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Are we there yet?

LERATO MOGOATLHE - Mar 09 2009 06:00

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Getting to Timbuktu isn't a world-famous joke for nothing, as Lerato Mogoatlhe found out

Here I am, scurrying around Bamako's dusty bus station quarter, looking for the first bus to Timbuktu. I dart between battered taxis and enthusiastic touts peddling tickets to other destinations in Mali and beyond.

My luck is confirmed as running on low when I am told that there are in fact no buses going to Timbuktu. You can fly to Timbuktu; money (never) permitting. You can paddle in via the Niger but that takes weeks and even the short cut -- catching a boat in Mopti -- involves an 18-hour bus trip and three days on the river, if hell freezes over and things run according to schedule.

I needed to have been in Timbuktu at least a week earlier to organise getting to the annual Féstival au Désert. I ask if the bus is at least headed in Timbuktu's direction. I get a nod. I pay 12 000 CFA francs and tell myself not to panic. Sure, not even locals around me have the faintest idea of the precise way to get there, but how hard can it be? Very hard, actually. This, for me, being a traveller who likes a challenge, makes getting to Timbuktu a road trip worth making.

The bus leaves the station on time at 6pm (gasp!), stops for prayers a little later and then is on the road all night long. Malian nights are dark. It's dawn when I am told to transfer to a bush taxi. The taxi might have once been white, but now its body bears the multiple scars of having being welded too many times to still be on the road.

I am about to protest when I am told that it will drop me off at Douentza where I can get a car to Timbuktu, peddled to tourists as The City of Mystery. I squeeze between two hefty mamas as more and more passengers pile in, sardine style. I sense deep vein thrombosis setting in, while my bone marrow freezes from a South African-like winter chill, misleadingly called the cool season.

We drive past vast areas of land; brown and barren mostly, with a few dusty and the sunburnt shrubs. The horizon is occasionally broken by equally lifeless-looking villages. The landscape and inhabitants look unmistakably African, the busting taxi decidedly West African; battered, never so overflowing, according to the driver, that it can't stop to pick up more passengers, its roof apparently never too small to bear the heaviest of goods.

All in all, the journey takes 26 hours. Gruelling as it is, it is also filled with wonder. It's like driving through postcards: a lone herd of camels walk in a straight line in the middle of nowhere, cattle have a field day at a water hole, a shepherd dozing under a shrub, his sheep too beaten down by the sun to stray. I find the starkness incredibly beautiful.

The final stretch of the trip starts in Douentza, where I catch a 4x4 ride to Timbuktu. It is a sand and dust-filled 170-plus kilometre trip. The land is even more barren, the isolation more glaring. Timbuktu is aptly named the faraway land. The sun is out and blazing. I manage to resist asking if we are there yet.

CONTINUES BELOW

I crack at Bambara Maoude village. I am told we have at least another two hours to go -- "If the car does not break down," a tout adds.

The car stops at a Niger riverside village, a scanty collection of straw huts. Even here the West African entrepreneurial spirit reigns, with lukewarm drinks and tired-looking fish and chips on sale. Kids ask for photographs; a cow is being loaded into a wooden boat and we tourists go into a snapping frenzy.

The sun sets while we are crossing the river, silhouetting a tiny port village in its orange glow. It's a moment worth the self-torture that is getting to Timbuktu. Which, by the way, is still another 20 minutes from the river.

Lerato Mogoatlhe is a freelance journalist from Johannesburg. She started travelling overland through Africa in June last year. Money, rebels and politics permitting, she still plans to visit Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, DRC, Angola and Namibia before returning to South Africa in June

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