Timbuktu
It's one of travel's great conundrums. Everybod has heard of Timbuktu but few people actually know where it is and even fewer ever get there. Everyone knows that it's a long way from here to Timbuktu, wherever "here" might be. A town of some 30,000 hardy souls, Timbuktu sits, half covered by sand, not far from the big bend of the Niger River at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert in Mali, a land-locked country in Western Africa.
Djin-Yala
Welcome!
Want to know and explore the Malian culture, sacred places, history, food and much more? Djin-Yala is here to make that desire come true. Having a memorable experience with a peace of mind couldn't be easier.
Bamako
To get there, we spent two days on a plane, several more in a four-wheel-drive, followed by a bone-jarring trip on the back of a donkey cart. There were four days on foot trekking through remote villages, where nothing much has changed in the past 300 years, three days up the Niger River aboard a leaky pinasse boat and one hour too many spent rocking against a very hard wooden saddle on the back of a camel.
Mopti
Long the stuff of myth and legend, the fabled city of gold is, in fact, a city of mud: mud-brick houses, mud ovens and crumbling mud mosques studded with the sticky-out ends of tree trunks.
Djenne
Threading through this sea of mud are rivers of sand, in lieu of streets, blown in from the ever-encroaching Sahara. Straggly herds of goats wander through the central marketplace, shooed away by women haggling over fruit and vegetables spread on mats on the sand. Brightly dressed girls laden with impossible loads on their heads struggle through the drifting sand, while groups of men sit by doing nothing.
