February 2012
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festival in the desert, 2012
Sand! in the middle of a sand dune landscape, we were blessed not to have the bad winds during our 3 days at the Festival, but the sand is nonetheless relentless. Local kids do acrobatics. Proud Tuaregs parade their camels and race them across the dunes. The stage was moved from Essakane ( 70 km from timbuktu) to the outskirts of Timbuktu in 2011 where it has remained, owing to a threat to...
photo op!
driving south from timbuktu, we run into a burro caravan carrying salt.Though the salt originally comes from mines in the desert to the far north particularly taoudenni, itusually comes as far as Timbuktu via camel caravan which is of course the ultimate photo op. On the way to lower Mali, it get broken into smaller loads on burros, which is what we captured. Unfortunately the Tuareg caravan chief...
January 2012
54 posts
Caravan to class-2
The kids have been prepped for our visit today, and maybe because of the festival and the proximity to Timbuktu,they are more familiar with the sight of toubabs, and there are smiles and laughter and lots of handshaking and photo taking. The second village, Mora, has a smaller school in the process of renovation, and the kids are learning their French and their letters as new rows of brick are...
Caravan to Class
On our second morning in Timbuktu, we meet Hamadou Toure at his NGO office, Nord Dev. Hamadou has partnered with Barry Hoffner and is the on site liaison and administrator for Caravans to Class. Because of the terrorism incidents in December, Mali Travel Tours was a bit hesitant about our traveling to outer villages in the Timbuktu area; we persisted and it felt totally safe and comfortable for...
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Biggest thing at Timbuktu Festival au Desert 2012
On Friday night at the festival the wonderful surprising announcement was made that Bono had arrived to lend support to the Festival, and on Saturday night , he played during a surprise Tinariwen set with Bassekou Kouyote also sitting in. There were so few tourists at the festival this year, and the tourist business is in desperate straits because of security issues. The cultural richness of this...
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Heading to Timbuktu(bab)
The plan was to caravan from Sevare with a bunch of 4x4s, safety in numbers, with the possibility of an armed escort provided by the tour operators.
We left base camp at the Flandre Hotel in Sevare and are the first vehicle to arrive at the prearranged meeting spot for the convoy to tomboucto. One other 4x4shows up, and another calls in that it will catch up to us. So the caravan is loosely 3...
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Djenne
Heading south from The Mopti/Sevare area we spend a long weekend in and around Djenne, a center of Islamic study and practice for centuries and home to the world’s largest mud structure, the Djenne mosque.This mosque can hold 14,000 worshippers at a time!
Since the town was designated as a world heritage site, all buildings must be built of
mud, and therefore redone once a year since the...
Two babes in dogon part 2
Some more random commentary about dogon country and our trip.
..Meet and greet is a lengthy process among dogon, and dogon and other Malians . How are you? How is your wife? How are your children? How is your mother? An interesting meeting that we had while climbing up the cliff from Ende to Begnimato was bumping into a group of trekkers which included Ali Farka Toure’s second wife , a...
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