Niger River Project

Our last evening in relative civilisation and luxury. Yes, we’ve found a car to hire (rather expensive, but when else are we going to head to the source of the Niger River?), and at crack of dawn we’ll head off for the interior.

First stop will be Faranah, the first town on the Niger – or Joliba as it’s known by locals this far up. Incidentally, we’ve decided to call the canoe ‘Joliba’. This was the name Mungo Park gave to the craft he and his dwindling band of men constructed in their ill-fated attempt to run the river to its mouth. They made it as far as a place called Bussa in what is now Nigeria, but were ambushed and killed – tragically only about 350 miles short of their goal. With any luck our Joliba won’t meet the same end…

After Faranah, we’ll head off to the village of Bambaya where we hope to find a local guide. Then we’ll get on Shanks’ Pony – ie walk – to the source, hopefully about two days each way. I’ve heard locals are very superstitious about the source and don’t like people visiting it, but I’m sure that if the price is right we’ll find someone to take us there.

So this is it for the next few weeks. After finding the source, we’ll head back to Faranah, from where we’re hitting the river itself. We’re all supplied up, mainly with spaghetti, tinned sardines and couscous – yum! We expect the river trip to take about two weeks and we probably won’t be updating the blog until we get to Bamako in Mali. But watch this space. As soon as we can, we’ll get more up to let you know how the river was.

We’ll be a little older and a little wiser next time you hear from us.

A bientot!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 11:06 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.