To Timbuktu for a Haircut

by Rick Antonson

I was a month away from my trip and oblivious to an event that would reshape my travels. Standing in Stanford’s, I flipped further in the guidebook and learned about the “Festival au Desert,” a Tuareg celebration of Malian music, which would take place from January 9 to 11. Tagged as the “most remote festival in the world,” it promised Ali Farka Toure and boasted that Robert Plant had performed there the year before. Well, if Robert Plant could make it, so could I.

  Sitting on the warm bookshop floor on a cold London night, I saw for the first time the name Essakane, the village where the Tuareg would stage their festival. This oasis, with two hundred inhabitants, was in the Sahara Desert, sixty-five kilometres northwest of Timbuktu. Should I rearrange my dream trip of trekking in the Dogon Country, then routing back to Mopti and making slow travel by the River Niger to Timbuktu? If I travelled to Timbuktu by road, I could arrive earlier and go to the festival. But no, the approach to Timbuktu should be arduous, earned.

  I bought The Rough Guide to West Africa and began making plans for passing those unwanted days in Dakar before the Wednesday train departed, if it departed.

  By the third week of December, my efforts were being stymied by not wanting too much structure. My Mali connection, Mohammed, promoted the Festival au Desert in a reply e-mail and proposed an itinerary that would get me to Timbuktu a week earlier, and by land rather than by river. The delayed train departure from Dakar cramped my schedule further. I would not get to Bamako on time, and I was faced with abandoning my original route. My explanation of that conundrum frustrated Mohammed. His latest began huffily, “We are not sure exactly what you want from this trip.”

  I could see his point.

  But Mohammed’s efforts, which I had solicited, veered toward more control than I liked. He intended to be in Bamako the week I arrived. If neither of the two (perhaps mythical) trains ran there from Dakar, I’d take a bus across Senegal or fly from Dakar to somewhere in Mali. My decision to leave such arrangements until I was in Africa increased Mohammed’s frustration. Finally, his impatience showed: “We suggest we meet you in Bamako the day after you arrive and plan out your journey to Timbuktu.” He offered to inform the Wawa Hotel, a place I could not find referenced in any guidebook, that I would show up at the hotel that week on an unknown day.

  I accepted his offer. At this stage, my confidence in Mohammed was high (which gave it room to slip, and room it would need).

  The most consistent advice I had received was to have a guide and prearranged driver for overland travel in either direction between Bamako and Timbuktu. Guidebooks and history persuaded me to include the River Niger and Le Pays Dogon in my trip. Mohammed repeatedly urged venturing to the once-famous trading centre of Gao, a settlement in the remarkable beauty of river and desert, as well as other places he said were of interest to tourists. I declined them all. He relented.

  Within each of us are character traits that grow with risk. I sensed my risk was shifting from that of a quest to that of trusting this man. I considered scuttling his role, which in fact I’d sought. But having someone local was my linchpin of safety. I committed to wiring him money.

  Unwrapped Christmas presents were strewn about our mountain cabin the days before I left North America. Most were intended to be useful to me in my quest: our nation’s flag in pins and ironons; L’Alchemist for my French reading on the trip, as it tells of the traveller’s search and finding; a Leatherman knife-tool that could fix, cut, or prod most anything living or mechanical. And, from son Brent, a rare copy of Brian Gardner’s book The Quest for Timbuktu, my most informative history lesson. From Janice, Hemingway in Africa by Christopher Ondaatje. It occurred to me that perhaps one could read these books and avoid the pending turmoil of the journey, but I brushed away the unworthy thought.

  There was, as well, a French-language map of Mali. Although I’d thought an English-language map would be better, or at least comprehensible to me, this gift was inspired. Few Malians would have been able to point me the right way on an English map.

  Another gift was a pocket watch that clamped shut to keep out the sand. I have not worn a watch for thirty years, having once been late and missed a departing airplane that crashed. Time seemed to move along fine without having me watch it. Despite that, I packed the timepiece when my family suggested that this was about safety; sometimes catching transportation does rely on punctuality.

  A friend, his wisdom anchored in his family’s exile from Uganda, offered advice in a noisy pub just before I departed: “For each of us there are two destinies.” I swallowed the remnants of my beer while his mug remained full; I listened. “One is the destiny you pursue,” said Abdullah, finally taking a drink. “The other is the destiny that pursues you.”

  At that point in my life, there was no more fitting symbol for travel destiny than Timbuktu. It spoke of “beyond,” of “difference,” and “silence.” Abraham Cresques’s 1373 map of West Africa made the first delineation of Timbuktu. Since then, Timbuktu has meant “can’t get there” to Westerners, and every traveller dreams of having been to such a place.

  I was fully aware that my personal quest paled in comparison with those who had gone before and with notable contemporaries who explored uncharted caverns, climbed unnamed mountains, and engaged in peculiar escapades of discovery. I admired those who did that; respected their skills, fortitude, and stick-to-itiveness. My journey had a clear motive: the betterment of self and the topographical freedom that Timbuktu implied. And I was realistic. As one journalist had recently written, “It takes a lot of effort to get to Timbuktu.”

  On a snowy New Year’s Eve in Vancouver, in a convenience store displaying a half-burned-out Western Union sign, I wired Mohammed the promised payment. I was prepared for Bambara and French, but not for that store owner’s Cantonese. He declined my credit card and wanted cash. I fought the crowds escaping the closing of a nearby shopping mall to find a bank machine and obtained the funds. But my pre-trip ordeal was not yet over. In his first efforts as a Western Union franchisee, the clerk managed to send my payment to Bulgaria. After taking half an hour to reverse this transaction, he succeeded in getting it to Mali. The money was sent simply to a name in a land. Mohammed (last name), Mali. That was it. A peculiar trust. At eight o’clock I headed home in the freezing dark to a cooling dinner and an even cooler Janice. Understandably, her patience was near an end.

  I was ready to go to Timbuktu the next day, a little afraid and tremendously excited. That night I prayed. “God, just don’t lose track of me.”

  Mohammed’s wife said of the Dakar-Bamako trains that they are “certain to be sadder than any train I’ve been on.”

  TWO

  The Origin of Myths

  BOARDING THE FIRST-CLASS COACH OF THE EXPRESS International in Dakar in the afternoon heat was complicated by a boarding platform of rocks, divots, and garbage. The task was made even more difficult by the fact that the cars were not numbered. The train was coloured the green of a grocery store awning last washed in the 1970s. It would carry me east to Bamako, Mali, where I’d make arrangements for travel to Timbuktu. My coach was close to the diesel engine, nearer the fumes but with a smoother ride than the trailing coaches. The cement walkway of potholes and skips ended well before it reached the highest-priced coaches. From there it was strewn with rubble for three more lengths, after which I found a vaguely identifiable attendant dressed in everyday clothes. He seemed as surprised to be proffered my ticket as I was to learn that he was in charge.

  “Un billet?” he demanded, staring at me suspiciously.

  “Here, try this,” I said, thrusting my ticket papers his way.

  “Oui.Quatre,” he said. And I climbed aboard in search of my berth.

  I edged down a narrow corridor filled with people. Roomette (a loose use of the term) “Four” had been replaced with its alphabet counterpart, “D,” lettered in dribbled paint.

  Nudged aside by a family hustling off the train before it departed, I entered my roomette to face a blunt man, blac
k muscles bursting his black shirt. He seemed twice my size and half my age. He pointed to the lower berths to indicate they were both taken. He was intrusive; he had simply got here first. I resented him immediately. Eyes locked, neither of us moved. I thought, okay, I’m about to be flattened.

  “Then help lift my bag,” I groaned, stabbing it with a finger and swinging my head to indicate the two top bunks that were now mine.

  He hoisted it atop all by himself, smiled, shook hands as a victor would, and introduced himself as Ebou. His Dakar friend, the custodian of the other low berth, poked in and grinned with a handsome mouthful of teeth. “Ussegnou,” he said by way of self-introduction. He was bigger and blacker than Ebou, and his face glistened in an easy sweat.

  The train jerked, throwing the three of us together. The six hundred pounds of us could barely turn around in our roomette. My journey jostled to a start.

  I was 2,123 kilometres from Timbuktu.

  It was my good fortune to be on the train at all. Only the Saturday train existed! At least this week.

  Arriving in Dakar near 11:30 the previous night, I fumbled my way through customs, past beggars, all the while shying away from loud offers of “taxi” in order to find a rickety bus, more rust than paint, that promised to drop me at the Sofitel Dakar Teranga hotel.

  I asked a fellow standing nearby, “Does a train run from Dakar to Bamako?”

  He shook his head. Then, in a language I’d never heard, he spoke to a dishevelled man leaning against a lamppost with no lamp. The man’s answer sounded pleasant but emphatic. “He says maybe Wednesday. Me, I don’t think there’s a train anymore.”

  The bus bumped from airport brightness onto craggy pavement and spotty streets on its run to downtown. It stopped at a poorly lit entrance to let off two passengers, leaving me alone on the vehicle. Fifteen minutes later it wound into the driveway of my hotel.

  After checking in, the question still nagged. “Is there a train to Bamako?” I asked the frumpy hotel desk clerk, a young woman who was more smiles than help. We duelled in English and French. Something I said in French was a laugh line, and she swung around in her chair, straightened to an attractive pose, and spoke in a third language to a giant man behind the counter. He shook his head, not seeing the humour.

  Then, he reconsidered, scratching his grey temple. “Yes. I think there is a train.” He was the hotel’s night manager, and maybe he wanted the train to run as much as I did. His left hand slowly dropped from his forehead and scrunched his mouth and chin into an indecisive frown. “But she says no.” His head twisted to face the telephone operator, who had overheard my question.

  “There used to be a Saturday train,” he said. “Go to the station in the morning and find out.” With that he turned and walked to the other end of the counter.

  A currency machine accepted my VISA card and disgorged sufficient seffe that I no longer felt the peculiar vulnerability that comes from carrying only U.S. dollars in a foreign country. I downed a Senegalese beer, stuffed some West African currency in my pocket, and headed to bed.

  Even my jet lag–addled sleep could not dull the sense of immediacy I had upon waking the next morning. Leaving behind an unmade bed and a large pack stuffed in my room, I strolled out of the hotel lobby holding a styrofoam cup of coffee with powdered milk and a teetering lid, and carrying my small day pack. My goal: train station at sunrise. My prayer: that there was a Saturday train. My sub-prayer: that it didn’t leave at sunrise.

  I was learning local names and trying my tongue with them. Tannis was a huffy porter helping as the doorman. He whistled for a taxi. Getting in, I uttered one of the few French phrases I was confident about, clearly directing to Le Gare de Dakar. The driver looked puzzled, but nevertheless delivered me to a place he didn’t believe I needed to go. The streets were deserted all but for the coffee vendors setting up their stalls and the morning bread merchants on bicycles. Ten minutes from the hotel we swept in front of a shabby building, once proud, and perhaps once a landmark. It looked unused. I could only conclude that this was the train station.

  “Train?” I asked, paying the driver.

  “Non,” he replied, pocketing my money.

  Under the trio of high arches, the dank station’s iron gates were open. I walked beneath the Arrivée sign, where a solitary woman and her mop played at the concrete floor. The building’s foyer felt as old as the railway’s first arrivals, who had come in 1923 from the then colony of French Sudan and its capital, Bamako. At the far end of the room, a dowdy man sat on a stool, his face against a window, speaking to a man behind it. I walked toward them through stale air and saw a handwritten departure schedule taped to the window frame, through which they kept talking. There was no glass. Both old men wore threadbare clothes. Mr. Gitta. Mr. Sarr.

  I sputtered my questions about Dakar to Bamako, first in French then in English as though to reassure myself, since they just kept nodding. In this franglais, I was hearing and confirming.

  “Train ticket?”

  Nod.

  “Train today?”

  Nod.

  “Train ticket? Single? Bamako? Sleeping Car? Today?”

  Nods.

  “Aujourd’hui?” I tapped at the counter to ensure I was not creating a problem through wishful thinking. Emphatic tap again. “Aujourd’hui!”

  Mr. Sarr slipped off his chair and leaned a finger to the handscrawled schedule. The paper was scruffy and looked tentative. “Yes. Today,” he said in English.

  It was true. Saturday. 1:50 p.m. Dakar, Senegal to Bamako, Mali. Thirty-five hours. I exclaimed in delight. They snickered at my giddiness.

  A few hours later, diesel fumes filled the air as we lurched along the route first begun in 1907, more than 1,200 kilometres away, near Bamako, after years of political deliberation. We were moving in discomfort, but I welcomed this after spending two hours standing in line with hundreds of Senegalese and Malians, all of whom were barred from the shade of the station until shortly before departure. It is a wonder to me that a train of fourteen coaches, carrying that many people, could be kept a secret. The factor at work here was irregularity, the on-again, off-again unreliability. Would it run next Saturday? Who knew?

  “Ebou,” stressed the keeper of the lower bunk after I mispronounced his name. His mellow voice reverberated in our small chamber, and I got his name right the second time. Ebou was a walrus of a man. His head barely fit the Boston Red Sox cap he wore. His smile was so broad it seemed like an extra row of teeth. As the train bunted underway, he grinned at my large pack, which I’d crammed onto one of the top bunks. I’d sleep on the other one.

  Ussegnou was a quiet man with a slow smirk that morphed into a grin; he had a cautious enjoyment of all things. His eventual laugh showed a pink tongue. It was difficult to gauge where his forehead gave way to the baubles of hair; his scalp was a melding of darks. His baggy shirt hid the amount of room he required.

  The three of us, each at least six feet tall, sized each other up. If our luggage could breathe, there’d be no air left. We realized that we were stuck with each other. Into this crowd came first the hand and then the head of the conductor, jabbing the still air of the upper mattress that held my pack. Beneath his armpit a seventeenyear-old snuck into the roomette.

  “Bonjour,” the young man laughed. “Pierre,” he introduced himself, aware that he’d been thrust into our room against our wishes. Pierre was full of energy and at home in our midst immediately, despite the presence of my bag on his bunk. Ebou and Ussegnou each grabbed an end of my pack, shifted it across the room, and crammed it into the corner of my bed, leaving barely enough room for my bootless feet against the metal ceiling. Pierre sprang from the floor to his berth in an effortless arch, landing seated, his feet dangling to a stop in unison. He was a professional dancer with an African troupe. Between gigs right now, Pierre was on holiday to stay with family near Bamako. He ran his hand through the field of tufts on his scalp and leaned back to the corner of the wall. He bent to moul
d himself against it. A gold chain gleamed around his neck, outside his T-shirt. “Where you from?” he asked in practised English. And our answers flowed as we settled in.

  Grime covered the window, doubly so because the dirty top pane had been pushed down in its sleeve behind the stationary one. We could see more clearly through a jacket than through the eons of smoke encrusted on this double-glazing. From the top half of the window, where I leaned into the slow breeze of the train, I could see the intermingling of people and garbage near the track. Goats ate rubbish, children tossed plastic bottles as toys, women hunched over fires, men peed as they faced the train, their backs to the sign Défense d’Uriner, telling me I was not the first to sense that this could be a health problem. It was their life. This day’s only difference was the ghost train moving among them.

  We aimed for Thiès and from there toward the border between Senegal and Mali.

  Pierre was beside me at the window, upwind, as the train gained speed. Just in time, he turned his head in to ask a question and avoided a faceful of spray. Frequent train travellers call the wispy moisture “The Christening.” Pierre knew it was fizz blown from the front coaches’ flushed toilet. He tightened his lips and grunted.

  In the fourteenth century, before the European Renaissance, Timbuktu was home to Africa’s religious, intellectual, and business elite. Timbuktu, the centre of enlightenment, was attuned to the Africa of its day in a way unlike any European city’s relationship to its continent. The city’s commercial success financed the creation of schools, among them the prestigious Koranic Sankor University, in what is now seen as the culture’s golden age. Up to two hundred thousand people lived at one of history’s great crossroads on the fringe of the Sahara. But today, with the desert’s sands eroding the city, fewer than twenty thousand souls call it home.

  In the beginning, there was salt. For millennia, at various times and places, salt has been a treasured source of power and wealth. Thought to influence both female fertility and male potency, it has long been an important element of religious ceremonies, superstitions, and medicine. Before its preservative qualities saved food on distant journeys or in storage, it was used to stabilize mummies. Whether derived from brine or hard salt, its ownership has brought prestige, prompted wars, and provided tax revenues. Salt coins have even been used as currency. But, while the uses and supply of salt are plentiful, its locations and availability were not always so, thus its disproportionate value until a century ago.