Slow boat up the Niger
One more Mali ‘catch-up’ post before getting to Burkina Faso and more recent events…
After leaving Dogon Country, we took a public motor boat up the Niger River to Timbuktu. Because it’s the dry season, the river levels are low and the boats get stuck pretty regularly on the sand, so what was supposed to take three days actually took seven. This wasn’t too bad, as we could lie down on strategically placed sacks of grain and had enough space to ourselves. It was certainly more comfortable than a bus, which I guess is the main thing when you’re on African transport.
The main highlight of the boat trip was that we saw quite a few hippos, some at pretty close range. I didn’t really get any good photos but it was still nice to do some animal spotting. There will be more chances for (hopefully) closer hippo spotting in Burkina Faso, so maybe I’ll get better shots then.
Other than this the main thing we got out of it wasn’t so much a ‘highlight’ but an insight into the lives of some of the world’s poorest people. Some villages had cattle and some grass, but others were desperately poor – people living in straw shacks in the sand, with no apparent agriculture or means to generate food or income. I’m really not sure how they are surviving. It’s this kind of rural poverty that makes Africa stand out from the rest of the world. What I usually associate with poverty – city slums – have been largely absent here compared with some other places I’ve been to like, to name a few, Jakarta, Calcutta, San Salvador and Casablanca (where the tin-shack slums even have satellite dishes on them!). But it’s this poverty in the countryside that makes Mali the fourth poorest country on earth according to the UN Human Development Index (the three countries below it are also in West Africa) – no schools, no healthcare, no water except from the filthy river (which they both defacate in and drink from), nothing. It was certainly a pretty humble experience, and not one that will be forgotten easily.
After six days we made it to Timbuktu, which has a great name but is pretty much a dump. I was hoping it would be more or less like Djenne but it was dustier, hotter and devoid of interesting architecture save for three mud-brick mosques, which were nice and all but not worth the journey if you’ve already seen mud-brick mosques elsewhere in the country.
During our time in Timbuktu and for the few days afterwards, it was hotter than anything we’ve experienced so far on this trip. The harmattan haze, which is caused by winds blowing south from the Sahara at this time of year, was also pretty awful. In general, it seemed like the smartest thing to do was to get out of the Sahel (the semidesert region south of the Sahara) and head further south to some greenery and coast. So we made the tough choice to skip Niger. We had really wanted to visit the Nigerien Sahara, which is supposed to be perhaps the most beautiful Saharan landscape in any of the 10 countries that this desert straddles, but with the heat and the harmattan it didn’t seem worth paying up to US$150 a day for 10-12 days of haze and poor visibility. So, instead we headed south for Burkina Faso, and hopefully we’ll even see some rain in Ghana in a couple of weeks.
Tags: Africa, heat, Mali, Timbuktu, Travel, West Africa
Nick
well this is useful… (at least for me)
very thanks
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