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“Hey guys” shouted Matt Kerr, “I think that might have been the border back there” as we sped across a bridge. Cyr and I couldn’t hear what he said, since we were in the back seat of the truck, so we just ignored him. Just after the bridge we stopped, the driver got out, and ran to a control point and we were not to follow. Matt said “are you sure that wasn’t the border?” “No way man, you don’t just go driving through borders accidentally. Trust us, you’ll know when we hit the border” we said.

Sure enough, we continued on for a while and hit what looked like a border and it seemed we’d be there for a while. There was some customs work that needed to be done on the Toyota Hilux we bought a ride in and paperwork in Africa is not taken lightly. It was shipped from Europe to Dakar with the intention of selling it in Mali for a profit. While we waited, we helped Frenchman with a DVD player he had just installed in his Mercedes. He was very thankful and after chatting a bit with him Andrew asked if this was the border. “No” was the reply. “The border was several kilometers the way you came. You are in Mali now”.

Fantastic, we’d crossed the border illegally and were now stuck in no man’s land for the second time on the trip. We were already pushing our luck since two of us (not me) didn’t have visas and hoped to get them on the border. Not having an exit stamp from Senegal was not going to make that any easier. We also didn’t relish the idea of going back to Senegal and begging for forgiveness. They probably had a warrant out for our arrest. That too, would be less than pleasant.

Our new French friend offered to help us since we helped him get his DVD player running and back we went into what could only be a bad situation. It felt like going to the dentist office. The best you can hope for is that nothing terribly horrible will happen to you and so it was here, it felt like we were already on our way to jail. We rode to the border outpost and prepared ourselves for another onslaught. Sure enough, after the formalities were done, one of the guards lost his cool and from what I picked up in French, he was not happy. Our new friend did a fantastic job sticking up for us and gave the guard a full on tongue lashing, but alas we were sent to the police station to have a “word” with the head honcho. I focused on the bright side and figured that by spending a night or two in jail we’d have no problems keeping on budget.

So there they were intently playing Scrabble and not too interested in breaking it up to deal with us. One of them finally moved into the office and we told them only that we needed to fill out the exit paperwork. He moved agonizingly slowly and I new that things would get much more complicated if the border guard decided to make an appearance…which of course he did. We were almost done with the paperwork when up pulls our buddy the border guard and starts making his way into the office. I positioned myself so that I could clearly see the border guard getting closer and the police commandant filling the paperwork. Just as the guard made it to the steps the commandant lifted the stamp and hovered it over the passports. “Come on, come on! Stamp damned passports for the love of god!” I screamed internally. But no, his hovering cost us the battle and the guard was happy to interrupt the process. So very, very close to freedom!

We had some explaining to do and after some apologies they let us through. At this point we figured out where the Senegal border was and we concluded that we’d better start working on the whole Mali thing pronto. By now it was dark and we’d been at the border for hours. We walked down the road and found someone who looked official. He asked us right away if we had visas, we said we needed two. “Ah” he said merrily, “that is an infraction”. Now Matt was very scared that he’d be rejected at the border and have to repeat the trip we’d just done (more on that later). He doesn’t know French, but he did pick up on the word infraction. I assured him that everything was alright, but he certainly didn’t believe me. In fact he was almost panicked. As expected we got around the infraction by a judicious use of cash. The guard was good natured about it and Andrew and I expected it, so it wasn’t a big deal.

Fourteen hours earlier we left Dakar at night after striking a deal with some guys in a truck stop. We were told to meet them there with roughly 20,000 cfa each and they’d take us all the way to Bamako. We handed over the cash and instead of hopping into a truck they loaded us into a 4×4 Toyota, things were looking good. We shot into the busy streets of Dakar, hit traffic, and before long it was dark. I never asked, but I don’t think I was the only who wondered if we were really headed to Mali.

Matt had had a long trip to Dakar and the jet lag helped him fall asleep in the front seat. Not far from the out skirts of Dakar the tarmac turned not to dirt, but more like to a crater field. It was so rough our heads regularly hit the truck’s ceiling, while wearing our seat belts. Many painful hours later we pulled into a dirt lot in a town full of people for some rest. Looking back the scene reminds me of pictures I’d seen of Mogadishu. I was concerned for my safety, but I was so beat up and tired I got out of the car and draped myself over the fully loaded truck bed. Though engines, tires, and the like normally don’t make for comfortable sleeping, I was out of commission in seconds.

It wasn’t long until I was rattled awake by the driver and we were back on the god forsaken road. 14 hours into the trip the sun was coming up, revealing a dirt two track next to the paved road. I looked at it enviously, and we finally turned on to it finding it just as glorious as I expected. Suddenly we were passing cows, 7-foot tall termite mounds, all the while racing down a dirt track – everything that makes Africa … well, Africa.

I thought we had it bad, but then we started passing the buses we considered taking from Dakar. It should suffice it to say that, of the many we passed, none were operational any longer. At one of stops Matt got out and I said “hey Matt, why the hell is your arm bleeding?”. He responded, “oh I was resting my head on my arm when I fell asleep last night “. How he slept through that ride is a mystery and how he slept while his head bashed a hole in his arm is even more confounding.

We had several more good experiences on our way most of which were the result of pulling over so our driver could nap while we wandered around meeting folks and we did eventually make it to Bamako and no, our driver did not take us there. Instead he kindly dropped us off at the side of the road and got us a cab for the small ride to the capital of Mali. So my fears were realized, but it could have been worse – much worse.

Getting off the boat in “Korioume” was like getting a stay of execution. We had been taken advantage in every way imaginable. I knew that my imagination didn’t match those of the river rats when it came to taking advantage of a situation. That left me with several days to ponder what was next, I wasn’t expecting Colombian neck ties or physical harm of any kind, but I thought that opportunities would arise and we would suffer for them. When we got to “Korioume” I was confused that we really didn’t have any real problems.

One of the boat boys led us to auberge and told us to stay there. We said “no”. We are going to catch a ride to Timbuktu. “No, no” said our little friend. “No one is going to Timbuktu tonight and this is the only place in town”. We’d heard that before, but we asked the price before we walked away. “yes, yes, you come with me” said the hotel clerk, we were standing out in a road of sand. “No, no, you tell us the price”, said one of us. “No, you come with me” answered our hotel clerk. We said “no”, some choice curse words, and then walked away listening to their shouts telling us there was nothing else. Obviously there was another Auberge, otherwise they would let us get sick of searching and come back. Of course that was after our boat boy wouldn’t turn loose our hand-woven reed mats that we were forced to buy for the boat trip, but hey, we didn’t want to carry them around anyway.

We did find one other Auberge, but they also would not give us the price. Being the obstinate bullheads that we were, we decided we would sleep outside on the shores of the river. Matt suggested we try to walk or hitchhike to Timbuktu, it was only around 20 km after all and it was night, a perfect time to be in the desert. It seemed like a good idea to me, but Andrew was hesitant. We looked for a comfortable place on the shores of the Niger river where we stood a chance of not getting mugged within 15 minutes but of course it didn’t take long for us to get chased off, citing a city ordained “no white people are to not to pay for lodging” ordinance.

We moved on and walked through the edge of town and found something to sit on. Out of the night came a person rolling down the sand shoulder of the road in a wheel chair along with another invalid. “We have a place you can stay, we just have to make sure it is ok with the boss”, said the two, “he will be back soon”. By now it had been dark for quite some time, we didn’t know where we were going, and we couldn’t say what the people looked like that were leading us through the night. We were happy to finally have gotten some hospitality. We walked the short distance and came to an enclosed, mud walled, courtyard and within minutes, the boss arrived. “Yes, you can sleep here on the ground”, said he. He offered us food, but we didn’t take the offer, knowing that any favors you accept result in a vulnerability that might be taken as an advantage. We gave them some of our expensive tea leaves, which for some reason they put into a cup and set it on the ground. Though our hosts didn’t seem to appreciate our tea, but the courtyard goats certainly did. There went a third of our precious gift tea right there.

That night we would get one thing we had not had for a while, we’d have all the room we could stand and not a grain sack in sight. As the old saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In this case we would trade the v-notch between two grain sacks for a mud floor, and not any mud floor, but one that had soaked up the sun of the Sahara for 12 hours prior to taking the weight of our bodies. I lay down and college physics drifted up from the bottom most reaches of my mind. As I lay sweating on one side of my body and chilling on the top side, the words thermal inertia fluttered through my brain like a deranged butterfly.

Before the sweat but after the goat came the matter of paying. “It will be quatre mille (4,000) cfa, to stay here” the boss man said in French after a goat had eaten all the expensive tea leaves we had given them as a present. Andrew looked at me and I said, “yeah ok, 4,000 cfa is a lot but I just want to get this over with”. “Not 4,000″ said Andrew, “quarante mille (40,000) cfa!”. “So he wants us to pay him $100 U.S. to sleep on the mud floor of his patio, with no mattress, no blankets, no bathroom, with the free roaming chickens and goats?”. “Yes” said Andrew. “Well tell him no” I said. Andrew told the man that it was too expensive, too which his reply was “well this is an expensive town”, with a straight face no less. There was always justification for these sorts of situations, no matter how ridiculous, there was always an excuse. He told us “ok, how much you want to pay” and we told him 10,000 which was way too much, but the amount we had agreed upon before getting into this jam. We finally settled on 20,000 cfa with mattresses, but we still had to contend with the goats and chickens and the heat radiating from the sun soaked mud floor.

Only Andrew felt like sleeping in, the chickens were driving me and Matt nuts and the sun was starting to get warm, it was 4:30 am and the floor and the air were reaching thermal equilibrium. We were off to find a man by the name of Yung, who we had met the following evening. Everyone in town that we asked said Yung, Yung goes to Timbuktu. As luck would have it, we did find Yung and he was willing to take us to Timbuktu that night for the sum of 100,000 cfa. I think we had planned to spend 1,500 cfa to get to Timbuktu from Korioume, so 100,000 cfa was out of the question. Instead, he said he would take us for 2,000 cfa in the morning at 7:30 A.M. We wandered over to Yung’s place and waited. It was a desolate place soft sandy paths between mud buildings and not a single foreigner. We thought surely there would be more transport to Timbuktu since this was the main thoroughfare. We spent the hours searching for food and found some excellent soup with meat and bread. By this time we were so used to having so little one bowl of soup between three of us left us stuffed. The greasy meat was heavenly and the bread came straight out of a wood fired oven built against one of the mud houses. Mangos were also abundant and surprisingly cheap and I spent the rest of my money (25 cents) on two big delicious mangoes, which we all shared back at Yung’s place. It was getting hot and sitting around in the street was becoming unpleasant. I was getting thirsty and of the three wells I found only one worked and it had a line. I kept losing my place in line because I couldn’t stand waiting in the exposed sun while women slowly filled their buckets of water. So, no water for me, though we were able to buy some later on.

Aside from basic sanitary practices, I think significant digits should be taught directly afterward. If you don’t know what significant digits are, look it up, I’m sure there is an exhaustive explanation on Wikipedia. The intent of significant digits is to match the precision of your reporting figures with the amount of error in your figure. What does this have to do with Mali, well I’ll tell you. When some says we leave at 7:30, that means that you’re error should be +/- 5 minutes. A more accurate method, and honest for that matter, would be to say we leave tomorrow, maybe. Yung had no intention of leaving at 7:30 and I was getting hot and thirsty. Andrew asked when we’d be leaving since 7:30 had come and gone, “oh we’ll leave at 10 o’clock”, said Yung. In the meantime we tried to find someone else, we asked Yung. Yung said, “I am a business man” meaning he wasn’t going to tell us. We were getting impatient, but I had found a place that sold frozen baggies of gingembre. Though the antidote only lasted a couple of minutes, it was akin to what I imagine injecting heroin is like. I went back many times borrowing the 25 cfa for my fix, promising that I would “have the money’ and that “I just needed a little time”.

Occasionally we would go on a scouting mission but no one else was going to Timbuktu. There were supposed to be 4x4s leaving here, but there was nothing. We asked and asked, but Yung was it. Yung noticed we were getting desperate, so he said “we could leave right now, but it was going to cost 60,000 cfa”. It was Friday, and we had to get to the bank before it closed, so were getting more and more anxious by the second. We were 20 km from Timbuktu, why couldn’t we find anyone who was going there, I kept asking myself. Then something else came to mind. Why don’t any of the store fronts mention Korioume? I had noticed this before, but hadn’t concentrated on it until now. I decided to walk around and look more closely at the signs. The word Korioume was nowhere to be found, but I did see a pattern emerging. The word Dire was conspicuously present, huh. I mulled this over for a couple of milliseconds and then the answer hit me so hard it almost knocked me down. Those bastards dropped us off on time, but in the wrong town. How wrong, I had no idea, but I flipped to the map in our guide book that covered all of Africa to confirm. Sure enough, on a map of Mali, there was Dire. I estimated we were about 120 km from Timbuktu, but in reality it was probably 70 km as the crow flies. I was happy we hadn’t tried to walk/hitch hike. That clarified why we were losing this game so badly. Once again, they had us by the short hairs and knew it. We knew we were in check but hadn’t realized that checkmate was unavoidable, Yung did, and now we did too.

In the early afternoon, we got Yung talked down to 30,000 cfa and three children pushed our van until it came to life. The van had 24 seats and we bought out 20 of them so I made sure that I had plenty of space. At this point in the trip, equality was no longer something I strived for. I was not going to be cramped in that van at mid day in the Sahara after buying out most of it. I made sure my backpack had a seat, my water bottle had its own seat, and I stretched my legs across the aisle so that no one could take the seat across from me, courtesy be damned.

It wasn’t long until I realized that Dire was not on the beaten path and if we had tried to walk and hitchhike that route we’d probably be dead. We busted out into the Sahara sans road and boy howdy how Yung could drive. We followed two tracks across the desert which split apart, rejoined, and often wandered off into the great unknown. There was no set path and we basically just zoomed around in the desert crossing irrigation ditches, passing camels, at 60 km/h. 60 km/h may not seem fast, but if you ever driven cross country on camel trails, you’ll understand. In fact, we’d regularly bottom out the suspension which invariably disengaged the rear door latches. While we were getting knocked around, the back doors would open and people on sitting on the ends of the benches that were designed for ease of entry and exit scrambled to get control of the wildly flapping doors while trying not to fall out. Yung either didn’t notice or didn’t care about the door situation and I doubt he would have bothered to stop in the event that someone really did fall out. I was also in the mood where I really didn’t care either, as long as I made it to the bank on time.

We all know that the Sahara is dry and sandy, but it is also very dusty. Riding with the windows down in the van kept us in a constant dust storm. When the rear doors parted it was like opening flood gates. Dirt and dust rolling onto and over us and I could almost feel the impact. Andrew had a bandana and wrapped it over his face bandito style, I followed suit. Matt, well he was asleep which I thought was a bit odd. By the time we hit a paved road, there was measurable depths of dust on us and we stopped in Korioume to clean up. Yung didn’t slow down on the pavement and we flew into town, a big Coca Cola sign welcoming us to Timbuktu (yes, really). We saw the bank on the way into town and it was just before 3 p.m. and we booked it back down the exposed street to the bank. Unfortunately for us, the bank closed at 11 am, but to our surprise the they had just installed an ATM. Even better, the ATM was in an air conditioned with a beautiful tiled floor which was ruined when our tears turned to mud as they rolled down our dusty cheeks. We quickly realized that we once again out of luck. The ATM was inoperable, the bank was closed, the Western Union was in the bank, and we had 20,000 cfa (50 USD) left, so much for catching a break. Oh and by the way, it would cost us 60,000 to get the closest ATM – if it worked.