To Timbuktu for a Haircut

by Rick Antonson

  So began my own feeble notions of travel. With the irrefutable logic of a child, I understood that one day I, too, must go to Timbuktu and get my hair cut. After all, how far could it be?

  Fifty years later, a world away, I walked a path among mud homes as old as time, baked by a dry heat that choked my breathing. It was impossible to tell the sand from the dust unless you stood on it. A young boy was setting up a chair with a missing leg in front of his parents’ house. Sand piled by the doorway, nudged there by desert winds that pushed relentlessly through these village streets. His left foot suddenly slipped over the edge of the path’s centre ditch. The slip almost caused him to fall into the shallow sewer. He noticed me as he regained his balance, and I stopped and looked into his eyes. We were only a metre apart. The youngster, maybe five years old, stared down my greeting. His eyes widened in a glare of determination. He crossed his dusty arms and clasped each defiant shoulder with a scraped hand. Sand and drool encrusted his lips in loose granules. The rose colour of his tongue showed and he did not smile. I felt like the first white man he’d ever seen, and not a welcome visitor. His face proclaimed his proud independence. He knew that whatever had lured me to travel there was hollow. But he did not know that I was looking for a shop where I could get my hair cut.

  It was my wife’s idea. I had time available for being away the coming January, all of it, and Janice didn’t. For half a year we’d talked about my taking a solo journey. But her interest began to fade when the topic of “What I’ll do” reared its head. We were in Prague to hear the International Olympic Committee’s decision naming the host destination for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. My colleagues and I had launched Canada’s Vancouver-Whistler bid six years earlier and were now part of the Canadian delegation. Janice and I arrived in the Czech Republic two days in advance, near midnight. In search of a late dinner, we walked on the cobblestones of the Charles Bridge, looking into the dark waters that flowed beneath. The roadway led us to an open but near-empty restaurant, where our lives were unexpectedly changed within minutes. While waiting for our grilled chicken over pasta we talked about the bid and then anything but the bid.

  My wont at such times was to compile a mental list of projects I could accomplish within a month. Friends had suggested everything from a long walk to a short sailing voyage; my family advised a month’s vow of silence in a Tibetan monastery. It must change you, people said; you’ll come back better for the time away. Whatever you do, don’t stay home and do chores.

  Our wine arrived before the meal, and without any preamble, I said to Janice, somewhat desperately, “It’s only six months away. I’ve got to pick something to do and start getting ready!”

  Her eyes clouded. A pause stilled the air. Exasperated, she finally said across the table: “Why don’t you just go to Timbuktu.”

  Stunned by the perfection of her suggestion, my head jerked. I could feel my lungs fill with oxygen. “Brilliant,” I said. My heart took stag leaps. “Absolutely brilliant.” We looked at one another. Janice sipped her red wine, unsure of what she had wrought.

  “I’m going to Timbuktu,” I committed, so profound was the image. “Just as soon as I find out where it is.”

  Touch a map of the world. Move your hand to Africa. Press a finger to unfamiliar West African names like Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso. Look north, above Ouagadougou, to the nation of Mali, and there, near the River Niger, find the most ethereal of names, Timbuktu.

  It is easier to point out countries of terror and despair, of dictators and abusers. The facts of sub-Saharan Africa are awful, the past mired in exaggerations, the future one of faint hope. Perhaps we understand Africa only marginally better than those who, in the not too distant past, hid their geographic ignorance by filling in the uncharted voids on their maps with sketches of fantastic monsters.

  To exploration-mad societies like France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Timbuktu lay at the unknown edges of cartography. Its sheer unassailability challenged even their most intrepid travellers. It acquired such an aura that even today many people believe Timbuktu is fictitious. It is assuredly not.

  Our globe’s most exotically named travel destination is rooted in the language of Berber, though it has been distorted to the point that only myth explains its genesis. I’ve found it commonly written as Timbuctoo, Tombooctoo or Tombuctou, Tombouktou, and less often Tumbyktu, Tembuch, Tombuto, Timkitoo or Tambuta, as well as the word used here: Timbuktu. The most frequently used label is the French, Tombouctou, which one finds on Mali maps and postcards.

  In Tuareg folklore, the place began with an old woman who looked after the nomads’ well when the men went trading or hunting. Tuareg Imashagan, desert people, first set camp in Timbuktu around A.D. 1000. Their well, tin in Berber lingo, provided water that was free of the illnesses they contracted nearer the River Niger, where they grazed camels and cattle on the burgo grass, and it became their preferred spot. As summer annually gave way to autumn’s temperate rains, these nomads moved on and left their goods in care of the old woman, commonly referred to as Bouctou, which translates as “woman with the large navel.” It was her well, and thus her name, that became renowned. The linking of proprietress and place formed “TinBouctou.” Timbuktu, one of the world’s finest names, is “the well of the lady with the big belly button.”

  Africa in 1829, prepared by the cartographer Sidney Hall, working from geographical information available to Europeans at that time, which demonstrates how limited knowledge was regarding the continent.

  ONE

  Scarcely Visited Places

  DEREK, A FELLOW I’D ONCE WORKED WITH, serendipitously showed up at the office two months before my intended departure. Our talk turned quickly to his travels in West Africa three years earlier.

  “Were you in Mali?” I asked.

  “Yes, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal.”

  “Did you go to Timbuktu?” I probed immediately, already sensing that my travels to Africa, even maybe Timbuktu, might lose the novelty I coveted.

  “No. It’s inconvenient, and in West Africa that means expensive travel.”

  Derek, with the shaggy locks of a part-time drummer hanging to his collar, and his fellow traveller, Chris, short, entrepreneurial, invigorating, agreed to meet me later at the pub and share their photos and travel savvy.

  “Chris was mugged,” Derek said before the beer arrived.

  “Lost my money,” Chris added, shifting off a suit jacket. “It’s a good idea to carry an old wallet filled with cards you don’t need and a little currency. Give it up right away. The robber will leave.”

  “And what if you’re mugged a second time?” I asked.

  “That’d be a problem.”

  “Moneybelt’s best,” said Derek. “And slip your leg through the pack strap when you sleep. Take postal tape so you can wrap your parcel if you leave anything in a safety deposit box — it’s the hotel staff that steal. Take your own lock for the room doors.”

  Derek took a long pull on the beer as soon as it was set before us and honed his stare directly into mine. “West Africa is a place to keep one eye open when you sleep.”

  I gave him a long wink to demonstrate my understanding.

  “But Burkina Faso was wonderful. Felt welcome,” said Derek.

  Chris countered. “I’d say the Dogon was the most special. Never felt in danger.” I’d read of this area only recently, its astonishing history and two-hundred-kilometre stone escarpment, and worked it into my rough itinerary.

  Noticing my enthusiasm, Derek cautioned: “Travels in Mali, however romanticized, are rugged.”

  When they urged me to spend a day at the Slave Trade Fort in Dakar, I finally made a formal declaration that my trip was about Mali.

  “Mali is one of the world’s throwaway countries,” Derek declared. “Ignored. It’s like Mali gets second seating at UN banquets.”

  “But,” said Chris, harking back to Dakar, “you will be in Senegal, right?” I nodded. He continu
ed: “Once, there was a train running from Dakar to Bamako. Doesn’t run anymore.”

  My heart sank. My silence remaining unexplained, they jumped to provide another advisory.

  “They may have a smattering of English,” Chris observed. “I hope your French is good. Be prepared, theirs is different. Doesn’t sound like ours.”

  Mali is a francophone country. The guidebooks were emphatic that knowledge of French is essential, especially in the remote regions. Derek said, “Often in Mali, the people don’t speak either French or English. The country has more than thirty indigenous languages. All you need to do is learn Bambara, or Bamana, the most common one.” He grinned wickedly.

  For anyone who travels, not to have a second language is a social hangnail. Now it would prove even more problematic. Pursing my lips for vowels and gurgling consonants unsettled me, but I did not want to be a unilingual wanderer among “uneducated” people who were nevertheless conversant in four languages. I must brush up on my high school French.

  “Pack small,” advised the already compact Chris. It was a comment that led Derek to say, “Take breathable pants. And polypro sox. Shirts, too. You’re going to be a sweaty bastard, and you’ll want that damp off.”

  “And Malian officials check your passport and your yellow fever certificate with equal interest,” warned Chris. “Lacking either means denied entry.”

  I jotted everything down. “What did you wish you’d taken?”

  “Well, we were better prepared than that Scot,” began Chris.

  “Park … something Park,” said Derek, finding it funny. “About two hundred years ago.”

  “Mungo Park,” I said. The irascible Scot was much on my mind: explorer extraordinaire, he twice failed to reach Timbuktu.

  “That’s him. Provisioned with beads to barter, a thermometer and an umbrella,” claimed Derek.

  “And the other Scot, the British major,” prodded Chris. “A bit odd, too.”

  “Laing?” I asked, knowing it must be. Many British explorers attempted to find Timbuktu in the early nineteenth century, but he stood out. “Alexander Gordon Laing?”

  “That’s him,” Chris replied. “Prepped for a year and left England without his medicine chest or writing quills.” They both looked at me. “You know these guys?”

  The months since I’d returned from Prague had been consumed with research. Park, Laing, and a host of others had become intimates, but I’ll get to that. “Now, you two — what did you forget to take?”

  “Safety pins. Ziploc bag to keep my passport dry. A Petzl,” Derek said, mimicking the forehead lamp that coal miners wear for the convenience of keeping their hands free while having a flashlight that moves wherever their head looks.

  “Food is iffy,” said Chris. “Take pâté in a can, maybe Tabasco to liven up the rice. And powdered spices. They’re easy to pack.”

  “Ah, and a large towel. I’d have loved that,” Derek added.

  They launched me on repeated trips to Mountain Equipment Co-op, Three Vets outlets, and The Travel Bug Store. Their most instructive talk was about attitude: “You get by, you just do. It all works out.”

  We each have horizons. I had to ask, “Weren’t you tempted to try to reach Timbuktu?”

  “It seemed impossible,” Chris said, as though offering a business evaluation.

  “Just too far from everything else,” Derek explained.

  I heaved a sigh of relief. My dream was safe.

  It was true, I had little idea where Timbuktu was. Janice and I left Prague two days after her late-night admonition. Flying home to Vancouver, still leery of thwarting the travel gods by discussing my newfound destiny, I searched the in-flight magazine’s map of the world. No Timbuktu there. Transiting Heathrow homebound, I ducked into a W.H. Smith bookstore. No Guide to Timbuktu there. Perhaps an atlas would help. The index got me to a page showing West Africa. I found Timbuktu, Mali. Mali? Africa, in that part of the continent, was often still referred to as French West Africa. Post-colonial name changes had translated French Sudan to Mali. This had occurred ten years after I was born; I just wasn’t paying attention.

  Entering “Timbuktu” into the bookstore’s computer identified fewer than a dozen books, most of them out of print. Some had the word in the title but no relevance to the place; an eye-catching marketing game, a dog’s name, a fictional concept, and other misuses hampered my search. I purchased the Lonely Planet Guide to West Africa and fondled the pages referring to the elusive country of Mali. There I found a useful reference to a once-central place reduced to a geographic curiosity.

  Back home, I scoured my bookshelves, pulling out every book on Africa and thumbing its index. They showed my now-favourite place in an unfavourable light, unworthy of the hard travel it would take to get there. But it was there, it had once been grander than words could tell, and it seemed to say, “Find me if you can.”

  Timbuktu would be dismissed today if it weren’t for the symbolism of its name. In the fourteenth century, the fabled city was a commercial hub that encouraged scientific and religious scholarship above all else. The cribbed history: salt from the north was traded for gold from the south; tobacco came too, then slaves. Timbuktu was the “Rome of the Sudan” and the “Athens of Africa,” more prosperous in its heyday than Paris or London. Then began the myths of “streets paved with gold,” the cornerstone of a legend that European explorers would one day lay bare. No sense of that legendary past remains in time-worn Timbuktu.

  Travelling to Timbuktu had become my obsession. When one’s work commands sixty hours every week, there is an imbalance apparent to all but the culprit. Henry David Thoreau, pondering this issue in Life Without Principle, piqued my guilt: “There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.” It had become “the job that ate my life.” That was not how I wished to see myself, not how I yearned to grow old. Every day seemed to be about other people, and I wanted to leave that behind, even if only temporarily.

  Flying a hundred thousand kilometres each year for two decades, travel for me meant air, not ground. A term as chair of an international travel association doubled those travels from Bali to Liverpool, from Quebec City to Sydney. I often gave speeches about the world of travel, and moved in a style distanced from the rigours of a traveller’s self-reliance. My visits were hurried and tinged with regret. My memories were trifling. In Cuba to deliver a lecture on travel, I was greeted by a crawling Mercedes and an English professor as guide each time I stepped outside Havana’s National Hotel. That could only distort my expectations. Checking into the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel to chair a travel conference, I was shown to the five-hundred-square-metre President’s Suite. Travelling in this way skews priorities and shaves principles. I watched harried colleagues become “oft travelled” rather than “well travelled.” For all my moving around, I was a travel amateur.

  Trips had begun to blur, which saddened me. When trips move quickly — a hazard when many are adjuncts to business obligations — one anticipated the fun of reflecting almost as much as the being there (something sad in that line, but let it be). Postponed reflection left many a trip taken without closure. What had happened to the tingly feelings that had once been brought on by strange places? And the insecurities? And anxieties? What would I amount to — a transient with an asterisk?

  I dreaded the thought of an unfinished life. What was more, it had been too long since I’d trudged up mountains in Nepal, snorkeled with fairy penguins in the Galapagos, driven a dogsled in the Yukon, or ridden horseback with a herdsman to his village in Mongolia. My train travels, which had happily included the hardships of the Trans-Siberian railway, were now as easy as a recent, smooth Amtrak ride from New York to San Francisco. Yet I was convinced that in one’s rocking-chair years, travels will count as much as friends, only a little less than family and much more than money.

  Being past mid-ocean in my life’s crossing, I felt there was only a limited time left to do what I wanted
. Ernest Hemingway wrote, “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and because it takes a man’s life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.” You die with regrets, not from them. Others might brood in your nursing-home years, but I would not. Timbuktu and the re-education of a traveller had begun.

  On the History Channel’s web page I came upon a link to the feature “Threats to the Survival of Timbuktu.” The most precious legacy of Timbuktu, it said, was the city’s centuries-old manuscripts, which were under threat. “In closets and chests throughout the southern Sahara, thousands of books from Timbuktu’s ancient libraries are hidden, their disintegration delayed by the dry desert air yet threatened by insects and the annual humidity of rainy seasons.”

  Their words became dust, their pages crumbled, and their bindings turned to powder. Finding out about these manuscripts set my pace and became a motivation for my journey. My itinerary now included researching the perilous state of these books and manuscripts, and the efforts underway to protect them. My journey now had the aura of a treasure hunt.

  I decided to go in search of the Timbuktu manuscripts.

  The wanderer in me was ready, brimming with anticipation. Paul Theroux’s Sunrise with Seamonsters said it well: “It is a ridiculous conceit to think that this enormous world has been exhausted of interest. There are still scarcely visited places and there are exhilarating ways of reaching them … It is every traveller’s wish to see his route as pure, unique and impossible for anyone else to recover … The going is still good.” That was me and Timbuktu.