Few names are as evocative as Timbuktu, but there are even better places on the way.
If you're after spa treatments, luxury safari lodges, gourmet feeds and chocolates on your pillow, then Mali is not for you. Even wildlife is not really on the agenda, bar a few hippos and crocodiles lurking in the boundless Niger river. But if you fancy seeing a mind-boggling ethnic mosaic, hearing Africa's best music, pondering cosmological riddles and seeing mud architecture that could have been designed by Gaudi, then this is your kind of place.
PHOTO: AP
Two thirds of this landlocked west African country is blanketed in the sand of the Sahara, animated only by the nomadic shrouded Tuaregs and camels. One town, Niafounke, is home to Mali's pioneering musician Ali Farka Toure, but the place everyone has heard of is Timbuktu, a name synonymous with remoteness although no longer the country's most compelling attraction.
PHOTO: AP
Getting there is still a long, tough journey, even by four-wheel drive rather than camel. It entails chokingly dusty hours on the road, followed by a slow diagonal chug across the Niger on an infrequent pontoon.
Then comes the anti-climax: a mish-mash of concrete and mud architecture, litter drifting over the encroaching dunes, open sewers, exhibits gone missing from the dusty museum, sand creeping inside houses whose upper stories collapsed in last year's heavy rains.
PHOTO: AP
But there are also beehive-like bread-ovens in the street churning out a local gritty form of chapati, a couple of markets, superb studded doors, a nightclub, Tuaregs clutching mobiles on motorbikes and three historic mosques. Non-Muslims are allowed to visit the oldest and most extraordinary of these, the Djingarey Ber.
Dating from 1325, its nine colonnaded corridors are made of packed mud and dimly lit by tiny skylights.
Southwest of Timbuktu, a more accessible Mali is typified by the thorny scrub of the Sahel, sliced by the Niger river, its lifeblood and main highway. On an island sandwiched between the banks lies Djenne -- a classic stop on the itinerary between the capital Bamako and the commercial hub of Mopti. Here concrete is banned, so the entire town is made of adobe bricks and rammed earth walls, radiating from another focal-point mosque, the world's largest mud structure, an iconic African equivalent to the Eiffel Tower or Sydney Opera House. It sits high above the main square on a raised platform, its walls and pinnacles bristling with projecting palmwood beams (which combine structural, scaffolding and anti-termite functions) and crowned with Dali-esque ostrich eggs.
Most visitors time their stay to include a Monday when the huge square and its surrounding streets host the weekly market with its multi-ethnic mix of peoples. Foulani (former nomadic cattle-herders, whose statuesque women sport tattooed upper lips and scarred cheeks), Bambara, Dogon, Songhay, Tuareg and Bozo peoples pour in on market day, balanced vertiginously on bundles of goods in gear- grinding trucks, ferried across the river from a donkey and cart, or paddling their own canoes. For these extrovert west Africans, market day is not just about commerce, it's the week's big party.
Mali is predominantly Muslim with the exception of the Dogon who remain largely animist, with a unique system of beliefs reflected in their distinctive handicrafts. Their highly symbolic wooden masks, intricately carved doors and baobab maracas can be bought at a handful of tourist-orientated stalls in Djenne, but they are most widely available in Mopti.
Halfway between Djenne and Timbuktu, this humming port never seems to sleep, fed by a constant coming and going of boats, vehicles, carts, goods and people from over the border in Burkina Faso and Niger, from nearby Dogon country, from up and downriver and from the desert. On the river banks lined with frighteningly overloaded boats, several stalls sell what look like stone slabs -- actually compressed salt, once the "gold" of the Sahara.
In the street market, you can find anything from French pastries to foam mattresses covered in luminous prints, bogolan (mud-cloth), Tuareg knick-knacks and those ubiquitous Dogon wood carvings.
River transport, the traditional means of locomotion here, means a packed public boat or a pinasse, a small, converted cargo boat propelled by an outboard motor and a pole. Also on the river are hundreds of canoes netting their catch from sunrise to sunset before it is dried, smoked and exported to neighboring countries. The largest and tastiest is the capitaine, Mali's greatest delicacy. Bozo fishermen share the riverbanks with the cattle-herding Foulani. Both inhabit simple mud villages, each extended family (including several wives) sharing a walled compound.
Travelling by road takes you almost parallel to the river through classic Sahel vegetation of acacias, sheas, baobabs and palms. The flat, arid landscape changes radically when you approach Dogon country, east of Mopti. As the road rises into a boulder- strewn plateau, the immense Bandiagara escarpment comes into view.
This stunning sandstone ridge is home to a string of Dogon villages, all clustered along its base beneath caves hollowed out by the previous inhabitants, the Tellem. Poking above the one-story village roofline are thatched pepperpot granaries, "male" or "female" according to their square or circular form, all connected by stony paths curling uphill to caves .
In contrast, the foreground has pockets of startlingly green vegetable gardens growing millet, shallots, aubergines and chillies, watered by the calabash load from wells and streams.
The region is mesmerizing, partly due to the omnipresence of the towering escarpment, partly the complexity and mysteries of Dogon culture, partly the elusive sandstone constructions blending perfectly with the ochre-colored backdrop, and partly the endless stream of mellifluous questions each Dogon will greet you with in a language that sounds like cooing doves.
Marcel Griaule, the French ethnographer whose extensive research in the 1930s brought the Dogon culture to the outer world, unwittingly also let loose a stream of alien conspiracy theories.
These originated in the curious fact that the Dogons somehow knew about the Sirius B star long before it was discovered by Western astronomers with all their sophisticated equipment. But when you're sleeping out on the flat, dusty rooftop of a Dogon house, gazing at the densely layered, sparkling night sky, listening to a few out-of-sync cocks crowing and donkeys braying, those alien astronauts seem irrelevant.
For your information :
Getting there: Lahoo Ticketing and Tour, special price until the end of March: NT$41,500 (cash only). Telephone: (02) 2531 2578.
Festivals: The Festival in the Desert at Essakane, 65km from Timbuktu, Jan. 7 to Jan. 9 ,with an unbeatable line-up of West Africa's top musicians (festival-au-desert.org). A Tuareg festival of music, food, camel rides and swordsmanship is held at Essouk, near Gao, Dec. 31 to Jan. 2 (kidal.info/FETE/Essouk).
When to go: April and May are unbearably hot and dusty before the rains break in June, then from August onwards temperatures drop markedly. The dry though hotter season is November-May.
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