It's Thursday morning. And boy am I tired. More tired than I can imagine. I've had a few grueling trips, but coming to Timbuktu is as hard as you think it should be. Of course, it is possible, with enough money, to do it an easier way, but I chose to do it African style. This will be one long blog post.
I woke up at the Hôtel Y A Pas De Problem. Mamadou Kassogue was there waiting as promised. The first thing he did was to try to convince me to give up on the pinasse I had booked and go with a Spanish group that was taking a private pinasse to Timbuktu. Nope. I'm sticking with my pinasse. They would charge more for a private pinasse and I might get some money back from the pinasse I booked, but certainly I'd eat a bit of it. And why would I want to go with a bunch of Westerners? So far, all my intercity travel has been 100% African besides me. There hasn't been a single white person. Why start with a group of 10?
So Mamadou took me to the boat. I put my stuff there and then he took me to provision myself. First we went to get some fruit. I didn't really want fruit, but I figured he knew that I would want fruit, so I got a couple melons and some limes for CFA 2000 which was probably high. Mamadou didn't seem to want to intervene in the bargaining process. Frankly, if I hire a guide, I want the guide to be an advocate on my behalf. Then we went to get water and other provisions. He said I would need 12 bottles of water. I picked out a canned soup, nutella, and some cookies. The cookies were CFA 1500 and the nutella was CFA 5000 (US$10). I passed on the nutella even after the shopkeeper dropped the price to CFA 4000 (US$8). The soup was priced like other canned products--about CFA 1250 (US$2.50). I felt like Mamadou was not telling me when the prices were high again. The cookies shouldn't be $3. He got a carton of waters that was a bit rough on the bottom. But he didn't look at the bottom and ripped open the top to put the stuff we bought in. Well, if he had made sure the bottom was OK, he would have left the top glued. Instead he totally destroyed the usability of the box. And I'm backpacking. I don't want to jug 18 liters of water with me. What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking.
Next we went to get some bread. I got 3 loaves for CFA 150 each (US$0.30). At that point he told me that the guy tried to over charge me, but he wouldn't have any of it--he said he was looking out for me. Yeah, right!
So we went back to the ship. Mamadou showed me information on his Dogon country tours. He told me the trip he wanted to take me on. I asked how much it would cost. He wouldn't give me any prices. I don't like that. I'm operating in a fog enough and Mamadou seems to want to keep the fog there. He told me that it's easy to get more people added to a trip once somebody signs up and he wanted to make a contract that he could show people. I was unwilling to be the first person to make a contract. If he wanted a multi-person trip, he was going to have to find other people and show me the itinerary and price--then I would make a decision--but no sooner. He tried to convince me to make a contract and pay some of the money up front. I told me that there was no way I was going to anything up front for something that far away where I knew no details of how it would be. Finally, he tried to appeal to my national honor. He said that the British keep their word, and he listed a few others. He said the French don't. I had promised to call when I was heading back from Gao (A baldfaced lie on my part--I have no intention of seeing the Dogon country--I was trying to get rid of him and we wasn't going away.) If a guide who tries to keep me in the fog and is impossible to shake is going to hound me, I certainly don't want to do business with him and I do want him to just leave me alone.
Mr. Good Prices, the CD merchant was there. He let me listen to some CDs and I bought 2. And Ali Farka Touré CD and one from his son Vieux Farka Touré. They have the hologram, so I hope the artists get royalties. They were CFA 5000 (US$10) each. Then a guy there named Umar gave me the phone number of his brother who is a guide in Timbuktu--Chokoroba. They said they'd call him and have him meet me. I told them NOT to call--I would do it myself when I arrived.
So eventually they all left and I settled in to wait. It was about 10am. The boat was scheduled to leave at 2pm. So I had some time to sleep. I was pretty tired from drinking the previous night and not in top form from the heat.
After about an hour, Mamadou came back. He said that the fête was coming up--the end of Ramadan. He needed to buy some stuff to visit his family in his village, and, if I have confiance in him, could I give him some money now and he would pay me back when I returned. It was obvious what he was doing. He was trying to make sure I contacted him on my return. I explained that I don't pay in advance for services not rendered yet and that I am not in the business of loaning money to people. He tried to convince me, but I was in my sleeping position and not leaving my sleeping position. It was obvious that I was not going to give him any money, so he asked for one more promise that I would call him. I assured him I would (a lie), and he left.
Then in my tiredness, the captain of the ship (or was he?) and one of the stevedores came on board and said I'd have to pay CFA 5000 for my luggage. I didn't have change so I gave him CFA 10000 and when he came back, he tried to convince me to pay CFA 10000 for the baggage. I got mad and said we had a deal and it wrong of him to try to change the terms. He gave me my change. I think I way overpaid and this would be something I would think about a lot on this loooooong voyage. My mood was not good.
As time went by, more and more people came on. And more and more cargo. When I first boarded, the edge of the boat was about 18 inches over the water line. Soon it was only about 6 inches over the water line. Two o'clock came and went. More cargo--watermelons, millet, sugar, rice, goods, a motorcycle. Three o'clock came and went. Four o'clock came and went. I was starting to get impatient--there were about 20 men in the front of the boat and I don't know how many women and children in the back. There was no room to stretch out at all. Finally, I decided that I had enough. At 6pm, if we weren't gone yet, I would walk away. I could get a 3rd class bed on the Comanav ship--which has beer as well. I'd like to spend another couple nights in the Y A Pas De Probleme, anyway. It's nice there and they have a nice bar with CFA 1000 large beers.
I calmed down after a half hour. We were scheduled to get in at 6am Thursday morning. It was late afternoon Tuesday. I decided that I could handle this. That if I'm going to call myself an explorer, I can't bail out at the first sign of anticipated discomfort. Maybe the Comanav is just as bad in its own way. I decided to stick it out. At 5pm, though, I did decided that if we don't leave tonight, that I will walk away--leaving the 18 liters of water there.
Then just before 6pm, we pushed off. The journey has started. We stopped at the first village and some women sold some chicken bits and some orange fruit to some of the people. Mamadou had told me that there are no women selling food when I asked. It was a lie. There are. The sun was soon down and people starting eating. I'll be so glad when this Ramadan is over. Then we headed on.
Eventually, people started drifting off to sleep. By the time people we laying down, all that was left for me was a 2' x 4' space over a bag of sugar. And that's what I slept in. I alternated between "sleeping" in the fetal position on one side, then the other, then sitting up for a while. A Nigerian guy took his shirt off, so I though I would too. I was fanning myself. It wasn't too hot, but it was humid. A cool but unrefreshing breeze came in. There was a guy with a watch that beeps on the hour. At each beep, I knew what time it was. And time was going slow. Really slow. 7pm. 8pm. 9pm. 10pm. 11pm. 12am. I was awake for all these. I barely slept at night as well. I heard beeps and when I checked my watch, it was always in hour earlier than I wished. I guess I hadn't drifted off for an extra hour.
At 10510 am, I was tired as hell. We got to a village I know is Niafunké. We offloaded the 2 NIgerian passengers and got two other passengers and headed on. A 10 minute stop.
At about 12:30pm, a guy caught my eye as I was getting into my fetal position to take a nap. He started to ask all the typical questions that I was no mood to answer. He ended by telling that we would arrive in Timbuktu tonight ("ce soir"). That pissed me off. I hate it when people give me predictions that turn out to be optimistic. Now I had hope that we'd arrive tonight as with that hope, a high probability of dashed hopes.
We had a 40 minute stop at 1:20. Some more people got off and I was able to stretch my legs for the first time in hours and hours. It felt good. I hoped I wouldn't have a deep vein thrombosis. We went from 20 men in the front to a little over a dozen.
From 3:20 to 4:30, we were at a village and I have no idea what was going on. There was a lot of waiting. People were moving to and from the boat and the village. It was a 70 minutes stop and I was getting extremely impatient. If this guy said we're going to arrive tonight, does it take time wasting 70 minute stops into account?
We made several more stops. We passed a large pinasse with 2 white guys on the roof filming us as we went by. Finally, at 6, I put my journal away. I was recording the whole thing in my paper journal. Every time I wrote something, everyone watched me wondering why I was writing. A kid kept touching me to try to get his attention. I asked is "parle tu français?" but he said no. Later another kid just stared at me for minutes and minutes.
Even after darkness fell, we were making stops. At each stop, a prearranged canoe would come out and pick up some of the passengers and their cargo. The number of people on board was swindling fast. But each stop meant no breeze. And no breeze meant humid trapped heat. Most were short and uneventful, but some were longer--30 minutes or so. In one stop, the guy loaded his motorcycle onto the canoe and the alarm kept going off. At 7, another guy told me it was just about 2 or 3 hours. So I was thinking maybe we'd be there by ten. But we kept stopping. Ten came and went and we were still stopping. Midnight came and went and we were still stopping. Until finally, there were only 2 passengers left besides the crew. I slept and the other Timbuktu bound guy woke me up and said we were here. I checked my watch. Three am. Now the boat was still and the mosquitos came. I couldn't sleep really. It sucked. Four o'clock came and went. Not getting light. At five, I must have dozed off because I remember looking for signs of light and there weren't any, then I woke up and it was light. It was 6.
The boat wasn't close enough to the shore for one to be able to disembark without getting wet. I had my zip-off North Face pants, though and was able to start to take my stuff off. Then the stevedores got the rest of my stuff for me.
Then I had to negotiate with the taxi people. They wouldn't take less that CFA 5000 to take me the 18km into Timbuktu. I tried to get them down, but all I succeeded in doing was getting the truck to leave immediately rather than wait for a bunch of cargo to be loaded.
Then, something happened I was dreading. I specifically told the people in Mopti to not call Chokoroba, but they did anyway. He rode in the back of the truck and kept chatting even though it should have obvious that I was in no mood to chat. We went to the Hôtel Bouctou where they have a bar--since I need a cold water and a cold beer. Though, it looks like all the keys are the same--not the sort of security I like.
I showered and went down to get my beverages and settle on what Chokoroba would show me. I got him to meet me at 8am the next day and show me around Timbuktu for 4 hours for CFA 12000 (US$24). He seems like a nice enough guy. When we were done, a bunch of Tuareg people had fun selling me stuff. I got a few post cards, a necklace that is nice for CFA 5000 (US$10), a little box for only CFA 1000 (US$2), and a bracelet from a cute little Tuareg kid for CFA 2200 (US$4.40). Then they all left me alone.
So I came back and typed this up.
September 25, 2008 10:30am Mali local time
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