Niger River Project

We’re back on the river after our brief detour to Dogon country. The mode of transport is a pinasse complete with 40cc Honda motor. The destination is Timbuktu, the fabled city of gold whose discovery cost so many European lives.

We’ve been joined for the three-day trip by four friends from the UK, Cat, my girlfriend, an Australian, Trev, who came with us to Dogon Country, and two other English guys and one woman we’ve met in Mopti. Strangely, the two guys, from London, are also called Ben and Dan; should make for an interesting ride…

The first bit of the trip is a straightforward rerun of our earlier ventures to Lac Debo – where readers may recall I was first hit by malaria. It’s much the same as before – peaceful, little fishing villages slipping past as we eat up the miles.

During the journey, I find myself reflecting on Mungo Park’s journey up this part of the river. By this stage, Park was a desperate man. He had lost most of his men to malaria or murder. His presence – not for the first time – had not been welcomed by many of the local kings, but Park resolved to press on, abandoning all his usual diplomacy and opting instead to fight his way down the river.

In our pinasse, with its gleaming new outboard, we whip along at a pace. How different for Park; with nothing but wind or manpower to propel his craft along, progress would have been slow. Split into narrow creeks and channels, the Niger at this point is narrow. In their flimsy boat, Park and his men would have made a tempting target for any angry tribesmen attempting to hinder their progress.

Because none of Park’s diaries from this stage of his journey survived, one can only imagine the horrors he and his men endured as they fended off attacks from the bank. The wide open space of Lac Debo, where the tendrils of the Inland Delta come together, must have come as a welcome relief to the crew of the Djoliba.

For us, it’s Lac Debo where the fun begins. Due to a late start, we’re running slightly behind schedule – as far as anything in Africa ever runs to such a thing. There probably isn’t even a word for it here. If we’re to make Timbuktu in time for our next date – a three-day festival in the middle of the Sahara – we need to be across the other side of the lake by the end of the day.

Night falls, and still we’re a long way off our target. Somehow, though, our skipper manages to plough on in the dark. And it’s proper dark here, African dark – not a photon of light pollution in the sky and, tonight, no moon.

For us passengers it’s a wonderful opportunity to lie on the deck of the boat and watch the stars, Orion doing his nightly stellar battle with the mighty Taurus. For the skipper, though, the conditions are tough.

Even at this time of night, some Bozo fishermen will still be out dredging the waters for fresh catches. Some of them have lights in their pirogues, and these we can see twinkling in the dark. But it’s the ones we can’t see that are the danger. At any moment I half expect to hear bangs and shouts as we plough across the path of a canoe hidden in the murky blackness of the lake.

But after about an hour and a half, the skipper brings us skillfully up on the far shore of the lake, with scarcely a bump. We all applaud, relieved to be on terra firma.

After a night camping on the lake’s sandy shore, we set sail early. Day two passes in much the same way as day one. We stop at a village to buy fish – the plump, fleshy capittaine for which the Niger is famous, and seems to produce in endless quantities.

Mid-afternoon, the pinasse pulls into Niafunke, a town situated on the beginning of the Niger’s Great Bend, where the river gradually begins to deviate away from its logic-defying journey north into the Sahara, to a more sensible course east then south towards the Atlantic.

Niafunke is only small, but it’s famous for being home to the great Malian blues musician, Ali Farka Toure. Toure sadly died last year, but the town has been imortalised as the name of one of the last albums he recorded. For all that, it’s not much of a place – sandy, hot, the usual ramshackle market place, no sign of its illustrious son. We don’t stop for long, the pinasse skipper keen to push on.

Day three, I awake on the sand dune where we’ve stopped for the night with a strange thought rolling through my head: for the first and possibly only time in my life, I can say, ‘Today I’m going to Timbuktu’.

Let’s get this show on the road – or maybe canoe on the water would be more appropriate…

I just realised yesterday that it was a mere six weeks until the Big Off! Six weeks!! I haven’t even had all my jabs yet. That little joy awaits me tomorrow. I think the only one I actually still need is rabies. I’ve heard nasty things about this particular jab – like that it hurts. And makes you foam at the mouth. And then go mad. Or maybe that’s just my imagination running away with me.

On the subject of letting the imagination run amok (smooth link eh?), I’ve been pondering lately how strange it is, this side of a big journey like the Niger River Project as it’s now become known, to try to envisage what it’s going to be like. Of course it’s impossible. You can look at the pictures, read the books, surf the web (for what scarily little info there actually seems to be out there on some of the places we’re heading for), you can fantasise, but nothing actually ever lives up to expectations.

How must it have been for Mungo Park, the illustrious Scot whose trailblazing exploits in the late 18th/early 19th centuries first led me to come up with the idea of heading down the Niger? For him the planet truly was lonely. He had no internet, no guidebooks, nothing, not even a decent map. In fact the very reason he went was precisely because West Africa at the time was one big cartographical black hole. Labels saying “Here be dragons” would not have looked out of place on some of the maps by even the leading map-makers of the day. What Park must have felt contemplating heading off into such complete and utter uncertainty, one can only wonder.

That, of course, is part of the joy of travelling – the unknown. There are certain things I’d like to have a better idea of, however. One is what it’s going to be like trying to hump our canoe to the launch point. For anyone interested, Dan and I are planning to rent a vehicle to take us to as close to the river’s source in Guinea as it’s possible to get by 4×4. We’re then going to leave the canoe and some gear with the driver, walk to the source (about three days’ yomp), walk back again then get driven to the town of Faranah from where we’ll hit the river proper. But that still means getting the canoe into Guinea then lugging into Mali from wherever we decide to finish the stint on the river.

And it’s big – collapsible, but big. Do you remember those old heavy tents you used to get in the olden days? The ones with canvas shells and frames that needed a degree in civil engineering to unfathom and you always vowed every year that you’d colour code but never did? Well, it’s a bit like that. Perhaps not quite as heavy, but bulky. Dan, if you’re reading this, we’re going to have put our thinking caps on, buddy. It’s going to be a right pain!

But, anyway, it’s all part of the fun. At least being big it’ll be a handy deterrant to all those nasty hippos and crocs that want us for lunch. Await further missives for a report on my experiences in putting it together for the first time…