If you’re after spa treatments, luxury safari lodges and chocolates on your pillow, then Mali is not for you. Even wildlife is not really on the agenda, bar a few hippos and crocodiles lurking in the boundless Niger river.
But if you fancy a mind-boggling ethnic mosaic, hearing Africa’s best music, seeing mud architecture that could have been designed by Gaudà and immersing yourself in the passions of an ancient cosmology — then this is your kind of place.
Two-thirds of this West African country is blanketed in the sand of the Sahara, animated only by the nomadic shrouded Tuaregs and camels. One town, Niafounke, is home to Mali’s pioneering musician Ali Farka Toure, but the place everyone has heard of is Timbuktu, a name synonymous with remoteness although no longer the country’s most enchanting attraction.
Getting there is still a long, tough journey, even by 4×4. It entails chokingly dusty hours on the road, followed by a slow diagonal chug across the Niger on an infrequent pontoon. Then comes the anti-climax: a mish-mash of concrete and mud architecture, litter drifting over the dunes, open sewers, exhibits gone missing from the dusty museum, sand creeping inside houses whose upper storeys collapsed in last year’s heavy rains …
But there are also beehive-like bread-ovens in the street churning out a gritty form of chapatti, a couple of markets, superb studded doors, a nightclub, Tuaregs clutching mobiles on motorbikes and three historic mosques. Non-Muslims are allowed to visit the oldest and most extraordinary of these, the Djingarey Ber.
Dating from 1325, its nine colonnaded corridors are made of packed mud and dimly lit by tiny skylights.
South-west of Timbuktu, a more accessible Mali is typified by the thorny scrub of the Sahel, sliced by the Niger river, its lifeblood and main highway. On an island sandwiched between the banks lies Djenne — a classic stop between the capital Bamako and the commercial hub of Mopti.
Here concrete is banned, so the entire town is made of adobe bricks and rammed earth walls, radiating from another focal-point mosque, the world’s largest mud structure, an iconic African equivalent to the Eiffel Tower or Sydney Opera House. It sits high above the main square on a raised platform, its walls and pinnacles bristling with projecting palmwood beams and crowned with Daliesque ostrich eggs.
Most visitors time their stay to include a Monday, when the huge square and its surrounding streets host the weekly market with its multi-ethnic mix of peoples. Foulani (former nomadic cattle-herders, whose statuesque women sport tattooed upper lips and scarred cheeks), Bambara, Dogon, Songhay, Tuareg and Bozo peoples pour in on market day, balanced vertiginously on bundles of goods in gear-grinding trucks, ferried across the river with a donkey and cart, or paddling their own canoes. For these extrovert West Africans, market day is not just about commerce — it’s the week’s big party.
Mali is predominantly Muslim with the exception of the Dogon who remain largely animist, with a unique system of beliefs reflected in their distinctive handicrafts. Their highly symbolic wooden masks, intricately carved doors and baobab maracas can be bought at a handful of tourist-orientated stalls in Djenne, but they are most widely available in Mopti.
Halfway between Djenne and Timbuktu, this humming port never seems to sleep, fed by a constant boats, vehicles, carts, goods and people from over the border in Burkina Faso and Niger, from nearby Dogon country, from up- and downriver and from the desert. On the river banks several stalls sell what look like stone slabs — actually compressed salt, once the “gold” of the Sahara.
In the street market, you can find anything from French pastries to foam mattresses covered in luminous prints, bogolan (mud-cloth), Tuareg knick-knacks and those ubiquitous Dogon wood carvings.
River transport, the traditional means of travel, means a packed public boat or a pinasse, a small, converted cargo boat propelled by outboard motor and pole. Also on the river are hundreds of canoes netting their catch from sunrise to sunset before it is dried, smoked and exported to neighbouring countries.
Travelling by road takes you almost parallel to the river through classic Sahel vegetation of acacias, sheas, baobabs and palms. The flat, arid landscape changes radically when you approach Dogon country, east of Mopti. As the road rises into a boulder-strewn plateau, the immense Bandiagara escarpment comes into view. This stunning sandstone ridge is home to a string of Dogon villages, all clustered along its base beneath caves hollowed out by the previous inhabitants, the Tellem. Poking above the one-storey village roofline are thatched pepperpot granaries, “male” or “female'” according to their square or circular form, all connected by stony paths curling uphill to caves and fetishes. In contrast, the foreground has pockets of startlingly green vegetable gardens.
The region is mesmerising, partly because of the omnipresence of the towering escarpment, partly the complexity and mysteries of Dogon culture, partly the elusive sandstone constructions blending with the ochre- coloured backdrop, and partly the endless stream of mellifluous questions each Dogon will greet you with.
Marcel Griaule, the French ethnographer whose extensive research in the 1930s brought the Dogon culture to the outer world, unwittingly also let loose a stream of alien conspiracy theories. These originated in the curious fact that the Dogons somehow knew about the Sirius B star long before it was discovered by Western astronomers. But when you’re sleeping out on the flat, dusty rooftop of a Dogon house, gazing at the densely layered, sparkling night sky, listening to out-of-sync cocks crowing and donkeys braying, those alien astronauts seem irrelevant. — Â