The Adventures of John & George: Mali Days 8 to 10 - Festival of the Desert, Essakane

The "festival au désert" started back in January 2001, and is held every year in Essakane which is about two hours of Timbuktu.

The idea for the festival apparently originated in the traditional local Touareg festivities of Takoubelt in Kidal and Temakannit in Timbuktu, which represented for long time a place for decision making and exchange of information among the different communities - with lots of singing, dancing, camel racing etc. Nowadays it's a great excuse for anyone who can get there to wrap something up in a handkerchief and try and sell it to a toubaab (whitey) - seriously, as Todd said, you'd be sitting in the chair at your local touareg dentist and the guy would sidle up with a handkerchief and ask "do you mind if I show you something from my village...?"

Today, the Festival is open to the rest of the world and welcomes artists from other Malian regions, around west Africa and also from Europe (why they bothered I'm not sure though. At one point a confused local touareg boy turned to me and asked "is this good?" as he had no idea what was going on - my answer was an embarrassed "no, it's not, not at all... ever" During three days there's apparently around 30 groups invited from all over the place. It's hard to tell though whether the music was the center point or the make shift market and the dozens of beer and food tents, or the camel rides or just lazing around in the sun... anyway a good time was had by all.

The road to Essakane - more accurately the start of trans Saharan route that goes up to morocco via Mauritania which you have to turn off and then bush bash over dunes to get to Essakane. If you're the first person through - good luck. Once a few people have been through then you can follow their tracks (assuming they didn't get lost). After a few days, however, there's a bunch of different tracks over a mile wide - when in doubt drive down the middle I guess...

The campsite at Essakane literally spread over many acres of fine Sahel sand

The usual desert deal - bloody cold at night and stinkin hot during the day
head gear and sunglasses were the fashion of choice

Touareg men lined up on the dunes at the start of the festival
You actually get a really good view from up on a camel - these guys have the right idea

The view's not so good where you're stuck at the back

Our little campsite under a few thorny Acadia trees.

We were apparently supposed to be camping on the other side of the festival near a large food tent. Unfortunately (or fortunately as it turned out) we got there early and just drove around and found a flat spot with some shade away from most things. Being used to the way you can do things on this continent, we saw no need to tramp all the way across the dunes to the other side for each meal like all the other touristas, so we got Mamadou to got to the locals and purchase some plates and bowls, a water drum, small charcoal fire etc, arrange for some firewood etc and we had ourselves a proper campsite. A small chat to the bloke running the food tent got us food delivery from across the festival each meal. Thus we could enjoy our food in peace without joining large queues in the sun (plus he always gave us extra so we ended up getting extra food). Quite handy when we needed to help out our ad-hoc security guard that had been sitting around at an adjacent camp and had agreed to watch our stuff while we were away in exchange for food, fire and a little medical attention on a cut on his foot... all worked out rather perfectly actually.... well almost. As we weren't quite playing by their rules (ie joined with a large tour group) the local "security" boys decided that we should pay some extra fee for our tents (quite a large fee, like 40 euro each or something) - unfortunately for the boys, despite their dogged determination, they had yet to master the art of the shake down. After an hour of patiently smiling at them and ignoring them reading our books, they got bored and left with their pockets empty. I'm sure they made money elsewhere that morning from some poor unsuspecting folk who didn't realise that they hadn't paid one fee or another...

Sundown over the touareg tents set up for various tour folk to camp in

Night concert form the comfort of the dunes - a great way to watch music (cold though)

The breakfast of champions

There were probably more camels than people at the festival

the local touareg women sit around the head bloke and wave and sing a traditional ballad

sunset on the dunes

sometimes you just get tired of it all....

After seeing various folk wandering through the desert for a couple of days, we just had to try it. So yes, George, Todd and I rode ourselves some camels.
Well, ride is a fairly loose term. George did pretty well. Todd had a camel that liked growling and making strange noises all the time and would throw him back and forth every time he stood up (I'll save Todd the embarrassment of putting up the video i took of him on a camel - funny stuff). Me on the other hand, being the light, agile camel riding kinda guy that I am, managed to somehow slip forward in the saddle and be thrown over the front when my camel sat down, breaking the front of the saddle. As our guide only spoke a little french, and I only spoke the parts of french that he didn't understand, we had a little communication problem (and he looked a little sad). Anyway, we managed to strap a blanket to the back of the camel and I got to ride it cowboy style (actually more fun in my humble opinion). We also bought a few trinkets off the bloke to make him feel better (and me less guilty)