Alphabet Travel

In Bamako, we took a box of a room – the kind dead bodies might be found in come morning – and I think you could even say we relaxed. Certainly we slowed down. Road travel in the Gambia and Senegal had drained our energy and we were flat like pancakes; emergency! Bring on the Vietnamese food, Castel beers and glowing riverside sunsets! Seriously, there is nothing like beef Saigonese style and a view out over the Niger River as the sky turns golden to soothe the impact of eighteen hours of the stench of illness and a soundtrack of baby screams. Less calming was Bamako’s Grand Marche, which was so busy I literally felt high walking around it, trying not to trip over the guinea fowl and severed bulls’ heads in the butchers’ section, then praising the glory of the old fashioned sewing machines in the tailors’ quarter. The human traffic ground to a standstill often, as vendors with wheelbarrows full of soap tried to push their way past women balancing huge metal bowls of fish on their heads. It was all brilliant until someone caught a thief in their stall and all hell broke loose. The fight – if you can call you that – bounced from one side of the crowd to the other, and we were inches away from fists, the lens hood on Seth’s camera even getting flung to the ground in one swipe. The thief restrained, fifty faces looked on in shock as the men who had caught him began to wallop him so hard that he was spitting blood. Later, a Malian friend explained that the country has a chillingly low tolerance for theft; ‘The thief, if he is caught, is lucky if he goes to prison. More likely he is killed. If a thief enters your house, maybe you are shooting him dead.’ I went to bed wondering what happened to the man in the market, and thinking that, if we were to get mugged in Mali and drew attention to it, we could be responsible for murder.

We left the capital for Segou, a real non-destination in that it had been given a glowing account in our guidebook and had consequently received such quantities of travellers as to mar the peaceful riverside atmosphere for the visitor, who is instantly tagged by gangs of touts and hawkers, the kind that if you shake them off complain loudly that you don’t like Africans and should go back to your country; ugh. The extra sting in Segou’s tail is, since its recent and bizarre popularity, every hotel and restaurant has hoiked their prices up. What you’re left with is a few glimpses of boatmen gliding along the Niger river, and glances of families washing their dishes and clothes in the river, but a great big dollop of grievous hassle. Shame, because this is where the famous traveller Mungo Park first laid eyes on the Niger and I couldn’t link this place with the one he saw.

Eastwards, to Djenne – much better. The Grand Mosque at Djenne was every bit as odd and wonderful as the photos would have you expect. Built from mud and pierced with wooden poles, it looks like a prickly sandcastle, and there really isn’t much to be done but stand there gawping at it. What I didn’t know until reaching the town is that it is on a small island. The streets are dusty, the houses old, also of mud, and the whole place has a look of melting chocolate. An oddly abiding memory of our Djenne time, though, was the night on which my evil cough and sore throat, caused by the desert harmattan wind, reached their worst point, and I was lying in bed, gargling water every twenty minutes, listening to bad karaoke renditions of Celine Dion songs blasting from a nearby hotel, and feeling very sorry for myself. Seth was sleeping restlessly, perhaps having lariam-induced nightmares, and this perhaps explains why he woke up, mistook my hand for a rat and started walloping it. Sigh. As if the Celine Dion wasn’t bad enough already.

There were villages close by which we reached on a shared motorbike and by hitching a ride on the back of a donkey cart loaded with bricks (as you do). The first village was populated by the children of doom, screaming for presents, deliberately ruining Seth’s photos and toying with the idea of chucking rocks at us. The second had angelic kids who walked with us, shyly holding our hands. The vast difference in atmosphere was much appreciated. The reason we had ridden out to see these places was to get a look at the smaller mud mosques built in the villages. They were smaller but no less austere, and in a way all the more picturesque for their setting among little granaries and huts. We saw maybe fifteen, twenty mud mosques while travelling in Mali and no two were alike. They leave a very firm impression on you; simple elegance, and an undeniable sense of the exotic. If I wasn’t such a useless artist, I’d have sketched them. (It’s a wonder I haven’t yet given away my sketchpad and pencils, like some crazed part of me expects to wake up tomorrow morning the next Da Vinci.)

Mopti, on the Bani River, was raw and we both liked it a lot. The port thronged with boats gliding in all directions and the markets were full of stinky dry fish, scorched looking chillies, chunks of salt on weighing scales and – of course – piles of Drogba and Obama t-shirts. We were lucky enough to join a busload of school basketball players when heading to the city of Gao, and as we lay across the backseat of the luxuriously roomy bus, the kids chanted victory songs, the stars shone and the rocky landscape of the Douentza-Hombori range cast impressive silhouettes beneath the moonlight. Gao would be our ‘G’ and it felt like the first alphabet letter in an age. Seth fell asleep on my lap and I eventually realised my constant nudging him to point out every passing rock formation was not making me popular. It was 4am when we arrived at crazily remote Gao (on the Niger River beyond Timbuktu, and at the fringe of our old friend, the Sahara). Seth wisely suggested waiting until dawn before checking into a hotel, so as not to be charged for two hours sleep. This is all very well but after a nine hour bus journey on the back of a long hot busy day, it is hard to sleep on a wooden bench in a waiting room where ‘The Power of Love’ is being played at full blast and your neighbour, a goat, keeps bleating disapprovingly. I got the giggles in the end, especially when Toni Braxton started crooning about unbreaking her heart (bbleeeee-aaah, said Mr. Goat, and I agreed).

Gao was a long thin town. It looked as old as it was – a mere 1300 years – and as though it had grown up out of the sand, natural, earthy, dusty. The odd tumbleweed flying around town would not have been out of place. Security issues in recent times meant that Gao’s tourist industry was in a dry patch. It really felt like an outpost, with barely a building over a storey high, a general lack of people in the streets and vast, sand blown patches of vast nothingness. We were the only people at the awesome Tomb of the Askias, and among the few mad enough to take a boat ride along the Niger in its driest, shallowest season, to see ‘the pink dune’. (‘It’s orange’, claimed Seth as we admired it at sunset. ‘It’s pink’ I said, uncertainty leaking through – damn. ‘It’s blatantly orange,’ he affirmed.) From there back to the shore at Gao, we passed a mini-age on sandbanks, the boatman and his son trying to push off to a deeper part of the river only to land moments later on another one, while our guide backseat sailed and Seth tried to explain the usefulness of his GPS which showed the exact route along the river we had taken on the way to the dune. Our boatman took an unimpressed glance at the machine and continued on his way. I felt the victory was his because we did eventually make it back to Gao, albeit in the dark, and what fisherman wants foreigners claiming their strange objects know the river better than he does? Our ‘G’ trinket was a bronze statue of a heron, bought from a hardcore saleswoman in the artisans’ market.

Hombori was a village lying at the heart of those rock formations I mentioned earlier, and we had long planned to make it our ‘H’. On arrival, finding that the accommodation facilities required that we sleep out on a rooftop, I was briefly mortified. For two weeks I had been coughing incessantly and speaking in a growly voice like Rani Mukerjee’s. Now I was finally beginning to feel better but we would be sleeping on the roof of a mud guesthouse in a town full of sand. If the sand winds of the harmattan were to re-infect my respiratory system, this would surely be the place for it to happen. The toilet was a hole in the floor. The shower a room with a see-through wooden beam door, and a giant goat that looked much like the Mouth of Sauron was living in a little outhouse opposite, glaring at me and trying to butt the door down each time it saw me run by in a towel. It was not ideal. Words like Sofitel, Novotel, Hilton, Sheraton hovered in my head and mocked me. However, this place turned out to be an awesome place to stay. (For the record, we were showered with sand laden winds in the night, but as I lay awake, spitting grit, I saw a shooting star. So nothing’s all bad.) The rocks of Hombori ranged from craggy plateaus to great, finger shaped, leaning monoliths, and Seth fell in love with the place, taking thousands of photographs. Climbing a set of crumbling steps into the rocks – a scene of almost biblical drama – one reached ‘Old Hombori’, where women were pounding millet and kids surrounded us as we walked. Cattle roamed the rocky streets in a lumbering manner a la Hindustan. In all directions the view was magnificent, a world of glowing gold coming in at the eyes.

A cattle market was due to take place in the nearby town of Boni the next morning, and Lelele, the owner of our guesthouse and all round good guy, was going there. We joined him… and half of Hombori village… and six goats… riding in the back of a lorry all the way to Boni, where donkeys were traded, goats slaughtered, and everything from woven mats to football shirts were sold in the shadow of dramatic orange escarpments. Lelele brought his young son Rafael along for the ride, and the four of us ate plates of rice and sauce in a shady compound presided over by a large, hospitable lady, as chickens and children ran around our feet. No transport returned to Hombori for hours, and when a minibus finally went, it was packed to bursting. Seth, Lelele, four other men and a goat travelled on the roof. Rafael and I were perched on a sack of rice at the feet of our fellow passengers in the back of the bus. Sweat streamed down our faces. A man carrying a giant terracotta pot looked dangerously close to falling asleep and dropping it on Raf’s head. We kept knocking on it to remind him we were there, the man beside us – a friend of the family – barking at the Sleepy man whenever he looked to be dozing off. It was fun to chat to the Ghanaian men sat next to me, but the humidity and heat were insane, and when Rafael began to fall asleep, I worried he was passing out. We played games, like hiding from each other under my hat, and messing around with my water bottle (a good excuse to get him to drink lots), but when the bus pulled over and we were invited up to travel on the roof, I was ecstatic. Climbing the ladder, leaping over various bikes and trying not to step on the goat, I joined Seth and Lelele. Rafael was handed up by the driver like a special delivery. That half hour, riding through the classic rock landscapes of Hombori on top of a bus in good company, after a great day, was the kind of travel experience I am always hoping for, the kind that fills you up until happiness is kind of bursting out of you. We were too tired to go trinket shopping that night. Luckily a hawker visited our guesthouse, and from him we bought a chunky Songhai necklace. Our eighth alphabet letter in the bag.

It was over soft white bread and mango jam in a hotel in Sevare that we realised we did not have to go to the Dogon Country to get our ‘I’.

The Dogon Country is Mali’s main tourist draw – ancient villages clinging to rocky escarpments, home to a people whose unique culture is said to have changed little over the centuries. The Lonely Planet dedicates eight pages to trekking in the Dogon. Every single tourist to the country goes there. It is regarded as Mali’s absolute highlight, and for these reasons as well as those of cost and general dislike of voyeuristic ‘village safaris’, we wanted to avoid it. The trouble was, it was full of ‘I’s and we knew of no ‘I’s in Burkina Faso, our next destination. So, over mango jam, resigned to reluctantly heading to the Dogon Country, Seth wondered once again were there really no ‘I’s in Burkina Faso? There was a Michelin map of West Africa pinned to the wall in the breakfast hut, more detailed than our atlas. I squinted at it. Two! There were two! Ingane and Imasgo! We could head on to Burkina, without spending days trying to reach remote Dogon villages! We were free! I should say that I’m sure visiting the Dogon villages could be a great experience and I can see why some people love it. It’s just not for us, at this time, on this trip, nor for the book I want to write. We like to dilute the touristy stuff we do by going to lesser known places too, and a Dogon trek would be… well, hard work diluting. The other thing I wasn’t sure about was how a culture and a people could remain so famously unchanged if so much tourism penetrated it? Anyway, we got a freebie because our minibus to the Malian border town of Koro passed right through part of the Dogon, allowing a glimpse at the crazy rocky scenery and some very nice mud mosques. Certainly, it’s a stunning area.

Our last night in Mali was due to be spent in the mud hut room with no door and zero ventilation. I loved it because it looked like something straight out of Star Wars. Seth hated it, and in the heat of the night, swearing, evacuated us and our mattress to the courtyard to sleep outside. We tied our mosquito net to a tree and slept once again with nice gusts of sand anointing us. Still, life was good. We had feasted on chips and peanut sauce at a street stall (yes really) and a friendly Frenchman called Vincent had offered us a lift in his van to Burkina Faso the next day. We had been in Mali for two weeks and it was time to move onwards, south and east.

Fifty kilometres; it was an inoffensive distance to travel between the villages of Bintang and Tendaba. On the map, it was a mere wiggle, a jubilant jump eastwards then westwards, passing a handful of small villages. In my head, I had us relaxing beside the Gambia River by lunchtime, eating chicken and chips with our feet propped on garden chairs. We had been camping, badly, for two days and nights now, and were orange with road dust, ready for some R&R. Here’s how the fifty kms treated us:

Phase one – A lift from Bintang village to Sibanor village, where we hope to flag a giri-giri minibus. The lift goes well; we ride alongside a huge basket of ripe red tomatoes and we only break down once.

Phase two – A whole hour by the roadside, in the company of fruit sellers and bored little boys. Every giri-giri going our way is full. We all gather dust in the shade of a tree filled with bats. Finally one that goes only as far as the next village arrives and we jump on board.

Phase three – For two and a half hours we share a bench with some tired looking women who have been waiting all morning to travel to the next town. When a giri-giri that miraculously has space finally pulls over, we discover, after loading our bags onto the roof, that there is not enough room for everyone. The conductor tries to kick off two of the women to make space for us but we protest, and watch miserably as the bus squeals away coating us in sand. For forty five minutes we try to flag down every moving vehicle, from lorries to pickups. At last a bus collects us, taking us just twenty km onwards to tiny Kalagi. Sigh.

Phase four – In Kalagi we quickly board the hottest giri-giri on earth and slowly bake all the way to Kwinella village where…

Phase five – … we are surrounded by children grabbing us as we try, and fail, to locate a cold bottle of Coke for the unavoidable five km walk we will have to make to reach Tendaba Camp.

Phase six – The walk is not so unavoidable; a teenage boy wants to drive us there on his donkey cart for a hundred dalasi. While he fetches the cart, we sit outside his school and chat to his teachers. The cart is slow – slower than walking – but with the weight off our shoulders we can watch hornbills flying from tree to tree, and fend off requests from the driver’s younger brother to relieve us of everything we own. ‘Can I have your hat? Can I have that book? Can I have a football? Give me your watch. A pen? Some sweets?’ We ride on.

Phase seven – Arrival. Down two bottles of Fanta on the spot to the surprise of the bar staff. Shower off a world of grime and stand amazed in equal measure by the great wide Gambia River and the number of hours of the day that have magically vanished. Feel as though I have been submerged in quicksand almost until death then pulled out at the last moment.

Our time in The Gambia was great, but there was certainly a point at which we began to dread moving between places on account of the gaping time and energy vortex that would kick in, inevitably, every time we tried to progress further east into the tiny country’s slender belly. It was a situation best explained by Paul Simon; ‘sometimes the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ away.’ In Tendaba we walked, talked and relaxed. Seth edited photos, I wrote. The river sunsets were beautiful, cold Julbrew beer in hand, while pied kingfishers fished in the shallow water all around us. We stayed for one day, two days, three… until we knew we were staying because we couldn’t bother leaving. To reach our ‘F’ though, a town called Farafenni, we needed to hit the road. It was forty kilometres away – who knew what the Gambia could hit us with for such a modest sounding distance? Actually, it wasn’t so bad; just a ferry, two buses, one taxi and a lift with some kind birdwatchers.

Farafenni inspired a touch of depression in me. It was another small and dusty town with no distinguishing features. There were the usual kids calling ‘toubab! toubab!’, the usual quiet market stocked with the usual vegetables, meat slabs and dusty fish scales blowing about underfoot. Shops sold the same shampoo, same hair extensions, same soap, same flip flops as ever. As usual none of the buildings were tall. As usual everyone rested until the sun had calmed down. I had known not to expect monuments on every corner in West Africa, yet was missing them, yearning for features beyond the colourful dress of local women shopping in the street, for inspiration outside of everyday life. I suspected that such feelings were pretty lame on my part and grumpily played Nintendo in our cheap hotel room, hoping to kick the mood care of retro gaming. The guidebook mentioned some stone circles in a place called Wassu. Briefly I became excited by the idea.

‘Are they old?’ I asked a guy at our hotel.

‘Ye-es,’ he said, uncertain, his face coming over a little misty, ‘maybe eighty years?’

There was a picture of them on the back of one of the Gambian notes. They looked older than eighty but not very inspiring.

‘Actually,’ I admitted, ‘we have some like this in England.’

‘I know you do!’ said a cheery young Gambian, a charity worker, ‘Stonehenge!’

I glanced for the last time at the picture of the modest stone circle of Wassu and decided not to suggest a visit there to Seth when he returned from his photo mission in the sleepy market. Luckily he would discover a very living Farafennian feature come the close of the day.

Earlier, we had been strolling around town in the company of a little group of children. At the sight and sound of revelry up ahead, they stopped dead in their tracks and conversed anxiously amongst themselves in Wolof.

‘Don’t go there,’ translated little Abdullah at last, pointing ahead, where figures seemed to be frolicking in the dust. ‘Come, we will go this way…’

‘What’s wrong with this street?’ asked Seth, ‘It sounds like a festival.’

‘Bad people -criminals. If you don’t give them money, they kill you.’

‘With knives,’ added a little girl clutching a schoolbag, genuinely scared.

To please them and hedge our bets, we returned to Eddy’s Hotel Bar and settled in the courtyard beneath a big tree full of bats, the sounds of the festival of terror growing ever closer. A young man in a baseball cap joined us to chat, explaining this was a once a year festival for Farafenni, offering to take us out onto the street to see it. Seth accepted his offer but I opted to drink a Julbrew and hang out with the garden toads and bats. The drumming and shouting drew closer. I looked at the sky and thought about Asia, especially Japan. I realised I was missing it. I had a head full of bamboo groves, lamp lit inns, steaming bowls of udon, the gonging of temple bells, priests in purple robes. That person who walked eight hundred miles, to eighty eight temples – was that really me? For some reason on this day I was having trouble living in the now. The now was boring me. I wasn’t interested in what was going on outside; just interested in musing. I knew the writer in me should be out there on the street but plain simple Lu, stripped of any further identity, just wanted to chill and be a little moody and enjoy the beer. Seth burst back onto the scene, wired and hyperactive, as though he had popped around the corner, downed twenty espressos, and popped back.

‘Louie, that was such a good one for you to miss!’ he told me, breathlessly, ‘I’m so glad you didn’t come.’

The festival, it transpired, centred on a man dressed in tree root tendrils who ran at people with machetes, brandishing and clashing them in their faces until money was produced. With him were a gang of loud shouting men, adding to the general impression of being attacked.

‘I gave 10 dalasi,’ explained Seth, ‘and 25 extra for a photo.’ He showed me the image on his camera screen. It was taken with an unsteady hand and showed a group of mad looking men and an unearthly figure clad in orange foliage, the eyes only just visible, holding sharp machetes aloft. This mythical creature, the Kankaran (spelling and facts here in need of much further research) danced and ran through the streets, causing mayhem. ‘If I’d been alone, I wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on, I would have just run screaming down the street!’

Seth’s guide suggested that you could clap instead of giving money if you wished, but as a foreigner money would be expected. So, we concluded, it was kind of like a festival of mugging. I noticed the guide looked just as flustered as Seth, and both of them drained their first Julbrew notably fast.

‘You have to work hard and train to be the Kankaran, ‘ said the guide.

‘Are there always men who follow him like that?’ asked Seth.

‘Yes, but at night, maybe he goes alone.’

I tried to shake the thought of the Kankaran arriving at our door in the night. Clearly there was a lot more to learn about this festival, its significance and the Kankaran, but for now I knew that Farafenni was not so featureless after all; I had just been looking for feature in the wrong places.

90km lay between us and our next destination. I figured it could only take all day. Our minibus was turned back by the police for not having a reflector in its front window. Grumbling, the driver took an hour long detour, bought a big road works sign and stuffed it in the window (obscuring a disturbing amount of his actual view out but hey…) Many hours, two more buses and a boat ride later, we were on the island of Janjanbureh, right in the middle of the Gambia River, a strange dusty place from where we would sail out, come morning, to try to see hippos. (Known locally as heepos, which sounds even better.)

Our boatman, Sadjo, took us out to what is known as Junction 6, a point in the river where a tributary forks away from the busy thoroughfare, away from ferries and fishermen, and hence a quiet spot perfect for wildlife. The heepos were there, comically elusive, popping their round heads, flapping ears and beady eyes above the water long enough to let out an indignant snort, then plunging under again. Waiting for them to resurface was a bit like that whack-a-mole game you play at retro arcades in places like Scarborough; heepos would pop up where you least expected them and plunge down before you had a moment to collect yourself. All of this led to lots of squinting at riverbanks. Those blessed with the awesome gift of perfect vision will never know what such scenarios are like for those of us who see like bats. Sadjo couldn’t get his head around how I could be missing so many hippo surfacings, and seemed to conclude that I had mental difficulties.

‘There!’ he yelled, annoyed, for the fiftieth time, pointing at a seemingly featureless patch of water on the other side of the river, ‘there there there!’ He was our boatman, and I liked him, but I don’t think he knew how close I was to pushing him in the river in these moments. I resolved never to come heepo spotting without my glasses ever again.

Possibly sensing my frustration, a kind heepo surfaced just a few metres from the boat – snorted – winked? – then descended. Excellent. On the way back, baboons watched us from the river bank, the bigger ones eyeing us as though they would have liked to give us all a big bite. It was a hot ride back, and I thought about contact lenses, but all in all there’s nothing quite like your first heepo sighting, however fuzzy round the edges.

Travel by public transport in West Africa; it’s totally exhausting, overwhelming, new, strange, and not without its moments of absolute brilliance. I’m sure that in this blog I come off a little serious, and perhaps a little complaining. It is due to being knackered, which is always a sign of good travel. I want to leave you with the ingredients for the epic journey we just completed:

A Recipe for getting from Janjanbureh, The Gambia to Bamako, Mali
1 x taxi to island’s south bank
1 x tiny ferry over Gambia River
Wait one hour in a tiny restaurant chatting to locals over a warm Sprite, then add…
1 x minibus to the town of Basse Santa Su
1 x taxi to the appropriate bush taxi depot
Now wait for three and a half hours for fellow passengers to join your party. Read. Get covered in dust. Begin to lose faith until finally…
1 x ride across Gambia-Senegal border in bashed up shell of a car with almost entire upholstery stripped, broken doors, holes in the floor and no glass in the windows, in the company of ten adults, a baby, plus a boy on the roof. Stop twice when bumper and exhaust fall off respectively.
Arrive in Velingara, Senegal, and take…
1 x taxi to bush taxi depot
Wait for one hour in the dark, then add…
1 x slow journey to Tambacounda, stopping at numerous police checks and passing alarming numbers of bush fires
Partake of 11pm steak and beer in tiny bar by cheap hotel where you have
1 x sticky night’s sleep
Then, stirring in one more taxi and a mission to the bank, add…
1 x minibus to the Senegal-Mali border, taking a mere six hours and at one stage reversing slowly through a busy market for no reason at all. NB, many live goats being tied to roof racks.
After an hour of police immigration formalities, take…
1 x taxi over border to Diboli, Mali
…where you can indulge in a feast of fishy crunchy rice and a plate of goat parts, including rectum, then stir in…
1 x 18 hour bus journey from hell, stopping randomly for many hours for no reason, while ill woman behind you wails and appears to be suffering from hallucinations, and two babies scream each time the vehicle stops
And there you have it! From Janjanbureh to Bamako; piece of cake.