Vive La Senegal

My westward travels since Kathmandu have finally run up against the ocean. You can't get any further west than Dakar in Africa unless you take to the seas and visit the Cape Verde Islands. It seems an appropriate place in which to quit a continent that has occupied me since November and ready myself for the Americas.

West Africa has left me a little jaded and travel weary to be honest. The final section from the Niger Delta to the coast has seen us cover over 1000km of relentlessly flat Sahel scenery in gruelling temperatures. The nondescript town of Kayes en route is officially the hottest town in Africa with afternoon temperatures regularly in the high 40s at this time of year. These are not places in which to linger long, and in truth they offer meagre pickings in terms of their cultural interest when you have just come from the Dogon Country.

However, Senegal does reward the journey when you reach the coast. We holed up at a lovely beach resort for a few days for some much needed R&R, before braving the dire warnings of the guide books in order to head into Dakar, the uncrowned capital of West Africa and a city with an unenviable reputation for noise, pollution and daylight robbery. Well, the guidebooks can't always have it their way. This is an exciting and vibrant city, with a wealth of attractive French colonial architecture, a cosmopolitan feel and a fabulous location on the final pensinsula before Africa runs out and the Atlantic begins. The people are friendly and sophisticated and for once in West Africa seem well geared up for meeting the expectations of western tourists. This is a great city indeed.

Out in the bay of Dakar sits the picturesque Isle de Goree, with a tiny fortified town of crumbling, brightly painted colonial villas and administrative buildings. Goree was the original European base in sub-saharan Africa, settled as early as the 15th C by the Portuguese, and subsequently it was the centre of French power in the region. It survives a picture postcard place, more like a Cornish fishing village than a slice of modern Africa, though the weather is quite a bit better than in Cornwall. Grace and I finished up our trip here and we couldn't have dreamt up a more idyllic spot if we'd tried.

Heat and Dust

Well, we made it out of Timbuktu alive, and after a gruelling two day drive on desert roads arrived back to some semblance of civilisation. Of course the truck broke down for several hours, a knackered suspension as opposed to the anticipated radiator collapse the cause, though we've still ended up replacing the radiator here in Bamako.

The rigours of overland travel in West Africa are beginning to take their toll on me and on my enthusiasm for the place. The scenery is relentlessly dull unless you particularly love endless flat expanses of scrubby trees and bush, dotting a brown earth baked hard like concrete by the merciless sun. The Sahel landscape is unvarying to quite an amazing degree over vast areas of West Africa, and seemingly empty of much life apart from goat herders and their flocks. We have a further solid five days of the stuff ahead of us as we depart Bamako for the Senegalese coast, with no sights to speak of en route. I'm craving hills and grass and something spectacular to see.

The highlight of the past days and in a sense of the whole trip has been a three day trek in the Dogon country in eastern Mali. The Dogon remained fiercely animist in the face of Moslem incursion into West Africa and retreated to defend their traditional beliefs to a spectacular escarpment landscape in the fourteenth century. The Bandiagara Escarpment truly is a landscape to make the heart sing. The wind eroded sandstone escarpment runs for about 150km with a fertile plateau behind where the Dogons cultivate onions, dropping magnificently 300m to a fertile plain below where many of the Dogon villages are picturesquely sited in the lee of the cliffs. There are gorges and dry river beds aplenty, with fabulously twisted boabob trees providing much needed shelter and shade from the heat and dust.

Dogon culture is quite fascinating and incorporates an important role for masked dancing. The masks are highly elaborate and in some cases astonishingly large. We were able to see a dance performed in one village which was really quite a sight to see. We also visited a cliff ledge painted with what could almost be taken for modernist abstract paintings in bold colours, where the Dogon boys are circumcised in an age old 15-day ceremony that marks their rite of passage into adulthood. The ubiquitous square thatched granary buildings raised on staddle stones are the signature buildings of Dogon villages, looking a little like the steeply gabled turrets of fairytale medieval castles. Every husband must provide a granary for each wife he takes, and it is these buildings which traditionally were sealed with the famous carved windows and doors of the Dogon. It was wonderful to be off the truck and on foot through this place, sleeping on roofs under the stars at night to recover from the rigours of a day's hiking.

In Timbuktu

Greetings from Timbuktu! It feels rather grand to write it, though the town is quite underwhelming when you actually explore the place. Still the whole point of Timbuktu is in the getting here (and the getting out again alive). Even the early European explorers who finally fought their way across burning desert sands and through hostile tribes to reach this place were disappointed in what they found after all their efforts. Timbuktu is truly a city of the imagination, its fabled wealth that endowed it with mosques, madressahs and one of the greatest universities on Earth in the late Middle Ages, is all long gone with barely a trace to show it ever existed at all.

In 1325 the Emperor of Mali collapsed the global price of gold for over a decade by giving away such vast quantities of the stuff as he passed through Cairo on his return journey from a pilgrimmage to Mecca. When Ibn Battutah visited the city a few years later, traversing the Sahara from Morocco, the city was entering into its golden age. These days there is just one mud mosque surviving from the 14th century, the streets of a depleted town are encroached by sand, and the only precious metal to be seen is the debased silver used by the Tuareg, the dominant ethnic group here, to fashion crude, though lovely, jewellery items for sale to tourists.

Inevitably, getting to Timbuktu proved quite an adventure. We finally reached it after an epic three day boat trip up the Niger River from a place downstream from the bustling port of Mopti. Our boat ran out of fuel and then proceeded to bust its motor so we pretty much limped into our destination half a day late, jaded, and having run out of food. However, it was a beautiful and fascinating journey, with plenty of diversions along the way, so our spirits weren't entirely dashed. It's worth remembering that it was often the departing that the early explorers found most tricky about Timbuktu, carrying with it all the associated risks of getting yourself murdered on a lonely stretch of desert road. Although our truck made it here without us, it was at the expense of the radiator, our sole remaining radiator following the tribulations of Cameroon. So nobody's holding their breath on when we get to leave.

These days Mopti, which is situated on a most peculiar inland delta, is the economic hub of eastern Mali, a region effectively defined by the great northerly sweep of the river. Its harbour is the stuff of photographers' dreams, as is the equally lively Monday market in the neighbouring town of Djenne, with its fabulous maze of atmospheric medieval streets in mud brick, centring on the graceful Friday Mosque, the world's largest mud brick building. Together these towns seem to encapsulate everything Timbuktu ought to be but is not.