The flight to Bamako (Mali’s capital city) was in a Boeing 737 with Royal Air Maroc, and it was a pleasant experience despite the late hour – we arrived on Thursday morning 15th January at 2:00 am. After walking across the tarmac (an Adelaide experience, even in far away Mali!), we filled in the forms, were met my Mr Sagara (the owner of the tour company with whom I had been corresponding by e-mail), proceeded through immigration (very relaxed!), and then to a 4WD for transport to our hotel. The drive took about half an hour, perhaps extended by a police road block where we had to show passports, and the driver had to show registration papers and lots of other documents I couldn’t identify. We finally got into bed at 3:35am, with alarm set for 7:30 am.
I had tried to arrange a flight from Bamako to get to Timbuktu (about 1000km or so upcountry), but unfortunately that flight could not be arranged. Airline companies in Mali (of which there was only one until December, but now there are two) only sell tickets for flights 10 days before departure. Although we had been on a waiting list for the “old” air company for some three months, we were bumped by a large tour group (their one plane has only 17 seats!), and a dispute between the old and the new companies means that the new company is not yet flying to Timbuktu. So that is why we had to get up at 7:30am – instead of having a leisurely day touring Bamako, we had to embark on a two-day 4-wheel drive overland trip to Timbuktu, leaving at 9am on Thursday morning. Still, three and three-quarters hour’s sleep is better than none, and we certainly got a good feel for how isolated Timbuktu really is – as they say there, ‘Welcome to the middle of nowhere’!
The day began with a great breakfast in Bamako. The Hotel Mandé, where we stayed, serves breakfast in a pavilion built out over the Niger River, with beautiful views and cool breezes. And being a former French colony, they do know how to bake fresh crusty bread rolls and bread sticks and make great coffee. After breakfast, a few financial transactions such as currency exchange were necessary – having dealt in yen in Japan, dollars in the US, dirhams in Morocco, I now moved into CFAs (Central and West African Francs) with an exchange rate of around about 400 CFAs to 1 Australian dollar – very pretty banknotes too.
In spite of the lack of sleep, Andrew and I were really glad that we drove from Bamako to Timbuktu rather than flying, as we saw so much more of the countryside and had some brilliant experiences meeting people, seeing daily life, experiencing villages, and so on. We were also grateful that Di did not subject her back to the roads we experienced, nor to the fine dust which covered us and which seemed to permeate everything – nostrils, hair, clothes!
Andrew and I think she would also have had trouble coping with the extremely strong, acrid, penetrating body odour of our seemingly 15 year-old driver – a pungent smell that, together with the overall smoky smell of the air here (a result of everyone burning wood for heating, cooking and even lighting) will remain a lingering memory of our time in Mali. We stopped in several villages, and even went into people’s houses, saw cooking, grain pounding, mud brick making, chestnut baking, house building, sorghum husking, goat herding, donkey trains, spoke with people – in short, we had a magical experience that I hope the photos will begin to convey.
We had an overnight stop in Mopti, and then on Friday (16th January) rose at 5:30am to start the journey to Timbuktu at 7am. The second day’s trip was on far rougher roads (sometimes tracks, and occasionally across ploughed but rock hard fields between tracks), and the countryside became noticeably drier as we proceeded north across the Sahel Desert. Although not always comfortable, especially when the driver had to screech and lock his brakes to thud a little more gently into the huge potholes he could not avoid, the journey was one never to be missed, venturing into remote areas of the Sahel that even most Malians almost never see.
Andy (age 12) writes:
Thursday the 15th of January: We touched down in Bamako before being greeted by Mr Sagara, the owner of Saga tours, who took us to the hotel where we slept for about 2 hours before getting up, having another buffet breakfast that was quite nice before being driven to Mopti, but stopping at many villages where we were invited into some of the locals homes and shown how they live, such as the way they pound their wheat with a big stick to make a flour that can then be made into a paste with many uses, how they build their houses from mud, the way they cook and how they separate the husks from the seeds, walking around some of the villages and having a very tasty, but late lunch in Ségou. We then checked into our hotel in Mopti before getting to sleep. Good night!
