It was at the Womad festival last July that we saw a big orange truck, advertising an overland encounter trip to the Festival au Desert in the Sahara. Being passionate about world music, I’d always wanted to go to Mali, the music capital of West Africa. Including visits to Djenne, Dogon villages, Timbuktu, and a trip on the River Niger, the whole thing set my imagination alight. The trip was rated as challenging, but having established that the risks were not to life or limb, I booked it with little hesitation. I felt that the challenges were an important part of the trip for me; could I really give up caring what I looked like…..or smelt like? Although I was sad that Neill decided not to come with me, I’m sure he made the right decision for himself.

I enjoyed the months of preparation- choosing equipment, sorting out visas and vaccinations and so on. I had a mixture of excitement, fear - and disbelief that I was really doing this. I got cold feet in the last week, and felt terrified as I took off from Heathrow three days after Christmas. In some ways my terror was justified. I was about to lose all my familiar points of reference.

I spent the first few days in Bamako in complete shock- nothing in the world could have prepared me for how African everything was! I had expected the capital city at least to have more western influence. Unpaved roads, markets so crowded you could hardly move, taxis so decrepit that it was a wonder they worked, goats and chickens in the city centre, hugely overloaded vehicles of every description, chaos everywhere. I quickly adjusted to new sights, smells, food, living conditions, and ways of doing business with people.

And carrying out business is a huge part of life in Mali; everywhere we went someone offered to sell us something: ‘I give you good price’. People sell everything from goats to a small amount of produce- a few mangoes, some kindling, a tablespoonful of tomato puree, necklaces, blankets, leather goods. A boy scavenging on the waste-tip at Timbuktu offered to sell me a length of twisted cassette tape for 1000 CFA, about £1.00, a lot of money to a Malian. And we got pestered a lot, everywhere, constantly. As fast as people pester you, you have to learn to either ignore or to haggle. Mali is particularly bad on this front because it is such a poor country, and if people have nothing to sell they ask you for something. This is most true of the children, who greet you with huge excitement, and then start to demand presents, pens, or sweets. We often had half a dozen children hanging off our hands and arms. They don’t take no for an answer, can get irritatingly persistent, and follow you for a long time. When they give up on the presents, they demand your water bottle, your sunglasses, your tee-shirt. We, of course, represented enormous wealth, and I found the differences between the ‘haves and have-nots’ very difficult to reconcile. And I felt conspicuously white.

Malian people don’t seem to have a concept of personal space, which for a reserved westerner was difficult. They would wander into our camps while we were eating, take a seat and try to sell us things; we were everywhere subjects of curiosity and attention, which I personally didn’t enjoy much. My most extreme example of this was in the desert. I was sitting in the doorway of the tent, ‘cleaning’ my nails, minding my own business. A Tuareg man came and sat down by me and asked me for a present. I went through the routine of telling him I had nothing for him, and he of course persisted. I never looked at him, carried on with my nails, and he didn’t take the hint. I had to tell him politely that I wanted to be on my own. Still he didn’t go. I then firmly but gently told him to leave me alone, and he said he’d go if I gave him a present….He was finally distracted by the arrival of someone selling sandals.

Having said this, we met some amazing and interesting people, so willing to help, to carry, to take you to places, so pleased to meet you. People are very relaxed, have all the time in the world, and that means that things happen when they happen, in African time as we came to learn; you could wait over two hours for a meal in a restaurant. I really grew to like African time, it feels very stress-free. The Malian people are resourceful, resolute, determined and confident. One image encapsulates this for me. A little boy, perhaps five years old, running for all he was worth behind us as the truck pulled out of his village, trying to keep up. He ran on for as much as a kilometre, just because he could. A future Malian Olympic sprinter if ever there was one.

Most people lead simple lifestyles, but there is plenty of food available. Not all of it is good quality, and it is often unvaried, so I suspect that malnutrition is rife. Beyond the city, we met nomadic people, and in the tribal Dogon country, the villages are medieval in structure. Of course the impact of tourism is huge here. The country will never catch up, if that was to be desirable. 85% of the population is still engaged in subsistence agriculture. Problems abound- little infrastructure, health care, sanitation or waste disposal, AIDS, polio. Western aid clothes being sold on the black market, but also some good modern wells donated by Japan and Germany. All absolutely fascinating, I couldn’t have understood any of this if I hadn’t been there.

I travelled in a group of 18 westerners, mostly British, aged 21 to 65, of varied backgrounds. I was the least experienced, having never been to Africa nor travelled on an overland trip before. This is a rough and ready style of travel. We went in a 17 ton truck, suitable for desert conditions, camping along the way, sharing tents, pitching them on hotel roofs, wildcamping, or sleeping under the stars. We all had jobs to do on the truck, and were divided into cook groups. When it was our turn we had to shop in local markets for food, and prepare the meals for the day, cooking off the truck. My personal best was to make huge Spanish omelettes with six dozen eggs, over an extremely hot wood fire in the Sahara desert! We often had early starts, up before dawn, and sometimes travelled late into the evening. In all we covered over 2,300 km.

The group was amiable enough for this journey, and there was remarkably little friction. We had a lot of fun, and shared some great experiences. It’s an oddly intimate way of meeting people, yet it was all very superficial, and I so much missed the warmth and affection of my family. Being away from them, with little contact or news either way was one of the most difficult aspects of this trip for me. I was never exactly homesick, but I missed them all hugely, particularly because big things were happening for each of them at home too. How on earth was I going to share this experience with them? I kept a detailed journal along the way for that purpose.

Out of Bamako we went first to Djenne, the site of the great mosque, the largest mud building in the world, and a World Heritage Site. It is quite simply stunning, our first glimpse of it being at sunrise. Djenne also boasts a famous Monday market, which we saw. It is enormous, colourful, energetic, and total, utter chaos. Donkey carts bring people, animals and goods to market. I watched a man on a lorry struggling to lift a huge weight onto a woman’s head; a bit of a wobble and she set off with it. Here I ate street food, a breakfast of bland rice patties, which weren’t a bit nice, and deep fried millet porridge, which was surprisingly tasty!

From there, with a couple of stops on the way, we went out into tribal Dogon country, along the Bandiagarra escarpment. The beauty of the landscape was unexpected, and took my breath away, as we trekked about 30 kms over three days. Not too strenuous, but very, very hot down there. It is remote territory, and the villages are quite awesome, with their thatched granaries and masked dances. This was a completely unique experience. Sleeping under the stars on a Dogon roof, next to the cliff of the escarpment was quite unforgettable. I was so excited I wanted to stare at the stars all night! With no light pollution they are so bright. And the dawn chorus, of roosters and donkeys, echoing around the cliffs was something else! Things just got better and better. Coming down from the cliffs one day we were greeted by the delightful sight of children singing and dancing for us; luckily I recorded it on a video clip. The second night there brought a small dust storm, and all I had to hand to use as a dust mask was a clean pair of knickers! I was becoming as resourceful as the Malian people! The sounds of drumming came from the village all night long, which we later heard was a funeral ceremony. I was really proud of myself for completing the trek; others in the group were sick with heatstroke and tummy problems and had to be transported out of the escarpment.

We had a day to recover, clean up a little and shop before we embarked on a river trip. That shopping trip was memorable, finding the best ways to eke out our budget, a taxi full of tinned food to take to the truck for Timbuktu and the desert; sacks of potatoes and onions on the roof of the taxi, many dozens of eggs, and someone offering to sell us a goat. Fresh meat might have been welcomed by some, but we declined.

The boat was a motorised pinasse, and we had three crew, including a cook. A moment of hilarity; as my French is passable, I was assigned the task of explaining to the cook how to make bubble and squeak! Her main language was Bambara, and her French more limited than mine, so the process was accompanied by gestures which had the group in stitches! The resulting lunch was a very tasty potato soup……The River Niger is gorgeous, serene. Many villagers were out doing their washing in the river, fishermen working on their pirogues, fabulous birds, monkeys on the banks, and hippos! The country takes its name from the hippo. Three days’ enforced relaxation was a rare treat. We wildcamped here, which was wonderful. The landscape changed along the route, the further east we went the more temporary dwellings of the nomads and desert features appeared. Fantastic sunrises and sunsets completed another fabulous stage of the journey.

And so we arrived in Timbuktu. I had long been fascinated by this mythical town, but I have to say that I was disappointed by it. This was in part because I needed to change some money, which, in African time took forever, and partly because the town was closed down for the festival of Tabasci (Eid). It’s a very sandy place and smelly, bits of dead animals lying in the street. I wasn’t able to see either the museum nor the ancient Islamic manuscripts which I wanted to do, because we just didn’t have long enough there.

The following day we drove 70kms into the desert, digging the truck out of the sand whenever we got stuck, our destination being the Festival au Desert. The setting was utterly surreal, perhaps the most bizarre moment of all being when a large group of Tuaregs riding camels came racing up alongside our camp! We experienced the Harmattan, the Saharan wind that caused a long, boring sand storm. I met some interesting people in the desert. Salik, a nomadic Tuareg silversmith had ridden for 7 days by camel to get there; Mohammed, a teacher in the village, who had never been to Timbuktu and didn’t want to go. Life was better for him in the desert, never mind the fact that the oasis lake is drying up and the harvest has failed for the last two years. Several potential offers of marriage, I am sure, and perhaps the funniest invitation of all, from a guy who was playing air guitar and asked me to dance to it…..! Wonderful moonlit shadows on the dunes, great memories.

For me the festival was the main object of the trip, everything else was a bonus as far as I was concerned. However, the music was a great disappointment because of typically poor Malian organisation. The timing of the acts was abysmal, either they were hours late, or early, so most of us missed the best bits. Certainly some bands were good, but there were none of the big stars of Malian music we had expected. It was great to hear world music played in its own context, and an African dance tent on the dunes was really rocking! Dancing in the Saharan moonlight was quite fabulous, soft sand makes an interesting dance-floor! Overall it was more a few ‘tastes’ of good things rather than the complete immersion I had hoped for.

There followed a rather gruelling three day dash back to Bamako, to connect with flights home. The first day’s travel was fourteen hours, mostly on the dustiest roads imaginable. If I’d thought I was dirty coming back from Dogon country, this was far, far worse. It was a bit of hell, breathing choking red dust, and getting completely covered in it, hair, skin, clothes, glasses, even underwear. Eyes, nose, ears and lungs feeling sandblasted, bleeding, full of dust. I continue to try and cough it out.

Yes, this was a challenging trip, coping with dirt and lack of sanitation in particular. Hygiene becomes a priority in these conditions, as even a small scratch can quickly turn into something quite nasty and difficult to treat. A bottle of Dettol spray, plasters and some antibacterial hand-wash gel were essential equipment. We treated our own water on the truck, and could drink no other, even for teeth cleaning. We hired water porters to carry our jerry cans in Dogon country. We went days on end without a shower or proper wash, relying on wet wipes instead. Dealing with ingrained dirt on hands, nails and feet was well nigh impossible. When we did get a cold open air shower it took several washes for the water running off my hair to run clean. Loos and showers were as primitive as they can get. Hot days and chilly nights. And you have to take every precaution against mosquitoes near the river.

The food we ate was mostly quite tasty, but at times unvaried- rice or cous-cous and vegetable stew twice a day for four days, omelettes or scrambled eggs for another four. As with the Malians, we were making do with what we could get. The fish we had in and near the city was delicious. The bread was good, French influenced, except in Timbuktu, where it was full of sand! No cheese, except a little imported Laughing Cow, no calcium, little fruit or salad outside the city. I started dreaming of ‘real’ food, wholemeal bread, broccoli, cheese, fruit smoothies, a proper cup of tea, anything with real texture……I dreamt also of all the things you can do with hot water! I did miss home comforts, but not as much as I expected, and there was no one thing I was longing for, other than to talk to my family again. And as for what I looked like or smelt like, well, it was so far out of my control that these things didn’t matter after a few days.

Overlanding is a great way to travel, to get as close as you can to the real people, though it’s certainly demanding. It does put money directly into the pockets of the local people. It’s clearly not for everyone, but I am pleased I chose this trip rather than a more ‘sanitised’ option.

Personally the three weeks were a huge learning curve, finding new limits, being on the move the whole time, experiencing considerable discomfort and pretty much taking it in my stride. The holiday also raised serious questions about the state of a developing country- and no ready answers. I took a bag of pens to a school, where my meeting with the headteacher was really lovely, but awkward for me. His appreciation was out of proportion with my small gesture. I questioned myself too, my greed and that of my fellow travellers, and the greed of the Malian people, a universal trait. I don’t know yet how to give something meaningful back to this needy country. At the end of the holiday our Kiwi trip leader paid me the greatest compliment: ‘You’ve done screamingly well, hun.’ I certainly did.

This holiday was a fabulous experience of a completely different culture, so many wonderful experiences and so much variety. I’d bought a new camera and took over 500 photos and video clips; a wonderful record, together with my journal. Sadly I didn’t get any drawing done while I was away, needing more time to distil the images in my head, but there’s time now to do that. Many times I had to pinch myself to make sure it was real, many times I became overcome by what I was experiencing. For me, the Dogon trek was the best bit, sleeping under the stars and all the rest, but I don’t want to rate anything else poorly, not even Timbuktu or the festival. I wouldn’t have missed those bits for the world, either. It is really quite something to be able to say ‘I did it.’

No, the holiday wasn’t the musical extravaganza I hoped for, it was everything else instead. However, in Bamako, at the start of the trip we went to an open air nightclub- Le Hogon, where we were lucky enough to hear the virtuoso kora player Toumani Diabate which was absolutely sublime. Of countless rich memories, that’s a great one to finish with.

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