Timbuktu: a Living Legend by Greg Cook

A visit to the semi-mythical African town of Timbuktu proves that real travel is all about the journey and the destination.

Through the heart of Mali, a land-locked nation set inside the jutting rump of west-Africa, there is a delta. A flat and impossibly broad body of water tasselled with ribbon islands, which quite obviously has no real business being there. This is the river Niger, a massive blue-green tract pouring itself entirely contrary to logic, away from the Atlantic towards the core of the continent. On the northern bank of this river lies a town, and on the northern border of this town the first dunes of the vast Sahara retract in waves across a distance barely limited by the horizon. It is dawn.

To the west the full moon is still setting - an oily-yellow ball of fat falling into a cauldron of scrub and sand. To the east a sun yet to rise stains the edge of the sky an almost inexplicable shade of crimson. The colour of a parched throat. Then, as the minutes creep by in the stillness and the dull flanks of the town’s mud-brick buildings begin to glow in the precious hours before the baking noon, the desert town of Timbuktu comes alive.

Timbuktu has been prefixed so often by the words ‘fabled city’ it’s now been firmly set in the western imagination as somewhere just outside the map – and clinging as it does to the southern edge of the cartographically blank Sahara, the reality isn’t actually that different. However, visiting Timbuktu in the 21st-century no longer requires an explorer’s iron will and an entourage of native Tuareg tribesmen able to navigate the desert by reading the texture of the sand. But it still takes a bit of doing, which for most travellers is what continues to make the journey worthwhile.

Although it was founded in the 12th-century, since September 22nd 1960, Timbuktu has been squarely centred within the country now known as the Republic of Mali. One of Africa’s poorest nations, culturally Mali is undoubtedly one of the continent’s richest, and the heart, the soul, and the glue that binds together a country five-times larger than the UK, consisting of countless tribal groups and over a dozen separate dialects, is music.   

Bamako. Capital of Mali

Of all African musicians Malian artist are arguably the most prolific and highly regarded. Many now have international reputations and in recent years have been sought out for inspiration and collaboration by heavy-weight western musicians such from Damon Albarn to Robert Plant. For most western visitors, musical or otherwise, the journey to Timbuktu begins on the tarmac at Mali’s only international airport, situated a few kilometres south of the country’s capital Bamako.   

To describe Bamako as a textbook example of a large city in a developing nation really doesn’t do justice to either its best or worst elements. The capital is low-rise and polluted. The air consists of a cocktail of red west-African dust, fully-leaded exhaust and smouldering rubbish. Spend just one morning around the main roads of central Bamako and you feel like you’ve inhaled a box of pencils. But in a city flung across forty square-kilometres and bisected by the broad Niger River, motor vehicles are a grim necessity and getting anywhere meaningful as a pedestrian in Bamako is nearly impossible.

However what the city offers as abundantly as pollution is bustle, colour and an amazing array of bars and clubs playing some of the best live music on the continent, all night every night – not to mention La Gare Routiere Songoniko, the bus terminal from which buses leave daily for the port town of Mopti on the first leg of the journey to Timbuktu.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that, like many west-African nations, French is used here as the second, unifying tongue – so the accustomed fall-back position of speaking English, but slower, simply won’t cut it. It’s also worth mentioning that nothing will happen according to anything written on a timetable. Buses leave only when full, which means their height has been doubled with a roof-load of white goods, motor bikes and feed sacks, and the aisles have been filled with livestock and yet more local travellers. Luxuriously undertaken on one of Mali’s rare, tarmac roads the journey-time for the 460km trip to Mopti is cheerfully advertised at eight hours. Once again, with unscheduled stops and almost inevitable breakdowns, the trip has been known to take two days. Stay optimistic and prepared by splitting the difference.

Mopti, Halfway to Timbuktu

Mopti, a raucous riverbank town spanning the southern bank of the Niger, is Mali’s main hub of commerce outside Bamako. It’s also roughly halfway to Timbuktu, and from here are two options for onward travel. The most expedient is overland by booking a seat in one of the numerous shared 4x4s. Relatively easy going at first, until arriving at Douentza, a small impoverished village a hundred miles east of Mopti where the asphalt ends and a bone-shaking days journey along semi-graded dirt track ensues, culminating in an unforgettable trip across the Niger where herdsmen regularly drive a chaos of skidding cattle tumbling up the metal ramps of a small car-ferry and in between the tightly packed land-cruisers.

This mode of transport will land you on the Niger’s northern bank in Korioume, the village on the doorstep of Timbuktu and conveniently connected by 10km of tarmac road, within one long day (unless of course you miss the last ferry leaving at sunset). But for the more romantic traveller, Mopti offers the chance to take the rest of the journey by boat, travelling for the next two or three days through the unique and beautiful Niger Inland Delta, spending nights on deck or camped around fires on the riverbank.

When the water is high enough, roughly between July and December, passage can be booked on one of large COMANAV steamer ferries regularly running this stretch of river, but during the dry season you’ll need to travel by pinasse or piroge, the smaller private boats that carry a mixture of goods and passengers. Once on board it’s easy to attune to the sedate, rolling rhythm of river travel, watching local fishermen in the late afternoon sun fling their nets in silhouette across the silver water,
maybe spotting a hippo or two in the seasonal Lake Debo, and floating past Naifunke, the village home of legendary world-blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure, this has to be the most evocative way to arrive at your destination.

Timbuktu Today

The Timbuktu of today may have changed somewhat since it’s 15th century heyday, when it’s fame as one of the most prosperous trading points in Africa gave rise to the legend of a city sprung from a land of gold. These days the straggling markets and roadside stalls appear to sell an identically limited inventory of sour oranges and grubby sachets of mobile-phone top-up cards.

However Timbuktu still offers more to its visitors than the mere kudos of arriving. As a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1992, the old-town quarter offers ancient mosques built in the region’s unique mud-brick style, a vernacular that looks at first glance like the work of some long-extinct species of giant ant.

Of its three mosques, the Djingareiber Mosque, built in 1325, is the oldest and is open to tourists, while the Sankori Mosque once housed the town’s university, one of the world’s greatest seats of learning during the middle ages. On the edge of the town’s Casbah, in the concisely named Institut de Hautes Etudes et des Recherches Islamique Ahmed Baba, some of the twenty-thousand of the university’s ancient scrolls so far discovered are on display. These days there’s also a modest but reasonable array of hotels, hostels and restaurants throughout the town - the medium-priced Hotel Boctou with its bustling terrace restaurant being arguably one of the most popular.

But it’s not the mud-brick buildings or their inhabitants that make Timbuktu special. The magic comes from simple fact it exists at all and the thrill of being there, which combine to create the strange sensation that, now you’re actually here, everywhere else is in the world is very far away.