The long bumpy drive to Timbuktu - yes, Timbuktu does exist, it's not somewhere plucked from myth; the west African hub for trade in gold, salt and slaves across the 14th-16th centuries, and a major centre for Islamic learning and culture, the remote desert city is now an endangered UNESCO World Heritage site - gave us plenty of practise sand matting. We ran with those metal mats and threw them under the truck wheels like professionals.
Finally, after a long climb, we glimpsed buildings on the horizon, our final approach to the large sprawl of mud structures lined with clusters of matting huts - the outer suburbs?
First impression of the once-great city of Timbuktu? Dusty, hazy and frantic with screaming, swarming children. One of the most hostile towns we've been in. Children mobbed the back of our parked truck, and small gangs of them broke away to accompany us as we explored the town. Jeff and I did two circuits, the second unintentional because we couldn't find the hotel meeting place, going in the wrong direction four times, and always followed by several boys vying for the job of guide. Finally hired one but the others stuck with us, a couple of quite sweet lads and one extremely irritating older one. Their constant haranguing was very tiring - didn't expect this level of harassment so far from everywhere, but then tourists coming to their town are probably the only thing of interest and source of money in a place completely surrounded by sand, where everything - not much if the market is anything to go by - has to be brought in.
But the setting for the hassling was amazing: a mud-walled city of twisting alleys studded with fantastic wooden doors and three mosques, two of which have towers skewered with wooden beams. We saw many mud bread ovens, their insides blackened from use.
Most of the town's residents looked very different from the "black" Africans we have seen more recently, with pale skin and straight dark hair, almost southern European in appearance. The children were poorly dressed and shivered in the cold.
After a couple of hours - all most of us could tolerate - we pushed our way back onto the truck through the throng of locals. Driving out of town we had to fight off children clambering up the side of the truck, sand mat on the edge of town and then rev the truck to make it up the long first hill. People trailed the truck like pilgrims. What an amazing place to visit, and what a hell of a place to live.
We camped amongst dead trees and fallen timber that provided lots of wood for a bonfire. Lots of noisy fun after dinner, with rockets and firecrackers from Jeff, and people running around the fire with sparklers, and Elton John and Beatles for entertainment. The coals glowed red late into the night, the regulars enjoying the change from the normal few inches of coals.
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