Stephen Codrington

 

Africa (Mali and Morocco) Travel Diary 2004

A highlight of the second day’s drive was a ferry (or punt) trip across the Niger River – an hour’s duration from 2:30pm to 3:30pm but with great views of riverside life, markets at each end of the trip, and so on.  We reached Timbuktu earlier than expected at about 4pm, so after checking into the hotel (and downloading Andrew’s photos for the day onto the laptop, because he had filled both the internal memory and the extra memory chip), we headed off for a leisurely walk around Timbuktu.  Actually, it was a preview of some of the things we would do the next day, because Saturday was to be a full day walking tour of Timbuktu.  During our Friday afternoon walk, we met a young boy called Mohammed, a Toureg whose village is 350km from Timbuktu.  Like Andrew, he is 12, and speaks quite good English (unusual here as most just learn French as their lingua franca).  It takes him 15 days every time he returns to his village (and vice versa), so he lives in a tent on the outskirts of the town during term time.  He and Andrew have exchanged e-mail addresses, so I hope they continue to correspond.  Another highlight of the brief walk was experiencing the taste of freshly baked hot bread from the street kilns that seem to be everywhere in this city.  The taste was fantastic, even though (like all the food here in Timbuktu) it seemed to contain lots of fine sand.

Andy (age 12) writes:

Friday the 16th of January: I got up at about 6:30 this morning to go to the dining room for breakfast before then checking out to start the final leg of our journey to Timbuktu. Before we set off, we went to a shop so that dad could buy a bottle of water for our trip but the idiot let himself get talked into buying four – he said you can get thirsty in the Sahara Desert! We were off road almost straight away and it’s a good thing that we were in a 4x4. Dad and I were bouncing around continually as we were driven through the branches of trees and held in tight the whole time by our seat belts. I was having a fantastic time; dad didn’t seem too pleased though; but the desert cheered him up a lot.  Eventually though, we got onto a sealed road with gigantic pot holes everywhere! Twice, there were huge dents across the road and our driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid spinning the car over which then made the brakes screech before we were sent very violently towards the roof of the car. There’s a ride at Disneyland that dad and I went on a number of times; it’s called the Matterhorn and Liesl apparently hated it when she went on it when she was 6; it’s full of big falls, tight turns and high speed excitement. The only difference with that ride and this drive was probably the longer waiting queue at Disneyland! We stopped in a village where all the children were very interested in me and kept on asking me questions. Surprisingly, I could answer most of them. One of them wanted to feel my skin while an adult woman asked dad if I was a female! (Maybe she thought that I couldn’t understand.) We then drove onto a punt for an hour-long journey across the Niger River. We got off on the other side and then drove only 14km to Timbuktu. Dad and I then walked around Timbuktu for about half an hour with our guide and also tried traditional bread that was baked in a big outside oven over a fire. Even though it was sandy, it was probably the nicest bread that I have ever tasted, apart from that really tasty Indian bread but I forget its name. Then I simply had a dinner of chicken and chips before heading to bed.