Australia Day 2008

As usual the Lagos Honorary Consul - Pam - managed to wrangle all the stray aussies (and plenty of folk who were just pretending for the day to get a free steak...) from around Lagos for a day a the beach to celebrate Australia Day.

Cheers!

Pam's beach hut was a bit of a hike - a good hour from lagos through the lagoons. But it was worth it!! It was beautiful. Unfortunately they'd lost at least 50m of beach during the wet season (making the narrow peninsula only brely 100m wide where the hut is...) But as it was harmattan you could still swim.

THANKS PAM

Mali

Since the great rush by Europeans to take anything that wasn't bolted down from Africa to make a profit (including people) began, back when the vast majority of West Africa was clumped under the rather uninspired name of "Negroland" (the more lucrative areas along the Ghana - Cote d'Ivoire coasts getting the flashier name of "The Gold Coast"), the area along the Niger River controlled by the Bambarra and Songhai - now known as Mali - has been held in almost mystical regard by European explorers.

I found this rather interesting "new and accurate map of Negroland" (1747) showing the European colonies along the coast and the main tribal regions (and, of course, what resources the Europeans could get [read: take] out of them).

(click on the map for a larger version)

Of note is the question that plagued explorers for over a century, as described in the 1840 book The Life and Times of Mungo Park :

"Few subjects have excited a more lively interest among the curious and the learned, than the geographical problem with regard to the termination of the Niger... This question was eventually put at rest, but not until more than half a century of fruitless effort and speculation, during which many valuable lives had been sacrificed in attempting to trace to it's outlet the course of the mysterious river."

The map depicts the theory of the day that had the gamibia river orginating in Mali and another river flowing from Lybia to a great desert lake near timbuktu. The actual outlet of the Niger in Nigeria's oil rich delta came from a diferent river all together. It seemed impossible that a river would flow out of the foothills and lush lanscape of what is now The Gambia and eastern Senegal, through Mali towards the Sahara before heading south though Niger and Nigeria to empty into the Bight of Benin. In fact, when Mungo park first set out to Mali, he had no idea which way the niger flowed despite his claim to sail down river to it's terminus...

It is this rather perculiar course that lead the river to be a major highway between Mali and downstream countries such as Niger and Nigeria. Thus trading ports such as timbuktu could flourish, bring salt from the mines tio the north in exchange for gold and the like from the south.

This is shown in the description of the kingdom of Tombut [Timbuktu]"from whence are brought gold, ivory and good tin."

Timbuctoo, Tumbuto, Tombouctou, Tumbyktu, Timbuktu or Tembuch (It doesn't seem to matter how you spell it) has been claiming European victims, and luring many to their deaths, since it first appeared (as Tembuch) on a Catalan map of the fourteenth century.

Rumour had been spreading of a mystical almost "el doardo"-like city in the Sahara that was abundant with gold and other such wealth that could be plundered by Europe... if only they could find it.

Timbuktu was first visited by a modern European in 1826, when the Scottish explorer Maj. Gordon Laing made it across the desert, only to be murdered soon after by the locals for refusing to convert to Islam... The African Association had been founded in Britain with the determination that a Brit should be the first European to set foot in Timbuctoo. And so he did. of course, he did not return...

The fervor was fanned by the likes of Chapman who wrote:

Deep in that lion-haunted inland lies
A mystic city, goal of high enterprise

..and a young Tennyson (before he was a lord) got very wordy with his poem "Timbuctoo". Rightly, as it would later be revealed, he wrote:

Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo
A dream as frail as those of ancient time?

A few years later the French announced that a Monsieur René Caillié had reached the lost city, dressed as a poor Arab, and returned alive. His description of the city somewhat deflated the myth:

"I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo... The city presented, at first sight, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions, but immense quicksands of a yellowish white colour ... the most profound silence prevailed."

This is the Timbuktu that one meets today after long voyage up the river Niger.

The air of mystery may have evaporated from Timbuktu under the sun and shifting sands of the Sahara, but the Country of Mali still has a lot to offer.

A former French colony, Mali still receives daily flights Paris and Marseilles, french is spoken widely and although there has been much western influence since independence and tourism is starting to flourish, the country offers a fresh, almost naive, face of west Africa - Africa for Beginners, as it were...

Unlike the hustle and bustle of coastal West Africa or the stricter, often conflict ridden areas ruled by Sharia Law, Mali is a laid-back, more relaxed, "Muslim-lite" (as one local described it) part of the world. One which George, Todd and I grew to love over two weeks travelling around...

Mali Day 2 - Bamako to Djenne

We had two weeks to play with in Mali as there's only one flight a week from Lagos - a milk run through west Africa stopping at Accra and Abidjan (turning a 1 hr flight into closer to 4 hrs of takeoffs and landings...)

Anyway, our plan was to make it up to Essakane a couple of hours north of Timbuktu on the edge of the Sahara where a three day music festival has been held for the last 8 years. We hired a guide and a car (with a driver) through a local tour company and had agreed on a route that covered pretty much all of the country that you could see in only two weeks...

I managed to take just over 1,000 photos and a few videos - so it's taken a little while to sort through them all and get something up on the blog (I also managed to turn them into a slide show that runs in just under an hour - maybe a little too long...)

So, here, for your viewing pleasure is a selection of Mali's finest...

[SO I DON'T KILL ANYONE'S BROWSER I'VE LIMITED THE AMOUNT THAT WILL COME UP ON THE FIRST PAGE - YOU'LL HAVE TO GO TO ARCHIVES ON THE LEFT TO LOAD UP THE LAST WEEK OF THE TRIP]

It was apparently watermelon season
(seems like a strange choice for a country that's mostly desert)

There's always a big trade in firewood
The roads were busy with donkey-pulled carts of wood, bagged rice and millet

Family on the move for lunch

This bloke hitched a ride to somewhere
(I'm not sure if the driver knows he's up there)

Walking to evening prayers

Sunset on the river waiting for the ferry to Djenne

Mali Day 3 - Djenne to Mopti

The town of Djenne (pron: Jenny) has been around for quite a while, and from walking around the place, it looks as if little has changed. Set on an island in a flat swampy inland delta of a tributary of the Niger, Djenne is one of the major draw cards for Mali - the UNESCO listed Djenne Mosque (info here and here) is apparently the largest mud brick structure in existence. It certainly looks impressive.

Some of the locals making mud bricks on the dry swamps outside Djenne with the Mosque dominating the skyline. In the wet season most of this low land is inundated.

Children play in the sandy square out the front of the Mosque - once a week there's a large market here where traders can bring much needed supplies from out of town. Each stall is defined by four rocks where they'll set up their make-shift stalls (you can see a couple in the foreground) same family at the same place every week - nice and easy to remember

Almost all the buildings in Djenne are built in the traditional mud brick style of the Sahel-Sudan. These fancy windows are one of the interesting influences received from thousands of years trading with Moroccans

on the streets of Djenne....
Despite having no sewers or any drainage system, this place was amazingly clean
(much better than anything similar in our neck of the woods)

Most of the kids are usually in Koranic school during the day (like Timbuktu, Djenne is considered a centre of Islamic learning in Mali) - some kids just like to play.

If you're going to market to sell your wares, you'll need to bring your own chair as well...

or you could get your kids to do it for you....

Millet is one of the staples around here and, unfortunately like most things in this part of the world, seems to take an inordinate amount of time and manpower to make it useful to people. In every town on the outskirts you'll see women pounding millet and using the breeze to filter the cracked husks from the goodness inside. The they have to grind it down to make flour.

Just to make things a little more difficult. Pretty much all the vegetation surrounding these villages has been cut down for firewood - leaving nothing but arid land. Thus dung is dried and used as firewood by the villagers

After walking around Djenne and some surrounding villages, we jumped back in the car and drove up to Mopti to begin the exciting part of our trip - a three day boat journey up the Niger River to Timbuktu !!

Mopti (info here) is a major trading post on The Niger (where the Bani - which goes down to Djenne - branches off) Here people board pinasses (small river boats) and pirogues (canoes), for either transportation or fishing.

Banks of the Niger - Mopti

The bigger boats are so full of people and stuff that the driver has to sit at the front and steer via a fairly flimsy looking cable system to the rudder at the back (where another guy tinkers with an old diesel engine)

The busy market-port of Mopti (mosque in the background) was quite amazing with the amount of stuff being moved. Salt from the mines north of Timbuktu is boated down and traded for various things. Fish are sold everywhere as are all manner of bits a pieces as usual...

A lazy day in the pirouge

Mali Days 4-6 - Pinasse on the Niger River to Timbuktu

Unloading the car in Mopti and taking one the the hundreds of pinasses up the river. We somehow managed to pick the coldest, windiest day on record to set sail (even the locals complained about the cold) So we all hunkered down under layers of clothes and sleeping bags and slept on the deck of the boat safely out of the wind.

What's a pinasse you ask? That's a pinasse. Toilet and out board at the back, kitchen table in the middle, a couple of couches, and the fuel tank at the front (optional sunbed on roof). Able to travel at walking pace for long periods of time. The driver and his first mate slept of the boat, but we pitched tents on the banks.

Enjoying a cup of tea

All meals were on the pinasse, so all you had to do was flag down a local fisherman, buy some of their latest catch, avoid being over-run by his children, and voi-la - dinner!!

The boys did amazingly well with just a little charcoal burner to come up with beautiful fish stews with rice or couscous. after a while you get sick of the Malian tourist staple of rice or couscous so we rebelled when we stopped at a small port town for supplies and got some plantains and goat meat (a more Nigerian diet). I think even the boat guys were happy with the change. The river fish was excellent, but there's only so many ways you can cook fish for lunch and dinner on a small canoe....

George and Todd enjoying the sunset (and the cold) - We actually purchased a couple of beanies in Mopti as it was so cold. In Nigeria one doesn't tend to keep any clothes that would make you warm (unless you're going somewhere where the air con's on full-bore...)

As you approach the vast inland delta of Lake Debo, your surrounded by miles of shallow reeds and the river narrows from the massive up to 1km wide beast into a hundred little streams just wide enough to turn a canoe. Luckily the boat driver seemed to know where he was going.

As well as fish, the locals here survive on the lucrative flocks of small birds that live in the swamps and rice paddies that the villagers have planted (you can see the cut rice and thatched huts in the background). So as the sun goes down and flocks of birds fly about the locals put up fishing nets to catch them - yes the black things in the net are birds. Not much to them, but apparently tastes like chicken...

Harmattan always makes for a good sunrise
(the rest of the day is dusty and cold, but sunrises are always pretty)

When your way is blocked by a river than can be over 1km wide, everyone and everything has to cross by canoe. That includes motorbikes, goats, donkeys and people...

This place is so flat you can travel for miles with the right transportation

Unfortunately, as it's so flat (and the river wide) it can get really windy and quite choppy

A slow boat heading towards Timbuktu with bags of rice



Each night we set up camp on the banks of the river.
As most of our crap was still on the boat, it was actually quite easy each day.

Our guide, Mamadou (or Mama-don't as he's affectionately known) relaxing under the cover of the kitchen table out of the cold.

One of the many bozo villages lining the river

Even though the river is so large, vegetation does spread far from it's banks into the desert so local herders tend to stay close

Mali Day 7 - Timbuktu

As per my rambling at the start of this blog, Timbuktu [Timbuctoo, Tumbuto, Tombouctou, Tumbyktu, or Tembuch (like I said it doesn't seem to matter how you spell it)] has been the stuff of myth for hundreds of years, an rich oasis surrounded by the ever moving sands of the Sahara.

Many adventurous folk have perished trying to make it across the Sahara from the north, or up the Niger (as we did) had they known the truth back then that the city is little more than a conglomeration of mud brick buildings intersected by narrow winding streets that reach 50 degrees C in the hot season, they might not have bothered... Even now, there's only a few white folk living in town (the largest foreign contingent apart from the nomadic touareg seems to be Libyan..) It's still 99.9% Muslim, but apparently there's three Mormons in town on their mission that have set up a church. These days no one will kill you for doing such a thing, but I'm not sure how big their congregation will be....

You spend a lot of time in Africa wondering about when places had their hey day, as it is usually not immediately apparent while you wander around dilapidated buildings and streets. Timbuktu, unfortunately is no exception. Once a huge scholarly centre, there used to be great libraries and centres of Koranic learning attached to the mosques here, but despite the desert conditions offering some protection, these have long ago fallen by the wayside. Today a few scrolls remain on display and the EU is helping rebuild the main mosque, while a South African firm is building an Islamic university (the first here for hundreds of years).

Locals in Timbuktu greet you by saying "welcome to the middle of nowhere" - mostly as a joke, but in reality, it really is in the middle of bloody nowhere (and you can only get there by camel, 4WD or canoe... there is supposed to be an airstrip here, but I never saw it)

Though it's population is only just 30,000 Timbuktu is quite a lively place and we just happened to be there on the busiest weekend of the year as 5,000 travellers and all the associate support people prepared to descend on Essakane (a few hours north) for the festival of the desert, pretty much doubling the towns population for a week.



This (apparently) is the original well after which timbuktu is named. "tim" being 'well' and "buktu" being the name of the woman who looked after the well

Timbuktu streets. The timber sticking out of the walls is part of the structure and is used as scaffolding each year when new mud is applied after the rainy season (not that Timbuktu gets much rain)

Timbuktu was the meeting place for tradesmen who would travel across Africa from the North, East and South, to barter their goods with the West Africans, who came from...well, West Africa. These days the markets seem to exist for their own sake, collecting the salt (still mined by hand and brought in by camel 40 days to the north) and rice grown locally near the river, and trading these for everything else one might need from Mopti and Segou further upstream. Because it's so remote, desolate, and incredibly difficult to get to (not just because of the terrain and heat there's also plenty of the bandits who roam the desert and rob everyone travelling past) prices are a little higher than usual but it's still bustling with plenty of good stuff.

This guy is selling herbs, teas, salt and various dried nuts and chillies etc.

Foosball - even in Timbuktu the kids love it...

Not quite the stuff of legend, Timbuktu streets aren't any different to any other Sahel town

Outside town in the dunes

Whilst it may look touristy and kinda stupid - these turbans (or shesh) are really comfortable and keep the sand and dust out very well. In the end, everyone was wearing one (you get sick of putting sunscreen on three hundred times a day and still getting burnt...

Enjoying a quite beer on the hotel roof watching the locals play football in the distance.

Luckily we'd filled the car up with crates of beer and water in Mopti before the pinasse trip and he met us in Timbuktu. With the influx of everyone for the festival, the Town quickly ran out of everything.