The Well of The Big Navel

So Timbuktu and back again.

We left Mopti last Thursday and headed up to Timbuktu on a cargo boat through - sleeping-on-bags-of-rice-tastic. The journey up through the Niger Delta was incredible, not least because I saw a hippo and Luke didn't, mwah ha ha.

Timbuktu was suitably renote, dusty and Saharan, just like it should be. And, as we'd figured, there wasn't a fat lot to do there. Spent just under thirty six hours tehre before slowly winding back along dirt tracks towards civilisation.

Mosques or Donkeys?

Luke's misguided. He thinks that when you're at one of those 'places to see before you die'-type places you're supposed to take photos of them and not the nearby donkeys. T'uh. You and I both know that there's no need photos of stuff like that, but donkeys... Photo gold.

So yeah, we're heading north. We've passed Djenne and seen that there 'places to see before you die'-type mud mosque. It's big and muddy and mosque-y and looks quite a lot like it does in the photos.

The road into Djenne was ace, each of the tiny, tiny settlements had their own small mud mosque which shouldn't really be a surprise, but it was.

Am in Mopti now. It's a port town, so is everything you expect it to be.

Country Number Sixty

"No, you don't need one."

"It's not a question of needing one, it would just be nice to have."

"But what would you do with it?"

"I don't know, ward off evil?"

I didn't buy the monkey head. Luke was right, I didn't know what I'd do with it and besides, in this heat it would start smelling pretty quickly.

Still, I'm in Bamako, where the streets are paved with cardboard, where As qre in q different plqce on the keyboqrd and where everyone wants to sell you drums.

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Apologies if you've sent me an email, I can't seem to access my account.

The Road Less Cliche

Apparently a Mali-Burkina Faso double header is an unusual choice of holiday. Still, I've got my reasons, none that make sense, but my reasons nonetheless.

Turns out I'm going to Bamako about four days too late. Luke was there for Eid and by all accounts it was somewhat of a hoot. He got involved in a ritual slaughter and spent the evening gorging himself on sheep brains and dancing around wearing nothing but sheep blood.

I've made some, or all, of that up but let's not let the truth get in the way of a good yarn - Bamako sounds bonkers and as far as I can tell, is as good a place to start the trip as I could possibly hope for.

I'm pretty stoked.

Right see you all in a couple of weeks. Lukey, I'm coming to get you...

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If you want to know what really happened to Luke try: http://www.travelpod.com/members/phileasfarx

Let's be honest, if you want to know what I'm up to over the next couple of weeks you should probably following Luke's blog rather than mine. I'm just going to smear inchoate whimsy over the internet, whereas Luke's more thorough, more sensible - or at least he was before he turned into a sheep-killing psychopath.