary in travellers cheques.

Now consider a restaurant in England, somewhere outside London. A student waiter will probably get no more than the minimum wage, so let’s say he’s earning £5 an hour, including tips. If the restaurant is open from lunch to dinner and our waiter works all day (as Marcel does), then he probably does at least 35 hours a week, so that’s £175 a week, or £700 a month. If I walked into this restaurant with 27 years of the waiter’s salary in my money belt, I’d have just under £19,000 in my pocket.

It would be obscene, and that’s without even considering that in Mali, the waiter in a successful tourist restaurant is somewhat further up the earnings ladder than a jobbing student waiter in London. Indeed, Marcel is one of the lucky ones. He’s managed to move from his home country to Mali, he’s got a job, he’s obviously well educated and can speak French and English, and if things go according to plan, he’ll get a qualification and end up being a mechanic. This is a step above the average Malian, for whom the contents of my money belt must assume mythical proportions. As Marcel says, ‘It is very hard here.’

Fortunately, I can reach for another beer to numb the thought. Aren’t I the lucky one?

Remember Me?

Written: 1 December 2002

I might be getting paranoid, but I think I’m developing a problem with the pattern recognition part of my brain. One of the primeval abilities that are hardwired in from birth is the ability to recognise the human face, but in Africa I seem to have lost the plot. I can’t tell anyone apart.

I’m not talking about the toubabs, who are as eclectically bizarre as always, from pasty men with pale, bulging thighs peeping out from under ill-advised shorts, to steely-haired old women beaming the knowing smile of those who’ve been around a while... no, I’m talking about the locals. I just can’t seem to get a handle on them; awful though it sounds, they all look the same to me.

This is a particular problem in Mopti, where the local touts insist on introducing themselves to me in a constant stream of tours, tickets and trips. They remember me – I’m the toubab with the beard and the brown bush hat, so I’m fairly easy to spot – and they remember my name if I’ve told it to them, and all this conspires to turns a quiet wander down the street into a circus of embarrassment.

‘Hello Mark, you remember me?’ says someone who might ring a bell, or who might not – I can’t tell.

‘Um,’ I venture, recalling the Gambian bumster who got angry because I hadn’t been at his wedding. ‘Um, remind me.’

‘I’m Baba,’ he says. ‘We talked about treks this morning.’ And so we did; I spent half an hour in this guy’s office, talking to him one-on-one about Dogon treks. He’s a nice guy. He also looks a little crestfallen that I don’t remember him. Shit.

But for every Baba there’s a tit who just happened to be in the group of touts that accosted me from the bus, and who’s appointed himself as my best friend and runs up to me every time I step into the street, shouting, ‘Monsieur, monsieur, you remember me?’ And this is when it’s handy that I’m so awful with faces, because my expression shows that no, I have absolutely no idea who he is. It makes selling me a tour that much harder.

If only I could differentiate between the Babas and the bozos, I’d be much better at playing the West African game. But I just can’t...

The Right Staff

Written: 2 December 2002

It’s not compulsory to take a guide to the Dogon Country, but it’s highly recommended. Although the area where the Dogon people live can be explored independently, the Dogon don’t speak any French and there are no maps or books available to tell you where everything is, so you’re much better off with a guide.

The biggest problem is finding one. After my less than exciting experience with the uninspiring Assiké in Djenné, I learned my lesson: no guide is better than a bad guide. The challenge is knowing which ones are bad and which are good, and seeing as I find it difficult to even remember people’s faces here, I’ve got little chance of working out who’s going to make my Dogon trek something to remember.

The best advice is to find some fellow travellers who’ve already been to Dogon Country, and to follow their recommendations. I’d already had a couple of names given to me, but none of them were based in Mopti, so to secure their services I’d have to travel to places like Bankass or Bandiagara, a day’s travel from Mopti. This wasn’t a problem, but given the lack of phones in people’s houses, it would mean turning up and hoping that the recommended guide would not only be around, but would be happy to take me to the falaise for a reasonable price, something that isn’t certain when you’re travelling on your own. In a perfect world I’d find a guide in Mopti, who was recommended by fellow travellers, who was heading off on the kind of trip I wanted (say a week exploring Dogon Country), and who also had some people already booked with him, bringing the price down to a reasonable level. Given my experiences of trying to plan in Africa, I doubted very much whether I’d find such a guide.

I was wrong. In Djenné I met a lovely German couple who warmly recommended a Mopti-based guide called Mikael, and as they were coming back to Mopti at the same time as me, they showed me the restaurant where they’d met him. Unfortunately Mikael was already out on a trip with a couple of French travellers, but instead I met up with his business partner Issa and talked money. It sounds good; Mikael is leaving on Tuesday morning with a couple of Italian travellers for a week’s trek through Dogon, and the price, although a little higher than I expected, is affordable and all-inclusive. I have everything I want: a recommended guide, other people, a reasonable price and a good length of trip.

The only problem was that this was all arranged on Friday, and the trip is on Tuesday. I’m in Mopti, hardly my favourite spot in Mali, and I’ve already visited nearby Djenné, taken trips on the Niger and explored Mopti to exhaustion. I’ve had absolutely nothing to do for three days in a place that drives me mad. Back on Friday, the thought was less than enthusing, and I could feel the Lariam lurking in the background, ready to pounce on me in my boredom.

It’s worked out well, though. Forcing myself to stay in Mopti has forced me to slow down, and it’s made me adopt a more African attitude to time management. I’ve spent hours doing nothing; I’ve wandered round town, making friends with the touts instead of fighting with them; I’ve smiled lots, aware that I’m stuck in Mopti and should make the best of it, and people have started smiling back; basically, I’ve slowly but surely slipped into Mopti life, and although it isn’t the most thrilling experience in the world, it’s doing me good. After two months of rushing round West Africa like a loose hosepipe on full power, I need to chill out.

The waiting has proved to be a good thing, too. When he came back from his trip, Mikael turned out to be a lovely guy, and I felt like I could trust him from the start. I put down a deposit and he wrote out a contract, but in case he found any other people who might be interested he held onto the contract so he could show them that I’d already signed up, and in exchange he’s given me his Carte Nationale d’Identité – his passport, basically – which I’m guarding with my life. I figure that anyone who is happy to give me his identity papers in a police-happy state like Mali is OK by me, and it gives me a chance to examine a Republique du Mali identity card close up, with its slogan Un peuple, un but, une foi (‘One people, one goal, one faith’), the print of the left index finger, parental details and so on. I’ve surmised that Mikael Djiguiba was born vers 1977 (sometime around 1977) to Issiaka (his father) and Oumou (his mother), and that passport photos in Mali are as utterly banal as they are in the West. It looks like I’d found a good guide.

It doesn’t always go well, though, which is why you have to be so paranoid about finding a guide. On my first visit to Mopti, when Brook and I had been looking for transport to Timbuktu, I met a couple of Polish guys in the mission catholique who’d booked with a guide called Petit David; they were leaving the following morning, and they seemed pretty happy with their choice. Amusingly, after I signed my contract with Mikael, Petit David tried to flog me a tour to Dogon, and when I mentioned that he’d taken the two Polish guys a couple of weeks ago, his face lit up and he proudly fished out a piece of paper, hoping to persuade me to book with him on the strength of their written recommendation. Humouring him, I took a look at the letter, which went something like this:

Dear Petit David,

Here is our recommendation following our four-day trek through Dogon Country. You were an appalling guide, and we cannot recommend you in any way. You often left us alone, wandering off to god knows where, and you didn’t have any good information about the area, didn’t know anyone who lived in the villages, and worst of all, we had to pay to leave the last village ourselves, even though you had insisted that everything was included in the price.

You can expect to hear nothing but terrible opinions of your service.

‘Good, isn’t it?’ asked Petit David.

‘Priceless,’ I said. ‘On the strength of that recommendation, I can only say it’s a huge shame that I’ve already signed a contract with Mikael. I’m sure your trips are unforgettable, David! Never mind, maybe next time, eh?’

‘But I already have a couple of people going with me tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You can join them if you like.’

‘No, really, thanks all the same,’ I said. ‘Have a nice trip, though.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, sloping off into the melee, ready to spring his recommendation on someone else. I briefly pitied the couple who were about to spend four days of hell with Petit David in Dogon, but then again I waited three days to make sure of my guide, and if you don’t put in the time, you’re taking your chances...

Dogon Country

Written: 7 December 2002

Mali has three major tourist attractions that earn it a reputation as one of West Africa’s best destinations. Timbuktu is famous for being famous; Djenné is famous for its mosque; and Dogon Country, or Pays Dogon as it’s known locally, is famous for its culture, its trekking, and the number of guides who will try to flog you a Dogon tour the minute you step foot in Bamako or Mopti. Luckily the home of the Dogon people is interesting enough to warrant the hype.

The appeal of Dogon Country is two-fold; people come here for the landscape and the culture. The Falaise de Bandiagara (the Bandiagara Escarpment) is a huge cliff that extends about 150km through the scrubland east of Mopti in a southwest to northeast direction. Along this escarpment are dotted the unique villages of the Dogon people, who moved to this area around 700 years ago to escape the influx of Islam into West Africa. The result is a wonderful combination of beautiful landscape and ancient culture that is perfect for exploration on foot. Dogon Country is a place for donkey tracks rather than roads; it’s an area that has managed to stay relatively untouched by tourism, and as a result it’s a considerable relief after the hassles of Bamako and Mopti. Indeed, it almost feels as if you’re not in Mali, especially as people speak Dogon instead of French. It’s highly refreshing.

Dogon Villages

The most striking images in Dogon Country are the villages perched along the escarpment. Because the Dogon were on the run from the spread of Islam, they wanted their new villages to be secure, so instead of building at the base of the cliffs or on the cliff tops, they built their villages into the cliff faces themselves. They weren’t the first to do this, though; before the Dogon arrived the previous inhabitants, the Tellem, had built their own villages into the cliffs, and the remains of these even more ancient dwellings can still be seen high up on the falaise, often 100m or so up a sheer rock face. Nobody is quite sure how the Tellem actually reached their houses, but it’s probable that the area was forested in those days, so they could have climbed trees, or they could have dropped ropes from the top of the escarpment and climbed down. Whatever, the Tellem houses add a strange mystique to an area that’s already pretty bizarre.

Both Tellem and Dogon villages are initially hard to spot. The falaise is a red-brown colour, shooting vertically out of the surrounding sandy scrubland, and the Dogon build their houses out of mud, so they blend into the background perfectly. Walking along the bottom of the escarpment, you can find yourself looking straight at a Dogon village without realising it, until your eyes pick out a regular shape here, or perhaps a thatched roof there. And then you realise the extent of these settlements; they’re impressive, not so much because of their size, but because of the way they cling to the steep slopes of the falaise, seemingly defying gravity.

Dogon dwellings are made up of two fundamental building blocks: granaries and houses. These sit around small courtyards with walls connecting the buildings, creating a cosy little environment that instantly feels like a home. Running round the courtyard will be loads of animals, from chickens to goats to donkeys, and everywhere you see women pounding millet and children mucking around in the dust, half naked and smiling in the heat.

The granaries vary from a couple of metres high to three or four metres, but they all follow the same design; they’re box-shaped, about twice as high as they are wide at the bottom, and they only have one entrance, just below the roof on one side. This is normally a small square door, maybe two feet across, and below it a wooden spar sticks out for people to grab hold of. On top of the granary is a conical thatched roof of straw, and each granary is lifted off the ground by a construction of stone legs and branches, keeping the grain store out of the reach of vermin. The walls are made of layered mud and straw, and the whole thing has a slightly comic air, not unlike a large cuckoo clock wearing a hat. And they’re everywhere; each house has at least one, and most have quite a few more, especially as women have separate grain stores to men. It’s these funny-looking granary roofs that give Dogon villages their distinctive look, so it’s fitting that grain should be such an important part of Dogon life.

Millet is the main staple that’s stored in the granaries. Millet stalks produce little round seeds that the Dogon crush up by pounding large poles into big stone bowls full of grain, separating out the chaff by pouring the crushed mixture from a height of a couple of metres, so the breeze blows the lighter husks away; this is women’s work, and the thumping of millet crushers can be heard all day in Dogon, often accompanied by gossip and the sound of children gurgling in the dirt. The flour that remains can be mixed with water to form a thick white gravy that tastes of mild starch, and this forms the staple diet of a huge number of poor Sahel dwellers. It’s not unusual to find people eating millet for breakfast, lunch and dinner, varying it between millet cream (a milk-like drink) and millet with some kind of sauce (on good days). It makes millet vitally important in Dogon life, which is why there are so many granaries around.

The houses are a bit more standard than the granaries, being made out of rocks and mud bricks that are smothered with mud on the outside. Most houses consist of a number of box-like rooms on one storey, often linked by a corridor that acts as a veranda, and the roofs are flat with a small lip round the edge to stop you falling off. Indeed, one of the delightful aspects of trekking in the Dogon is sleeping on the roof, as it can get pretty hot inside at night, with the rocks of the house storing the heat of the daytime sun and radiating it at night. You also get to wake up to the stars, which is quite an event under the clear night sky of Pays Dogon.

Dogon villages consist of more than just houses, though. The nerve centre of each village is the togu-na, a low-roofed shelter in the centre of town where the men of the village get together to chat, smoke, drink and, it seems, fall asleep. The togu-na is specially built to prevent you from standing up, as this helps prevent discussions from turning into arguments, and with the roof covered in eight layers of thatched millet stalks and the sides completely open, it’s a good place to escape from the sun. Women aren’t allowed in the togu-na, just one indication of the sexism of Dogon life; others include the widespread (though illegal) practice of female circumcision (or, to be more accurate, female genital mutilation); the law that women have to live in a separate building during menstruation as it is considered an unclean time by the men; and the fact that women seem to do most of the work.

As well as houses, granaries and togu-nas, there are plenty of mosques, churches and animist fetishes (a fetish being a stone that’s holy to followers of the ancient animist belief system of the Dogon). The Dogon are highly tolerant of different religions, and many villages are split up into different areas, one for the Muslims, one for the Catholics, and one for the animists. Although the different religions often live apart, it’s not unusual for someone to believe in multiple religions, so you may get a Catholic who’s also an animist, who prays in the church and then goes off to sacrifice a chicken at the fetish to placate the local spirits. It’s a refreshing change after the in-your-face Islam of northern Africa.

So Dogon has it all: amazing architecture, an interesting and ancient culture, beautiful landscapes and trekking paths everywhere instead of roads. How can you fail to enjoy yourself?

My Experience of Dogon

How can you fail? By being horribly ill, of course. I originally booked a seven-day trek with Mikael, and joining us for the first four days were Gian Luca and Valentina from Italy, and for the first five days Coen and Susan from Holland. However I got so ill I cut it short to five days, returning to Mopti two days early. Being ill in the baking sun of the Dogon was not pleasant; indeed, it was one of the lowest points of my trip so far, which is really saying something. Luckily towards the end things perked up a bit, not because I got better, but because I got used to it. Sometimes rolling with the punches has its own appeal, and in the end I just let Africa pound me senseless.

The first rumblings of discontent started in Mopti. I woke up on the first day of the trek, all packed and ready to head off into Dogon, and instantly had to rush to the toilet, the bottom falling out of my world in depressingly familiar fashion. There was no way I was going to cancel my trip now, not after three days of intensely boring waiting in Mopti, so I clenched my teeth, met up with the rest of the team, and jumped into the car to Djiguibombo, our starting point.

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. Our taxi, a Peugeot 505, tried to pass a four-wheel-drive coming the other way over a thin bridge, but the other driver refused to pull over and first the front wheel and then the rear wheel of our car slipped over the side of the metre-high concrete kerb. The whole car lurched to the right and the chassis slammed down onto the road; we weren’t going anywhere for a while. Amazingly nobody said a thing; the driver got out and looked at the car, the wheels uselessly hanging over the side of the bridge, and he simply shrugged and went off in search of rocks to prop it up. Things go wrong in Africa and there’s no point in getting stressed about it; instead we piled out into the shade of a baobab and sat down to watch.

The original plan was to jack the car up so the wheels could be pushed back onto the road, and half an hour later some progress had been made. Luckily for us, at that moment a minibus trundled into view, packed to bursting point with chickens and people, and the entire contingent simply got out and lifted our taxi back onto the road. This is probably the only advantage of having buses so full of people; we were back on the road to Djiguibombo in no time, as if nothing had happened.

On the Roof

Djiguibombo is a pleasant little Dogon village on the plateau above the escarpment, and although it pales into insignificance compared to some of the beautiful villages further along, I found it fascinating because it was the first one we’d visited. It had all the village elements described above, and it soon became apparent that I’d been right to wait for Mikael. Incredibly polite, witty, always smiling and amazingly tolerant of our inane questions, Mikael was obviously an accomplished guide. The others in the group were also delightful, and I figured that we had all the ingredients for a fantastic trek, as long as I could shift my illness. This was going to be good.

The short trek down the escarpment to our first night’s stop at Kani-Kombolé felt good too. The views from the top of the cliff were beautiful, with flat scrubland stretching to Burkina Faso in the distance, and as we wandered down the falaise we passed groups of Dogon women carrying baskets on their heads, saying hello and being warmly greeted in return. The Dogon are famous for their greetings, which seem to go on forever; a typical exchange goes something like this:

‘Ohh seh-weh mah?’ (How are you?)

‘Seh-weh.’ (I’m well.)

‘Ohh mara seh-weh mah?’ (How is your family?)

‘Seh-weh.’ (They’re well.)

‘Ohh seh-weh dege-mah?’ (How was your day?)

‘Seh-weh.’ (Good, thanks.)

‘Ohh mara seh-weh dege-mah?’ (How was your family’s day?)

‘Seh-weh.’ (Good, thanks.)

And so on. Often this greeting goes on so long that you end up shouting at the person you’re greeting, who’s now miles behind you, a dot fading into the distance yelling ‘Seh-weh’ in answer. Whatever the exchange, as you pass each other, you smile warmly. Everyone smiled on the way down to Kani-Kombolé; so did I.

I wasn’t smiling later that night, though. We settled in and ate a meal of rice and the smallest chicken in the world, and Gian Luca, Valentina and I opted for a night’s sleep on the roof, under the stars. ‘What could be more perfect?’ I thought as I lay under the stars, Orion shining on the horizon as I grimaced my way through what I hoped would be the last few muscle spasms of the night.

As the minutes ticked by, the slight breeze that had felt so pleasant when we’d settled down started picking up, and as Orion slowly glided through the sky, it began picking up handfuls of sand from the roof and throwing them in my hair. ‘Never mind,’ I thought, ‘that’s why I have a sleeping bag,’ and I snuggled down inside, trying to get comfortable on the thin mattress that lay between me and the stone roof. It seemed to work, too, as what felt like a short time later I heard the muezzin start up his 5am call to prayer at the nearby mosque, waking me from my sleepy thoughts with his nasal whining. I peeped out from under my bag, aching like fury, and took a look at the sky, just as the wind howled another handful of sand into my face.

Right at that moment I heard a frustrated Italian curse from next door and saw Gian Luca and Valentina pick up their mattresses and start the torturous process of carrying them down the rickety tree-trunk ladder to the house below. I didn’t know why they were bothering; the muezzin’s call goes out at 5am, and I figured we’d be up soon anyway, so it didn’t worry me too much that I was finding it damn near impossible to get back to sleep in the increasingly gale-force wind.

An hour later something clicked in my mind. Orion was only just overhead, which meant it couldn’t be five in the morning – it had to be earlier. I rolled over, looked at my watch, gasped as I saw it was only 3am, and was rewarded by another mouthful of sand blown at high speed right into my face. That did it. The bloody muezzin had started wailing at 2am – two bloody am! – and I hadn’t actually managed to get any sleep yet, I’d just drifted off for a few minutes before he’d woken me up. It dawned on me that I was going to have to follow my Italian friends downstairs, so I wrenched myself out of bed, clenched my muscles to prevent any appalling accidents, and somehow managed to get everything off the roof without being blown into neighbouring Burkina.

Downstairs wasn’t much better – it was hot, uncomfortable and crowded – but at least the wind was whistling outside, not in my bed. Safe in the knowledge that I’d learned my lesson when it comes to sleeping on a Dogon roof, I tried to pass out on the floor, with a modicum of success. I didn’t dream so much as hallucinate, though at least I got through to the morning in one piece.

Unwell in Dogon

Day two was agony. A typical trekking day in the Dogon consists of breakfast, followed by a quick excursion round the village you’ve stayed in, and a trek of a few kilometres to the next village, taking maybe a couple of hours and arriving at, say, 11am. You then stay there until around 3pm, exploring the village once the sun has stopped being so incredibly hot, and then fit in another couple of hours of trekking to reach your destination for the night, where you take a bucket shower, eat, and sleep. It’s not a terribly demanding schedule, but when you’re ill it’s a nightmare. We set off from Kani-Kombolé for what should have been an easy stroll along the foot of the escarpment, but the combination of an awful night’s sleep and my worsening diarrhoea meant I struggled to keep walking. By the time we reached our lunch stop at Teli, I was fading fast.

This was irritating, as Teli is a beautiful village. Up high on the escarpment are lots of old Tellem dwellings – tiny houses that look more like weird beehives, as Tellem buildings are often only a couple of feet high with single holes for windows – and the old village of Teli, only recently abandoned for a more modern bunch of houses on the plain below, is a classic Dogon collection of granaries, houses and winding paths, perched halfway up the escarpment with beautiful views of the countryside. Mikael explained various aspects of Dogon history and folklore, but I couldn’t concentrate; I was too busy making sure I didn’t ruin my trekking trousers, clenching in silent agony until we made it back to the campement, where the rest of the group ate lunch and I booked a spot in the toilet block. I felt miserable.

The walk to Endé, our stop for the night, was equally distressing, and after a delightful bucket shower under the stars and a bowl of plain rice with some pieces of unidentifiable meat, I went to bed, inside this time. I needed a good night’s sleep, and this time I was damn well going to get it.

Unfortunately the cricket that found its way into my room had other ideas. Crickets are the noisiest insects on the planet (apart, perhaps, from cicadas), and my visitor set up shop right near my head, screeching so loudly that the stone walls of my bedroom vibrated in sympathy. I turned on my torch, and he stopped; I turned it off, and he started again; my earplugs did nothing to drown out the symphony, and I was at a total loss what to do. It took half an hour of hunting through the room to track down the mud-coloured cricket on the mud-coloured wall, by which time I barely had enough energy to crush the bastard with my hiking boots. I eventually got back to sleep, but my good night’s sleep had been rudely interrupted.

Party Mood

The next morning signalled the end of Ramadan and the festival of Eid al-Fitr. Not surprisingly the end of a month of fasting is a time of great celebration, and a huge gunpowder explosion at 6am was the signal for everyone to leap out of bed and start partying. I needed a party like I needed a hole in the head, but I dutifully dragged myself out of bed and followed the crowds outside the village.

I’m glad I did. Mikael is a Muslim and we followed him into the scrub, and for the first time I saw people in Africa actually running, with streams of smartly dressed Muslims jogging along the road to an impromptu service outside the village limits. By the time we arrived two groups had gathered, one for each different Islamic sect represented in Endé, and each group sorted themselves into ranks of men, women and children, all of them facing east. I watched, fascinated, as the spiritual leader of one group brought out a loudspeaker and started chanting away, while the other group settled for an unamplified service, their holy man happy to stand under a towel held by three men. Umbrellas dotted the crowd to keep off the powerful sun, and throughout the service people continued to arrive, some running from the village and some noisily screeching up on motorbikes. It was pandemonium, quite unlike a Christian church service, and it looked more like a restless classroom at the end of term than a religious service. At one point a herd of cows threatened to run into one of the groups, but some judicious yelling and waving of sticks managed to avert disaster, though by this time it seemed as if the teacher had lost control, as everyone was jabbering away, seemingly oblivious to the chanting going on. People were obviously in the mood for a party, and after a month of abstinence, who can blame them?

Unfortunately, I didn’t feel remotely like celebrating. The morning’s walk from Endé to Yaba-Talu was an exercise in controlling my pain, and the lunch stop seemed to go on for hours – which it did. I’d assumed that stopping for four hours in the middle of every day would be perfect for a spot of writing and possibly some exploring, but how wrong I was. I was physically far too tired to head out into the midday sun, and whenever I tried to get out my computer to do a spot of writing, it was as if someone had got out a loudspeaker and announced it to the whole village. I’d set up my keyboard and the population of Mali would crowd round, staring at the screen and whispering among themselves. It made writing impossible; I’d try typing something, but you try being creative when half the planet is breathing down your neck. It’s like trying to be angry with someone who won’t stop smiling; it just doesn’t work.

Of course, who can blame them? I’d stare if I lived in a Dogon village and a white guy turned up with a fold-out computer, and I have to keep reminding myself that in Africa, staring and invading someone’s personal space is simply not rude; the problem lies with me, not with them. I remember reading a story about a journalist who lived in Africa for a while, and sometimes he’d shut his door for a bit of privacy, so he could concentrate on his latest piece. However, this didn’t have the desired effect, as the Africans with whom he lived interpreted the closed door as meaning that there was something wrong, because in Africa you simply don’t shut yourself off from other people. So shutting the door would make things worse, as everyone would keep knocking on the door to find out if everything was all right, shattering his concentration completely. I know just how he felt, but instead of getting angry, I just fold up my computer and give up on writing, opting instead for sitting and staring into space. Hell, after three days in Mopti waiting for Mikael, doing nothing for hours on end is practically second nature.

Take Me Home

As with the morning walk from Endé, the afternoon hike was a real struggle as we trudged back up the falaise to Begnimato, one of the most picturesque villages on the trek. I was seriously considering leaving Dogon Country early; I couldn’t take much more trekking with such a weak body, and I needed sleep, I needed a bed near to a toilet, and I needed time to get better, none of which was forthcoming in Begnimato.

What a pity, as Begnimato is glorious. Sitting right on top of the cliff, the views of the plains are stunning, and the village has the air of something ancient, something really quite special. It doesn’t look that different to other Dogon villages, and still consists of the same granaries, houses and togu-nas that you see throughout Dogon Country, but the way it sits there, surveying the landscape from its cliff-top command, is simply beautiful.

I was in no state to appreciate the beauty, though, and realised that on top of my physical illness, I was beginning to get depressed. I’d waited for this trek for three days and really wanted to enjoy it, and here I was spending most of my time enjoying the olfactory experience of the Dogon’s alfresco toilets (well, holes in the ground, to be more accurate). They might have had some of the most wonderful views of all the ablutions I’ve had the pleasure to use in Mali, but that was scant consolation as I ran for yet another shot at goal. I decided that there was only one thing for it; I would have to stop taking Lariam, as the combination of Lariam depression and physical illness was pushing me close to my limit. I grabbed the one pill I’d brought with me, which I was due to take that evening, and crushed it with my boots, ceremoniously scattering the powder to the winds. I figured I’d take my chances with malaria, and I instantly felt much better. It wouldn’t last.

That night my bed consisted of a paper-thin mattress thrown onto a floor that made the north face of the Eiger look flat. I woke up every half an hour to find myself slumped in the corner of the room, but some quick work with some grappling hooks and a couple of pickaxes got me back to the top, from where I could start my slow slumberous slide all over again. It was like going tobogganing in incredibly slow motion, but even that was fun and games compared to the rooster.

At 5am the local cock perched himself right outside my door and started cock-a-doodle-dooing at the top of his voice. I tried the earplugs, and they made no difference; I tried ignoring the bastard, and that made it worse; and finally I tried getting up and throwing stones at the sod, which seemed to do the trick.

Roosters, though, are obviously cleverer that they look, because he waited for 15 minutes, until I’d lulled myself back into a false sense of security, and then he started again. So I went outside and threw stones at him again, and again he retired, squawking. But sure enough, 15 minutes later he was back, this time on the roof right above my head, where I couldn’t get to him and he was totally safe; he celebrated by inviting a friend, and together the two of them serenaded me until the sun rose on my bloodshot eyes.

Back Down Again

Day four was therefore another washout, and on the walk from Begnimato to Dourou, further along the escarpment, I reached the lowest point of the trek, and arguably the lowest point of my entire African trip. I was thoroughly drained, feeling awful, bored with all the sitting around in the middle of the day, sick of the same food for every meal, and totally, totally depressed. I decided I would take the taxi back to Mopti with Gian Luca and Valentina, as they had only joined us for four days, and as I struggled my way along the top of escarpment, clenching and seriously considering flying back home and giving up on Africa, something happened. It was gradual, and I didn’t notice it at first, but it turned out to be the bottom of the curve; I had reached the most miserable point of my entire trip, and logic dictated that from here, things could only get better. I couldn’t give up now; I had given up the Lariam and it would take a few weeks to leave my system, I would soon shift my diarrhoea, and after this trek I had a whole new country to look forward to. Sure, I could fly home, but why not stick it out for a little longer, just in case?

Logic saved the day, so instead of jacking it in right away, I talked to the highly sympathetic Mikael and decided to head back the next day with Coen and Susan. I wasn’t physically going to be able to manage seven days, but five sounded about right. And from that moment on, things got better, and I stopped thinking of flying back to London... for now, anyway.

After lunch in Dourou and saying goodbye to the Italians, the four of us dropped down the escarpment to Nombori, and despite the physical strain, I actually enjoyed myself for the first time since day one. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but I got into the rhythm, savoured the views, and when we reached Nombori, I knew I’d made the right decision. The sunset over the escarpment was picture-perfect, the view from the roof of our campement was beautiful, and the people were delightful. I even got a reasonably good night’s sleep, which I couldn’t quite believe, and before I knew it we were up and about on day five, ready to return back up the escarpment to Dourou, where we would get a car back to Mopti.

A Highlight?

I was far too unwell to appreciate the Dogon Country for what it really is. At the time I hated it, but I would have hated anything in that state; in reality the Dogon is a wonderful place. The people are friendly, the landscape is awesome, and even through the haze of Lariam and diarrhoea I managed to crack the odd smile. As a rose-tinted memory, the Dogon will be a delight to revisit from the comfort of my grandad’s rocking chair.

I was, however, too weak to concentrate on the Dogon culture and all the stories that Mikael told us, which is a shame. Dogon culture is one of the most amazing aspects of the region, and things like the wonderful carved doors, the animist legends and the mysterious Tellem are fascinating to discover. I was also too ill to appreciate the kola nut, a local narcotic that the Dogon chew incessantly in the same way that the Indians chew pan; I tried one – everyone does – and it tasted like acrid, bitter radishes, not the best taste when you’re feeling ill.

I still loved Dogon Country, though. I had to reach the lowest point of my trip, and I had to talk myself down from buying the next flight back to London, but at least I got through unscathed, and from here things can only get better.

And that’s got to be a good thing.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 9 December 2002

After being thoroughly underwhelmed by Senegal, I desperately wanted to like Mali. I wanted it to amaze me on a daily basis; I wanted its landscapes to astound me; I wanted the culture to enthral me; in short, I wanted too much.

It’s hard for me to be totally honest about what I thought of Mali, because a lot of my thoughts were affected by malaria pills or illness. My initially negative experience of the River Niger was probably more to do with the fact I was recovering from a nasty bout of bacteria than a reflection on the experience itself, and I’m convinced my black mood in the desert of Timbuktu was a direct effect of the Lariam; I can’t think of any sane reason why I would feel miserable while camel trekking in such an evocative place. But I did feel miserable in Mali, and for a lot of the time, and I left the country after the lowest ebb of all, being ill in Dogon Country.

So most of my problems with Mali should be blamed on me, not the country. Mali promised some interesting places, and it delivered them. Timbuktu grew on me, and by the time I left I was thoroughly caught up in its myth and mystery; Djenné surprised me by being a delightfully friendly place, and the imposing mud mosque is even more beautiful in the flesh than it is in the countless tourist department posters you see splattered around the walls of Mali’s hotels and travel agencies; the River Niger between Timbuktu and Gao is breathtaking, and the public ferry is a wonderful way to see it; and Dogon Country, even through the haze of Lariam-influenced depression and constant rushes to the ablutions, is an amazing place, steeped in culture and history.

But, as the barman said to the horse, why the long face? I guess the problem isn’t with Mali, but a realisation that so far, West Africa hasn’t been what I expected, and I expected more. None of the countries I have visited so far has shone in the way that, say, India, Australia or Malaysia shone for me on my previous trip, and I genuinely expected that two months into my African jaunt I’d be raving about at least one place. Incredibly, I’m not; instead I’ve visited a collection of pleasant enough places that I’m pleased I’ve seen, but I wouldn’t necessarily bother to visit them again. I’d go back to India or Australia at the drop of a hat, but I won’t be coming back here.

Perhaps I should blame the language barrier? People say that you visit West Africa for the people and East Africa for the animals, but so far the only people I’ve warmed to are the Gambians, and I only spent about a week there, so even that’s pushing it. This could be down to the language barrier, as my French is easily good enough for ordering food, finding hotel rooms and getting the right bus, but stops way short of proper, involved conversation. It’s therefore impossible for me to really get to know anyone who doesn’t speak English, which restricts me to those in the tourist trade, idiotic touts, and the odd language expert – hardly a fair cross-section of the populace. So for me to say that I didn’t particularly like the Malians or the Senegalese could just be another way of me saying that my French isn’t good enough to jump the cultural barrier.

It’s also possible that the Francophone countries inherited a fair amount of ‘French-ness’ about them while the English colonies inherited a fair amount of ‘English-ness’, which would make me feel much more at home and at ease in Anglophone countries. India was a prime example of the English influence putting me at my ease; I loved the way the language worked in the Gambia in the same way I loved the way the Indians speak English, I enjoyed seeing snippets of home appear in the strange cultural mishmash of Africa, and I loved talking to the locals, even in basic English. In Francophone countries, if a conversation goes astray, I instantly assume it’s because of my French; if a conversation goes astray in an Anglophone country, it’s either down to the other person’s English, or it’s down to a cultural difference, but whatever the reason, I understand what’s going on. In French-speaking countries, I rarely do.

But I think my biggest disappointment in the Sahel countries has been the lack of anything stunning to discover; I have yet to be speechless at a building, a landscape, an event in the street or an aspect of the local culture. I’ll be astounded if this doesn’t happen in Africa, somewhere along the line. Too many people rave about this continent for it to be full of clones of Senegal and Mali; if it is, I’ll just have to find another continent for my fix.

Mali, then, is a pleasant place, but for me it’s nothing to shout about. I can’t complain, because I have come away with some good memories and some good stories, but I’m still looking for that special something that makes all this illness, all this waiting, all this hassle and all this emotional wrangling worth the effort. Mali doesn’t have that special something, but it’s still a good place to visit, and no doubt the rose-tinted spectacles of history will help me warm to it; thankfully Lariam doesn’t seem to affect my tendency to happy nostalgia.

Further Reading

This story is continued in another of my books, A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from the same source, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Tambacounda to Kayes

Kayes

Kayes to Bamako

A Serious Loss

Black Music

Bamako

Saturday Night at the Movies

Mopti

Mopti to Timbuktu

Marmalade!

Timbuktu

The Waiting Game

Camel Trekking in Timbuktu

Down on the Upside

Tuareg Tea

Bloody Nora

Timbuktu to Gao

The Floating Market

Gao

Gao to Mopti

Sahel Food

Djenné

The Best Laid Plans

A Financial Perspective

Remember Me?

The Right Staff

Dogon Country

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading

Table of Contents

Preface

Tambacounda to Kayes

Kayes

Kayes to Bamako

A Serious Loss

Black Music

Bamako

Saturday Night at the Movies

Mopti

Mopti to Timbuktu

Marmalade!

Timbuktu

The Waiting Game

Camel Trekking in Timbuktu

Down on the Upside

Tuareg Tea

Bloody Nora

Timbuktu to Gao

The Floating Market

Gao

Gao to Mopti

Sahel Food

Djenné

The Best Laid Plans

A Financial Perspective

Remember Me?

The Right Staff

Dogon Country

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading