Wednesday, August 02, 2006
On the Banks of the Niger
I wrote this last week, but the internet connection in Mali was to slow and too expensive to try and upload it from there, i had to wait until we got back into Burkina Faso.
We made out way up from Ouagadougou to Mopti in Mali,
a 461 Km trip involving a night spent at the Mali border crossing in some mud-brick ‘motel” where we got to sleep on the floor and pay $10 for the privilege and a minor break down right at the foot of the Dogon Cliffs.
Mopti is a nice
town though; it has a much different feel than Ouaga, a city who seemed to be suffocating under the weight of its own poverty. So I guess that not a very useful comparison. Mopti’s a river town, right at the confluence of the Niger and one of its tributaries whose name slips my mind at the moment. The lively port sees 
people from the Sahel, the Sahara, and a good portion of west Africa mingling and trading all sorts of goods from goats to camels to cotton to Ashanti cloths to salt; you can find it all here it seems. The main river of the part of the world, the Niger, who winds her way from the lush highlands of
Guinea through Mali, kissing the edge of the Sahara at Timbuktu and Goa before plunging back into the tropics in Benin and Nigeria, brings with her the vitality and vivacity from each different culture that it meets, giving a strangely c
osmopolitan feels to a place that appears to exist right on the edge of the habitable world.
We're going to shoot for Timbuctou tomorrow, spend 3 days on a pinasse or river boat and then
a quick trip through the desert to spend a day or two in the town before we catch a 4WD ride back to Mopti through the desert roads. We're going to be cutting it close on time and money, but how many 
oppertunities to go to Timbuctou do you get in a lifetime?
We made out way up from Ouagadougou to Mopti in Mali,
a 461 Km trip involving a night spent at the Mali border crossing in some mud-brick ‘motel” where we got to sleep on the floor and pay $10 for the privilege and a minor break down right at the foot of the Dogon Cliffs.Mopti is a nice
town though; it has a much different feel than Ouaga, a city who seemed to be suffocating under the weight of its own poverty. So I guess that not a very useful comparison. Mopti’s a river town, right at the confluence of the Niger and one of its tributaries whose name slips my mind at the moment. The lively port sees people from the Sahel, the Sahara, and a good portion of west Africa mingling and trading all sorts of goods from goats to camels to cotton to Ashanti cloths to salt; you can find it all here it seems. The main river of the part of the world, the Niger, who winds her way from the lush highlands of Guinea through Mali, kissing the edge of the Sahara at Timbuktu and Goa before plunging back into the tropics in Benin and Nigeria, brings with her the vitality and vivacity from each different culture that it meets, giving a strangely cosmopolitan feels to a place that appears to exist right on the edge of the habitable world.We're going to shoot for Timbuctou tomorrow, spend 3 days on a pinasse or river boat and then
a quick trip through the desert to spend a day or two in the town before we catch a 4WD ride back to Mopti through the desert roads. We're going to be cutting it close on time and money, but how many oppertunities to go to Timbuctou do you get in a lifetime?
