Across the Sahara to Timbuktu

from the Ray I. Doan Photographic Collection

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Day 8

We were leaving this morning for a visit to the nomad market at Djebok (pronounced J-buck) and then on to some nomad camps for camel dancing.  Amadou learned that the teacher's strike had ended so he wanted to go back to Bamako, to take examines he'd missed.  We dropped him off to catch a bus that was a 36-hour ride to Bamako.

I never got Nimit's story of his adoption because he said it was too painful to talk about.  He said the story is on his internet site.   Anyway, his birth mother is alive and well and lives in a house in Gao that is half owned by Nimit.  His mother had been after him to take her to visit her nomad relatives.  This was the first time there was space in the truck to take her, so, we had her along until we got to the relatives.  She's somewhere around 60 year old, no one knows for sure, and appeared to be in good health.  She sat beside me in the truck and she was constantly shying away form me because she had bought a nice new indigo cloth robe.  She was afraid the indigo dye would rub off on my clothes.  With very good reason, I later learned.  After half a day of sitting beside her my nose was blowing blue just from breathing the air around her.

Djebok is about an hour and half drive north of Gao.  We got to the market at about 9 am, just about as it was opening.  Nimit was distressed to see two other tourist vehicles there.  He said they were horning in on his gig.  Apparently no tourists but his had ever visited the market previously. He knew 8 or 10 of the nomads visiting the market.  He said some of nomads had traveled 10 days to get to the one day of the market.  The village, which probably has a population of 1500, had a big open area where they held the livestock portion of the market.  There were goats, sheep, donkeys and camels for sale.  One of Nimit's acquaintances had a high end riding camel for sale for 300,000 Ff (about $500.00).  They had a second area of the market with small stalls where they sold grain, dates, tobacco and all the other staples of nomad life.

I had Nimit negotiate with the building owner closest to the market.  I wanted to get up on his roof to take panoramas of the livestock area.  He agreed and went and got a ladder so I could climb up on the roof.  However, it was a Mali ladder that Nimit thought was just too dangerous to climb.  I told him to quit being a wimp and start living dangerously.  I made it to the roof and photographed the market with every panorama lens I have, so if there is a picture there I have it.

The livestock area of the market at Djebok. 
Mainly camels, goats and donkeys are for sale.

When we were getting ready to leave the market a Chief Bilal of the Mgad Tribe wanted a ride back to his camp.  He was the chief of Nimit's cousin's tribe and his camp was near where Nimit's mother was going.  I never did find out if these stops were on our way, or were out of our way.  We started off on a cross-country trek with the chief directing.  The area we were going through was covered with old lava fields that were full of big sharp pointed rocks.  These lava areas were basically undriveable.  We finally got the chief back to his camp and then found Nimit's cousins and dropped off his mother.

We were then making one of the many detours around another lava field when the truck gave a big lurch and a bang.  The driver got out and looked under the front end then walked behind the truck and came back with a broken fan belt.  He and Nimit had a concerned conversation in French but we continued on.  Nimit announced that the bad news was the air conditioner belt was broken.  The good news was the water pump belt was not broken, so we'd just get hot, not stopped.

A little while later, the good news turned into bad news, when the truck started to overheat.  At first they thought it might be a cracked radiator, which would have been a true disaster.  Since it was already 4 pm they decided to camp for the night and look into repairs.  It turned out the water pump belt had also finally broken.   They had replacement water pump and air conditioner belts but they found out the air conditioner belt was a little too big and wouldn't work.  Anyway, it was just another day in the truck maintenance saga.

As we were getting ready for bed, when it was almost dark, Nimit held up his hand saying, listen, I hear a car coming.  I couldn't hear it and no car showed up, but Nimit kept starling off to the east.  Then he asked, do you see that big black thing at the horizon?  I thought I could see something but it was so dark I couldn't be sure.  Then all of a sudden there was a buzzing overhead.  I pointed my flashlight up and we saw there a six-foot thick cloud of flying locus starting about three feet over our head.  There must have been millions of them.  I was hopping they weren't going to decide to fly any lower because it looked like a true plague.

Went to bed that night in what turned out to be the coldest night of the trip.  The evening started out cool so I put the blanket over my sleeping bag first thing.  About midnight I woke up thinking I was cold, even with the blanket.  I lay there a while, thinking I'm never going to go back to sleep, unless I can get warmer.  I decided the solution was to zip up my bag and use it as a sleeping bag, rather than as a blanket, as I had been.  I did that but a half hour later I was still awake and cold.  I finally took the blanket and folded it in half so I had a narrow double thick blanket.  That did the trick and I was able to get some more sleep.

 

Day 9

It had been so cold during the night I had an ominous feeling about getting the truck started, and I was right.  After breakfast we must have pushed the truck for an hour until it finally started.  We would push it down a very slight grade, as fast as we could, and it would cough a couple of times but not start.  Then we'd push it up back up the grade and do it all again.  The whole process was getting old and by the time the thing finally started I'd decided there should be a change in the itinerary.

I told Nimit, that with all the truck problems, I wanted to head back to Gao, get the truck fixed, and concentrate on photographing the Rose Dune.  Nimit was distressed over that thought because I'm sure he very much wanted to visit his nomad relatives.  His compromise was to continue on to the nomad camps today, and then first thing tomorrow morning head back Gao.  We'd get to Gao by noon and be able to photograph the Rose Dune in the afternoon, and then again the next morning.  I agreed with this plan and we headed on to the nomad camps.

Our first visit was to the second ranking chief in the area, Hima-Hima.  He is the brother of the big chief, who is cool to Nimit's activities.  The big chief doesn't like all the infidel outsiders, disturbing the nomad's traditional ways.  There is a lot of politics among the nomads and apparently Nimit intended to make an end run around the big chief.  A proper visit to the nomads means laying out mats and sitting around having tea from one, just right size shot glass.  It was established that Hima-Hima would be in charge of setting up the camel dance that afternoon at 4 pm.  I still didn't know what a camel dance was but I thought I'd find out soon enough.

Our next visit was to a more or less permanent tent camp of only women.  The women in the camp are young single women, divorced women and old widow women.  Nimit told me there are lots of divorced nomad women.  He said the divorce rate among the nomads is higher than it is in the United States.  He said the divorces come from older wealthy men arranging marriages with child brides, who later decide they don't want to live with the old guy.  The dowry system is a major factor in nomad marriages and plays a big part in the child brides.  It seemed like half the women in the camp were relatives of Nimit.

We then went to a shady groove of trees along Lake Semit where we setup camp for a four-hour lunch that was designed for serving tea with visiting nomads.  Nimit's cousin showed up with Nimit's prized camel.  The cousin keeps the camel when Nimit's not using it on a camel trip.   He has other camels that are kept by someone in Gao.  There were hours of tea drinking that I thought must be for this special visit, but Nimit said no, that this was more or less a normal day for the nomads.  The nomads lead a very simple life with few of the possessions that other people have, but they seem to be satisfied with their life.

Nimit told me some of the discussion among nomads concerned the current outrageous price of cows.   He said one man had offered 30 goats as payment for one cow.  Ten of the goats had babies but the fellow with the cow would only sell for 30 goats if all 30 of the goats had babies.  While the tea drinking was going on a nomad showed up with a goat.  He held it up by the back legs and made it walk around on its front legs, sort like steering a wheel borrow.  Obviously the goat was dinner.  After a short discussion our cook got out a huge knife and cut the goats throat.  They hung it up in a tree pulled off its skin in one piece, so they could make the skin into a water bag.

Nimit said the last time he'd seen this area had been during the drought in 1984.  He said at that time, there wasn't a living blade of grass or a tree in the whole area.  He said the countryside was littered with the bodies of livestock that had starved to death.   He said the only reason there weren't people lying out there to, was because the nomads were burying their dead.

At about 3:30 pm we packed up camp and headed for the camel dance.  The women apparently do most of the preparations for the camel dance.  They had taken all their finest mats and hung them over some bushes as a backdrop for the finish line of the dance.  The women were opposite the finish line and were all gathered around a drum made by stretching a goatskin over a wooden millet pounding container.  Nimit was embarrassed because there were only three camels there.  He had hoped for ten camels and riders.

The dance consists of the women beating a changing tempo on the drum, while a camel and rider charge toward the finish line.  The object is for the rider to keep the proper pace with the drum, for the camel to take some exact number of steps and stop exactly at the finish line opposite the women.  The subtleties of the event were beyond me.  Mostly what I saw was a guy running on a camel.  After a while Nimit got on his camel and was racing around the field while I was taking pictures with my Nikon F100 and my new 80/400 mm stabilized lens.  That combination is really a nice camera and lens.  Toward the end of things Nimit's camel slipped and fell, at full gallop, and threw him head over heels.  He wasn't hurt, or at least said he wasn't.  Later on I got on his camel and had him take my picture.  He was very careful not to let the camel move.  Apparently I looked as unstable as I felt.

I was having problems with the 24/120 mm zoom lens because it quit auto focusing.  I'm sure the lens is so full of Sahara dust that it has jammed up the focusing mechanism.  Dust was a big problem as was the constant bouncing and jarring in the truck.  This was a very hard trip on camera equipment.

After the camel dancing we were offered a campsite with the nomads.  I didn't know what that entailed until later in the evening, when the goats got home.  The baby goats don't go out with the adult goats during the day.  They're kept in camp so they can't suckle during the day.  When the adult goats are coming back in the evening they tie up all the babies, until they milk the mother goats.  When the mother goats get near the camp they start bleating for their kids and the kids start crying for their mother.  And they do it loud.  This kept up for almost an hour then it calmed down to just noisy.  It was not an environment I would have selected for a good night's sleep.  I had the camels bedded down about 20 feet away from me.  What a night!

Bringing the goats back to the nomad's camp in the evening.

When it first got dark we had a bright full moon, which helped a lot in getting the camp ready for the night.  After a while it seemed a lot darker, which I thought was strange.  I looked up at the moon and discovered there was a lunar eclipse in progress.  The moon was about 80% obscured, which explained why it seemed so dark.  Over the next 45 minutes the eclipse progressed to 95% or maybe 98%.  The nomads considered it an ill omen.  Of what I don't know.

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This page was last updated: March 15, 2008