Around the World in 50 Years (22 page)

None of which did me any good.

By then I was back in Addis, from whence I'd begun this costly, time-consuming, and fruitless jaunt, and was there informed by Ethiopian Airlines that—“Sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Albert”—they were not flying to N'Djamena until the president of Chad lifted his declaration of a state of emergency. But—“Not to worry, Mr. Albert—you'll receive a refund for the unused portion of the four-flight ticket.” (A refund Mr. Albert received only after four years, and nine e-mails, and, the clincher, an irate invasion of their executive suite accompanied by a local journalist who threatened to expose them.)

Chad's president decreed that the state of emergency would remain in place for at least 15 days, which was more time than I could afford; therefore, I sadly concluded that Chad had to hang for some other year, and caught a plane four days later for the same circuitous route to Niamey in Niger.

A persistent drought and the search for work had driven people from all over Niger to Niamey, expanding it from 3,000 in 1930 to more than a million, but it was still a sleepy, laid-back place on the banks of the River Niger. All the streets in my part of town were of deep sand, which reduced noise and traffic speed, and the dusty sidewalks were lined with beggars, bums, basket cases, and poorly stocked vendors of Kleenex, flashlight batteries, and single cigarettes. The few stores of substance were run by Frenchmen.

After I'd visited both the Grande and the Petite Markets there was not much left to see in Niamey. And since a group called Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was starting to kidnap Westerners there, I hopped a bus for a ten-hour ride westward to rendezvous with God and Bernard. They'd driven their old wreck of a Land Cruiser, which now had over 500,000 km on it, up from Accra, where they lived, to Ouagadougou, where we met and provisioned for eleven days of camping. Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso, the world's third poorest country, number 175 on the UN Human Development Index of 177, where half of the population lives, if one can call it that, on less than one dollar a day, where only 13 percent are literate, and desertification is a continuing problem. What followed was an eventful week:

Tuesday: I got hit by a small truck when crossing a busy street. Nothing broken.

Wednesday: Massive riots erupted in Ouagadougou, protesting rising grain prices, which had
doubled
in one year, partly caused by America's diverting some of its corn crop from food and animal feed to the production of ethanol. The locals burned tires, smashed streetlights, looted shops—just like on the
Evening News.
We cut our shopping short and scooted out of town, heading toward Mali. The rough dirt track leading to Gorum-Gorum quickly broke the tube leading to our vehicle's brake fluid reservoir, forcing us to spend hours looking for a welder. I got into a dispute with the denizens of Gorum-Gorum, where many of the houses are famously decorated with black and white stripes. They demanded I give them money for taking pictures of their houses, but I make it a point to never pay for photos because it sets a precedent that ruins things for the tourists who follow and who will be harassed if they don't also pay.

Thursday: Out for a morning constitutional, I crossed paths with a deadly saw-scaled viper. Fortunately, it was not in an aggressive mood and made no threat display, but it can be one mean killing machine. We broke the Cruiser's hood reenforcer on another rough road and had to hunt up another welder.

Friday: We cracked parts of the front and rear bumpers, requiring more welding and more delay. The temperature, which had been a bearable 117 degrees, zoomed off my thermometer's scale at 122. That night, while we were camped in the desert a quarter mile behind a small village, bandits struck and made off with two 25-liter jerry cans stored on the luggage rack atop the Cruiser and filled with $200 worth of precious diesel. I presume this was the handiwork of the teenage miscreants who'd walked out from the village to “welcome” us as we were pitching our tents at sunset and to see what there was to be had once we slept. It took days to replace the fuel because the nearest refinery was hundreds of miles distant, and the petrol trucks now avoided the area because of riots.

Saturday: My most malodorous and shocking misadventure took place on the darkened streets of Bobo-Dioulasso (which had just sustained a destructive riot), where I fell into an open manhole filled with raw human sewage. I rushed back to my hotel room to clean off the crap. After a long shower I flipped the switch to turn on the ceiling fan and was almost knocked out by an electric shock from the combination of a defective switch and my bare feet on the wet tile floor.

All things considered, a fairly typical week in Africa.

The highlight was our visit to Djenné, long a seat of Islamic learning and culture, and the oldest known city in sub-Saharan Africa, a bustling trading center on the banks of the Niger that had for centuries prospered from this direct shipping connection to Timbuktu, which had access to salt and gold. Djenné's main square offered an exotic counterpoint of several hundred farmers and merchants hawking spices, vegetables, cloth, and brightly colored plastic pails, while white-capped, dark-bearded, fiery-eyed imams hawked the teachings of the Koran to attentive youths in a score of outdoor
madrassas,
all competing for airtime against an omnipresent cacophony of chants, flutes, boom boxes, and switch-pitch drums.

I jumped into the market scene with a handful of my ever-popular Times Square T-shirts, and had, within ten minutes, traded five for two Dogon carvings and a sizable plastic washtub filled with enough veggies, spices, and cooking oils to feed us for a week. But I turned down a host of unsolicited offers for my New York Mets baseball cap.

The square was dominated by the most famous building south of the pyramids, the Great Mosque of Djenné, a UNESCO world heritage site that was the largest mud building anywhere, the apotheosis of the Sudano-Sahelian architectural style, and the culmination of any kid's fantasy of the ultimate sand castle. The mosque's base is set nine feet above the ground, atop a platform 245 feet long on every side, far larger in area than two football fields. Its three rectangular minarets, facing east to Mecca, soared seven stories high into the clear desert sky.

The mosque is made of sunbaked bricks molded from mud mixed with rice husks, held together with a mud-based mortar and covered with a mud paste that gives it a smooth, sculpted look. The walls are two feet thick and adorned with a forest of conical pinnacles topped with real ostrich eggs symbolizing purity and fertility. Every spring Djenné holds a weeklong working festival during which the able-bodied pitch in to repair any damage caused by rain and by the repeated expansion and contraction of the mud resulting from the large shifts between day and night temperatures.

I was not allowed to enter the mosque. In 1998
Vogue
had commissioned a notorious fashion shoot there, featuring scantily clad models, which so outraged the devout townsfolk that non-Muslims had been forbidden to enter ever since. But I was content to sit in the square and marvel at this magnificent mud masterpiece.

Although God appreciated the Great Mosque as a work of art and an ideal attraction for his tourists, he didn't like what it represented. “When Islam came into West Africa,” he told me, “it was introduced in Timbuktu, which became one of the highest education centers, and then it spread, by the Niger River down here to Djenné in the eighth century, forcing the Dogon tribe to flee to their present-day location in the escarpment. Now, Al-Qaeda is trying to dominate Mali, Niger, and parts of Burkina Faso, threatening my business.”

The Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali near the Niger River was built in 1907. It is is repaired during a festival each year, and is the largest mud-brick building in the world. The lively market beside it features vendors pushing fruits and plastic pails and imams pushing the Koran and who knows what else.

We were aware that time was running short to visit Timbuktu. We knew that a vast area around it on three sides was controlled by the Tuareg, a tough and ruthless tribe that disdained the central government in Bamako, believing it discriminated against them because of their lighter skins. For many decades the Tuareg had engaged in sporadic robbery and revolt in the region, and subjected Godfried to the most harrowing incident of his career:

“I was taking a group of six Italians into the heart of the desert where salt is mined, to a town called Taoudenni, 660 kilometers north of Timbuktu, near where some of these rebels have bases. About halfway there we were stopped by a gang of these people. They shot out our tires and took away our food and most of our water. They didn't kill any of us, but they went through every single piece of luggage. They took away all the money I had for the trip, all the money belonging to the clients, every single thing they wanted to take away.”

I asked him how he survived.

“It was very, very miraculous. It was just the beginning of cell phones. My boss was carrying a cell phone operated by solar energy. The bandits did not know what it was and discarded it. So when they were gone, my boss, who I was assisting to guide these people, used the phone, which took the rest of the afternoon to get into contact with the military base in Timbuktu. We spoke to this one precious person, who I will never forget in my life, who knew the desert very well. ‘Tell me the color of the sand where you are,' he asked, and we told him the color, and he knew exactly where we were, because he was someone who had been initiated by his father to go on the salt trade, so he was walking camels across the Sahara for almost all his life. And they came up to rescue us. It took them three days to come up the 350 clicks in their Jeep. They saved our lives.”

The Tuareg had since formed the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad in the far northeast corner of Mali and were dedicated to wresting control of it from the central government. They had been infiltrated and influenced by radical Islamists, and the most zealous of them were leading a new movement called Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith), centered in the lawless lands near Mali's border with Algeria in the forbidding Adrar des Ifoghas mountains, and dedicated to turning northern Mali, including Timbuktu, into an Islamic nation under strict sharia law. Adding to this danger, both Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and MUJAO (Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa) were increasingly aggressive in that large lawless region. If we fell into their clutches, we'd be either ransom objects or dead meat.

After much consideration—and well aware of my tendency to let desire trump security—I decided to take the chance and attempt the run to Timbuktu. I'd wanted to visit that storied town for half of my life, and this might be my last opportunity. I reckoned the reward was worth the risk.

From Djenné it was a two-day drive, via Mopti, across the desert to Timbuktu, all tough going, where we were repeatedly forced to choose between the hard-packed track with its teeth-jarring corrugated ruts or sand so dry and soft we had to roll or push our vehicle up every incline steeper than five degrees. We saw only one other vehicle that trip, a white van carrying three dazzling Italian women in bathing suits—were they a mirage?—stuck in sand over its hubcaps. We winched them out, and I wished I could have wenched them in, but they were headed in the opposite direction. The main traffic we encountered were caravans of donkeys—50, 100, 200, or more—carrying salt southwest to the port of Mopti at the confluence of the Niger and Bani Rivers, or bringing food and household goods northeast to Timbuktu. (Camel caravans seldom ventured far south of Timbuktu because they succumbed to the tsetse fly, which cannot live in the drier regions to the north.)

It was so dry in the Saharan belt that I saw only one cloud in 33 days, and no mist, dew, or fog. So dry that many areas received less than four inches of rain a year, compared to more than 120 inches in West Africa. So dry that in God's vehicle with no AC and the windows open to catch a breeze, after I'd soaked my clothes with water to keep cool, the moisture evaporated in ten minutes. So drying that even though I drank more than 20 glasses of water each day, I could barely pee two teacups worth at night. So dry that my nasal drip caused by the pollution in Ouagadougou congealed like a Wyoming waterfall in winter. So drying that when I tried to spit, I had nothing to spit with.

I ended the drive with a desiccated nose that cracked when touched and excruciatingly irritated eyes from a thousand kilometers of desert dust. God's old car ended up in the shop for two days with a broken ball joint, a cranky crankcase, and a leaking radiator that needed extensive welding.

Timbuktu has long been the universal byword for adventure, escape, faraway places, the mysterious inaccessibility of the Sahara, the middle of nowhere, the end of the road. And it is still all that, although it's now a dusty and dreary skeleton of the resplendent city it had been in the 14th century, when it was the capital of the Mali Empire, controlling the entire northwest quadrant of Africa and spreading the worship of Islam throughout the region.