about26-3 Across the Sahara to Timbuktu

from the Ray I. Doan Photographic Collection

Day 3

I and everyone else got up when it started to get light about 6:30 am. It hadn't exactly been the same as a night's sleep at home in bed, but I'd gotten some sleep and was feeling OK. I found the sleeping bag was enough and I had not needed the extra blanket. We could hear vehicles go by on the highway so Nimit asked me how many went by during the night. I told him I thought two or three were passing an hour. He thought that sounded like way too many. Breakfast was Granola cereal in powered milk with raisins and dried banana chips added. The powered milk was mixed with boiled water and was surprisingly good. Coffee was instant Nescafe in small individual packages. Nescafe instant coffee has an absolute lock on the coffee market in Mali. The stuff is available in the tiny stands in every roadside market in Mali. I don't know if anyone uses regular ground coffee since tea is the drink of 95% of the population.

The batteries were too low to start the truck in the morning so we had to push it by hand to get it started. It started OK, after a couple of tries, but it was worrisome having your vehicle not start when you're in such a remote location. Apparently the truck's voltage regulator is faulty and it causes the batteries to run dead overnight. That's why Nimit was trying to have me find a replacement in the States.


Pushing the truck to get it started, a regular occurrence.	On the road to Timbuktu.

After we packed up, we continued on the main road for another hour or so and then headed off cross-country, no road or tracks. Nimit said there was a 'mean' police post that is at the junction to the track to Timbuktu, so we were avoiding the area. We'd been zigzagging and bouncing around for several hours when I wondered, out loud, when we would be getting to the main track to Timbuktu. Oh, Nimit said "we've been on the track for a long time." Welcome to African roads!

At about 1:30 pm we stopped for lunch on a barren gravel plain. They seemed to favor this type of terrain, maybe for ease in pushing the truck, should they need to, to get it started. The Land Cruiser had air conditioning but it seem to work best when it was cold. In the middle of the day I wasn't at all sure that it was working, so it was a relief to stop and get out of the truck. The temperature was in the 90's so it was a typical cold winter day. The humidity was almost non-existent so in the shade it was really quite comfortable. I'd thought that being the desert meant we'd have nothing but cloudless blue skies but it had been almost constantly cloudy since I'd gotten to Mali.

Lunch is at least an hour event, but probably longer. There is unpacking, firewood hunting, fire building, cooking lunch, eating and repacking. The main course for lunch was pasta with beef. I had the feeling I was going to be eating a lot of pasta. That turned out to be right, but what I didn't know was that lunch was about the last of the beef. It would be goat meat from then on.

During lunch, a whole string of Land Cruisers went by heading for Timbuktu. Nimit said there was a four-day Tuareg festival, starting in a few days, way north of Gao. The Prime Minister and his entourage were leaving from Timbuktu to attend the festival. However, no way were they going to drive to Timbuktu. They had chartered a plane to fly to Timbuktu and sent their drivers on ahead to drive the vehicles to Timbuktu.


Al-Hader, our driver helping with lunch.	Al-Movmine, our cook at work.

After we got back on the track, we found it was now really torn up because of all the vehicles that had just gone by ahead of us. We bounced up and down until we finally got to the Niger River where we had to take a ferry across to Timbuktu. When we got to the river there were 26 vehicles waiting for the ferry. One of the vehicles was a group from Mountain Sobek, a travel company that sends me literature all the time.

The ferry holds five vehicles and takes an hour and a half to make the round trip. This being Africa you also had to drive through mud and two foot deep water to get to the ferry. I was fast forming the impression this was definitely going to be adventure travel. We had a local promoter come up and sell Nimit on the idea of three of us taking a Pirogue over to Timbuktu with our luggage. We'd leave the driver and cook with the truck to get over when they could.

A Pirogue is a modest size dugout canoe. They come in a two-person size to a six-person size. You may see the two person size with eight people and the six person size with twenty people, but it has to be people that don't place a high value on their life. Most of the Pirogues are poled by hand but a few have motors. Then they have the really giant size dugout canoe that they call a Pinasse. The Pinasses almost all have a motor and are used mostly for freight or cargo.


The guy in front is carrying some of my camera gear, out to our boat to Timbuktu.	Boarding our Pinasse for the trip to Timbuktu.

When we got across the river we got a cab from the port that is about 10 miles from town. We finally reached the fabled Timbuktu and checked in the Amanar Hotel. My room was undoubtedly first class by Mali standards. That meant it had a bathroom with a shower and a toilet that worked. There was no hot water. Before they put my luggage in a room Amadou's job was to check and see if the toilet worked.

A young man named Aboubacrine owns the hotel. He has a birth defect that has made one leg shriveled and pointed backwards. He crawls around on the floor to get around. He seems to get along very well without the use of a wheelchair. In looking around later, I decided Timbuktu was decidedly not wheelchair friendly, which was probably why he didn't have one. He had a motorized tricycle parked outside the hotel but I never saw him use it. I gave the guy a lot of credit, for making a success of his life, when he might just as well have been hanging out with the rest of the beggars at the port.

Aboubacrine also owns the Amanar Restaurant, which is two blocks from the hotel. I'm sure it is one of the best restaurants in town. It has a large, well stocked bar, in what you must remember is a 98% alcohol abstaining Moslem country. We ate there and had a good meal but American restaurants don't have to worry about the competition. Our driver and cook arrived with the truck about 10 pm, having, in true African style, pushed ahead of many other vehicles. They were on the last ferry for the night. About 15 vehicles had to spent the night on the other side of the river, including the Mountain Sobek group.

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This page was last updated: March 15, 2008