Car Rapide

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I have now been on my own for almost a month and it has been a steep learning curve. Public transport has been exciting, trying to haggle the price to somewhere reasonable, whilst waiting for the seven places in the Peugeot 505 to fill up before you leave. I crossed into Senegal from Kayes, Mali and turned North at Kidira, where I loosely followed the Senegal River to St. Louis. For the next few days I travelled by night and explored by day; Ouro Sogui, Matam and Podor, all small towns on the banks of the River Senegal. On two occasions I arrived in the early hours of the morning and slept ‘rough’ in a petrol station and in the back of a little meat shop with no trouble at all.

Sept Place

Out of the three, Podor is probably the most interesting, with a French Fort that is being restored – but the history behind it is more impressive than the building itself. If I hadn’t arrived on a Friday I would have waited for the Thursday ferry to St. Louis, which takes six days, to make a change from the potholed roads. St. Louis is a town full of unpolished character and typical of ‘old’ capital cities. Neglected and needing a layer of paint, it is obvious there is no money coming this way. This is a huge unemployment problem; if you’re lucky there might be one person in a family of 15 (usually a young man) who has a job, but this will only be for a couple a days a week as there just simply isn’t the work for the number of people.

The Muslim family I stayed with looked after me very well. The children were charming and the young mother had another baby since while I was there. Her other son, Habib, who is five, decided I was his ‘white man!’ In terms of sights, sounds and smells, St. Louis is full of them. Among the usual, small restaurants, internet cafes and artisan markets there are abandoned colonial buildings and palms trees, pelicans eating from rubbish dumps, tramps and a beach which is used as a toilet. There are broken bridges, old water towers, a fish eagle and the kind of smell that needs getting used to in the fishing village. None of these should be considered as reasons not to visit St. Louis though; they are simply characteristics of a town that make it what it is. I wouldn’t want it any other way. More importantly I believe it is the people living amongst all this that make it a place to visit.

If the railway hadn’t been disused for over ten years and covered by a daily market so thick you can no longer see the tracks, Dakar is a direct 265km away. Instead I took other means of public transport and five hours later I was there. Dakar is vast and I fell on my feet in finding Ndongo, a particularly street wise pizza delivery boy, who after a short conversation about accommodation, picked up my bags and threw them in the back of a cab. We arrived at his family’s house where I stayed for a week with his ‘mama,’ his sister, his brother and Malik, his five year old son, who I spent most of my time colouring in exercise books with.

There are thousands of places to see in Dakar, all of which you can read about in a guide book. I enjoyed the Ile de Gorée, famous for its role in the slave trade, but offering a lot more. It was fascinating to see as an artist and is a beautiful little island (900m long and 300 wide). The French and the English fought consistently over the island, with the French keeping it until Senagalese independence in 1960.

Dakar Goree ferry

You can catch a boat from Dakar every couple of hours to the Island for 5000cfa, unless you are local, in which case it is much cheaper. The island is now full of artists, living in and amongst the old French bunkers and concrete military buildings making for a fascinating place to explore – free from red rope barriers and people asking you ‘not to touch.’ You will probably find a man called Halil, who lives beside the largest cannon in Africa (now out of service and never used). He is very knowledgeable and offered me a place to stay in his hut.

Marche Kermel

On Sunday morning, I headed down to Marche Kermel to draw the fresh fish and crabs and as I left I was invited to have tea with Ali. This is not unusual and on this occasion I accepted. After a little of while talking about life in general and England, Ali and his seven friends had a whip round for Sunday lunch. Such is the hospitality that I wasn’t allowed to make a contribution. I should explain that we were sitting in a car park at the back of the market on benches and the floor yet 30 minutes later, their friend produced a traditional Sunday lunch of battered sole, a kilo of prawns and a sort of onion sauce, all eaten out of one big bowl with your hands. It was easily the best thing I have eaten in Africa, although Mama’s chicken ‘Yassa’ came close.

Banjul Fishing Beach

I soon left Ndongo and his family and headed south for Banjul, Gambia where I turned east and followed the river up the middle of Gambia. If I was to do the trip again I would drop down into Casamance, the southern section of Senegal as I have only heard good things about it. My next stop though was the Gambia River National Park, where for the first time I rang ahead to let them know I was coming. It was lucky I did because I arrived in a tiny village at a river front with nowhere to go until Aliou picked me up in a boat. We motored for 30 minutes to a stilt house overlooking the Gambia River which was quite stunning. It was the closest to luxury I have come to in Africa: three course meals, made beds, clean sheets, privacy and I was generously looked after by Matthew the manager.

The lodge overlooks the river and two or three large islands which are home to four families of chimpanzees. It has been their home for 30 years now and they are as close to the wild as you can get. Ideally they would live an uninterrupted life but because the islands provide on average only 80%t of their food, Rene and his team of chimp handlers feed them every couple of days. This gives visitors a very privileged view of chimps and gave me the opportunity to try and draw them.

After three days of private toured boat rides, sunrise coffee trips, bird watching, baboons, monkeys, lizards, rare manatees surfacing each evening and the howls of chimpanzees waking me up in the morning, I had to force myself back onto the road. What better way to do this than to try and get to Bamako direct….

A short boat ride with Rene, a 4×4, a mini bus, another crowded mini bus, a ferry, one more minibus, a car ferry we had to pull across on a rope (if you pulled you didn’t pay!), two more minibuses, a night on Mohammed’s floor who I had met in the last bus, a small bus, a horse and cart, a taxi, a decent sized coach and another taxi. 36 hours later exhausted I arrived back in Bamako to psych myself up for the bus to Bobo Dioulasso in Burkina Faso.

A month ago we set off from London in two Toyota Land Cruisers. I am travelling with a man called Guy Lankester who was born in Zimbabwe and now spends six months of the year running bespoke tours in West Africa. So far he has organised everything, which is great for me because I can spend what little time we have trying to draw. Some of the drawings are below. The others you can see here.

Having missed the 2am ferry from Dover, we arrive in Paris a little later than planned to arrange our Malian visas (there is no Malian embassy in London; Algerian you can do in London, Tunisian you don’t need as a UK national). This usually takes 24 hours to be ready. After that we had a very easy run down to Lyon where we stayed on the floor with some Tuareg people, and onto Italy to catch the 24-hour ferry to Tunis.

Genoa

My first real opportunity to draw came in Genoa, where Africa seems to begin. A seething port of people, mostly men with their cars packed with everything you can imagine; sofas, mopeds, fridges, dining room tables, and anything that doesn’t fit inside goes on top. Every official we came to said ‘splendid’ and being English we were happy to agree, only later realizing that it was the name of the boat (the other option leaving the next day was ‘Excellent’).

Genoa boat

I would suggest booking a cabin on the boat, as with three beds and a shower it may be the last luxury for a while. I don’t think it is possible to avoid the visa/passport/vehicle paper queues in Tunis port – it took us a couple of hours, and, as I have come to learn, it is easier not to fight or hurry anything in Africa.

Tozeur cafe

After that we headed for the desert, spending a night in a perfectly clean hostel in Kairouan, where there is also a 5 star hotel (Hotel La Kasbah) if it is luxury you are after. The next morning we made a small detour past the giant salt lake called Chott el Jerid. Big enough to feature on Tunisian coins, it is worth driving past before arriving in Tozeur where I had an opportunity to draw the small dark reed market buildings, the friendly shop keepers and the café culture which replaces European drinking.

Before you get to the Algerian you will have had to organise a guide, as it is the law to travel with one ‘for your own safety’. And it is important to get the right one. For that reason I am not going to recommend ours! Travelling with Guy meant that visas and itineraries were all organised, (your guide should be able to do this,) but you will need to check in at each police post and this slows down the driving – along with having to stop for traditional Tuareg tea, which you will learn to love.

Police post

All that organised – Algeria begins to become a fascinating place to visit. Little oasis towns, usually understated in the guide books, are very welcoming to tourists, with cheap rooms available or camping if you prefer. I should also add there was always a more expensive option, although it was not one that we ever took. Each town is usually half-a-days drive away so when we were organised it was possible to drive in the mornings and see the sights in the afternoons. We weren’t allowed to drive much after dark, (another precaution taken after having so much trouble in the 90s) but this did not worry us because we were happy to see the giant Sahara desert and its indescribably large ergs in the sun light.

A Berber

Often we were invited into people’s houses to eat, usually around one big bowl of rice and meat with sauce. I found that the longer I spent in little places such as El Golea and In Salah, the more I enjoyed it, and enjoyed getting to know the shops, the prices and the local food.

As we got further south we left behind the Arabic influences and attitudes and moved into Tamashek territory. The Tamashek or Tuareg are a community of people that live in the southern half of the Sahara across Niger, Mali, Algeria and Mauritania. They are very welcoming and we found ourselves drinking tea with them a lot. The tradition being three small glasses; the first for death, the second for life and the third for love – this is the sweetest!

We were aiming for Tamanrasset, which was the real reason for going all that way. It sits just to the West of the Hoggar mountains and there is some impressive scenery to be explored, including Assekrem, a rival for the Grand Canyon. It is possible to explore the area by camel on a 28 day trek to Djanet over the mountains, though it’s not for the faint hearted. We stayed in the very friendly Campement Toulef just outside Tamanrasset.

As a town I found Tamanrasset had a lot of things to draw; a large market, infrastructure, generous and friendly people, mechanics and jewellery stores. However if it is museums, libraries, historic buildings and other tourists that you are looking for there aren’t very many. Their history is very oral like a lot of Africa’s. So we were really there for the desert, the people, a sense of achievement and the experience. All of which we got.

Our next objective was to get in to Mali…The border areas of Algeria, Niger, Mali and Mauritania are not safe at the moment, as they are home to bandits searching for tourists and selling them on for ransom or to terrorists.

Having left Tamanrasset for Bordj – Mokhtar, we had a stunning drive of 600km with no road, just sand track, through some brilliant desert landscape. We comfortably and quite safely camped out over night. Our guide made Tugula, a type of bread, from semolina and water which was cooked in the sand under the fire, broken into tiny pieces and mixed with our meat sauce.

Timimoun

Having checked in with the friendly Algerian Army in the morning, we arrived in Bordj – Mohktar. Little did we know that four days later we would be doing the same trip in reverse in the early hours of the morning in turbans and boubous for disguise.

The next day we tried to cross the border. We always had a back up plan for crossing between Mali and Algeria. Following the recent spate of kidnappings the plan was to send our tourist-looking vehicles with our two guides who were of no interest to bandits and take another vehicle on the other route to Gao – 900km away. In short, (as you may have read in the Saturday Times,) this plan fell through and it turned out we were the target of a kidnap attempt, which meant we were all too happy to turn around and head for the safety of Tamanrasset. A decision that paid off when our guides took our cars over the border and were stopped and tied up by armed bandits looking for us. Four hours later they were released and continued amazingly with the cars to Gao.

This left us with a scary 600km drive back to Tamanrasset and a decision to make.

Did we now risk the border with Niger, public transport and 2100km detour to Gao or fly to Bamako and wait for the cars and drive up to Timbuktu? Eventually the flight was too tempting. That is one great thing about Tamanrasset: you can get in and out easily to Algers, Niamey, Bamako and the West.

This gives me the opportunity to write about Algers where we waited for our connecting flight to Bamako. As an illustrator it is an impressive city; white buildings with bright blue shutters all in different stages of disrepair. Palm trees and large European influenced buildings are all backed up onto the sea and there’s a commercial port too. Accompanied by a high hill behind it, there’s the usual chaos of public transport and the busy ‘casbah’ market – it is somewhere I could have drawn for a week.

To be fair to Mali and Algeria I should add that this problem of kidnapping is very much local to border areas, where there are vast spaces of unchartered territory and a thousand places to hide. I also believe that it is not vast network of terrorists or even Al Queda as our governments would have us believe. This means that you are not going to be targeted from anywhere with people, so public transport and towns are always safe, as is your hotel or campement.

The only other thing I would say is to read the FCO website, but immediately after to speak to somebody with local knowledge. Understandably the FCO have to err on the side of caution and so have a tendency to blanket areas as ‘no go’ which can be very off putting but is not necessarily a reason not to go to some wonderful areas, as we did, away from the trouble.

For more information about trips to West Africa visit: www.fromhere2timbuktu.com. Guy Lankester has become somewhat of an expert in West Africa and very natural with the locals. It was his contacts that warned us about the kidnap attempt so he is worth speaking to.

I also read a couple of very relevant books on my journey: Dead Aid by Dmabisa Moyo; The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa by Jeremy Keenan; Between Sea & Sahara by Eugene Fromentin.

Globalista is proud to  support illustrator George Butler on his 6 month, 8500km overland adventure through Africa. From 1st January 2010, we’ll be posting on the Travel Journal monthly updates and illustrations of George’s epic journey, as he negotiates his way through the witch towns of Ghana, attends a festival in the desert, meets the BaAka Pygmies in Cameroon and much more. Find out more at www.georgebutler.org

See more of George’s excellent work at: www.georgebutler.org