It was a hot day in the dusty port town of Mopti, Mali. My travel buddy and I were tired of the rickety Catholic Mission hostel and eager to head to Timbuktu. So we went down to the Bozo bar, where the touts are as thick as the flies, and started to negotiate a boat trip. We were experienced travelers on top of our game. So we bargained hard. For hours. There were tears, there was yelling, there were appeals to god, and finally there was a ticket for a “3 day tourist boat to Timbuktu with fish to eat at night and omelettes and coffee in the morning.” I think the tickets cost us forty dollars, which is a lot of money but not crazy money.
The next day we hauled our stuff and a stash of clean water down to the riverfront. Our boat, they said, was just upstream, and we’d take this small cargo canoe there. At this point we pretty much knew something was up, but we had worked so hard to get on the boat and didn’t really have anything better to do. So we settled down on some large bags of rice. At the last minute we bought a bag of baguettes from a child wading past. this became our food for the entire ordeal.
For three days we sat on that boat, inching up the Niger. It was too shallow and our boat was too heavy, and so we ended up stuck nearly every hour, often having to round up canoes from nearby villages to take some of the weight off. The boat owners also were selling rice and goods to the tiny river villages. The negotiations could take hours. On the first day we’d gone maybe 10k. We were close to just walking back to town, but I thought the idea of walking through an unknown desert was a bad idea. And we just had no idea what was going on. Nobody gave us the same story, and most people seemed as pissed off and confused as ourselves.
Our company was a fascinating mix of the world’s poorest people. They’d all been scammed, too, though for less money than us. And these poor people had no other money to find a more reasonable way to get where they were going. They were stuck on this boat however long it might take. Despite the number of different languages we all spoke, we all got to know each other very well.
At night we bedded down on the dried mud river banks, sleeping on our prayer scarves. The bathroom was the desert under the stars. People washed up in the muddy parasite infested river. All we had to eat was rancid (and growing rancider) goat meat and oily rice. And all this was cooked by the slave family who was responsible for bailing out the bottom of the boat 24/7. That’s right, slaves. Owned by the boatman. And so we kept drifting.
Finally we hit a town of some size, and my buddy and I bailed. For all I know, those people are still on that damned boat. We managed to catch a ride with a nice Taureg man. When we finally arrived in Timbuktu, hungry and dirty, we sat down at a restaurant. A gaunt British man with haunted looking eyes and a large tattoo that said “Exist.” sat down next to us.
“You’ll never believe what just happened. I was on a boat. The boat…I think I left a piece of my soul on that boat…it was terrible…”
We turned back to our beef and rice, unable to even come up with a way to respond.
