The fabled city of Timbuktu

By Hamilton Wende
BBC News, Mali

Timbuktu is a name that conjures up ideas of the unattainable or magical and, as Hamilton Wende discovers, it still remains relatively inaccessible even in today's world of quick and easy travel.

Timbuktu's Sankore mosque is the site of Africa's first university

Our journey began badly. Only a few hundred yards from our hotel in Bamako, the capital of Mali, I suddenly noticed that our driver Ibrahim looked curiously relaxed as we waited at an intersection.

Then, horrified, I realised he was snoring loudly with his head drooped over the steering wheel.

He had been up all night partying, so I insisted on driving.

As our convoy headed north into the semi-desert, he slept like a baby in the passenger seat for four hours.

It was only when we stopped for lunch under an acacia tree that he finally awoke.

In order to help him along, Moussa, another driver, pulled out a goatskin bag containing an ornate teapot that looked like something out of the Arabian Nights and a small gas burner.

"Chai," he said to me with a cigarette clenched in his teeth, as he squatted in the hot sand to brew some mint tea.

"This could take a while," one of my travelling companions muttered.

"Traditionally, they have to drink three cups. The first is bitter like death, the second bitter-sweet like life and the third sweet like love."

Moussa and Ibrahim, however, limited themselves to a single cup and we got back onto the road.

Changing colours

The heat shimmered off the white sand as we drove, while the empty sky was bleached almost white by the sun. And baobab trees stood stark against the horizon.

The town of Mopti is known as the "Venice of Mali"

The journey proved hard and exhausting, and we all wondered what lay ahead.

The landscape and towering sky were at first drab but then started to change with the alchemy of light in Africa, layered with subtle tones of green, brown, yellow, blue, silver and white.

That range of colours was interrupted suddenly by people in the villages who were wearing bright clothes of emerald, canary and azure.

Two Tuareg men in traditional turbans zoomed by on motorbikes.

The houses were almost all of mud, and the mosques with their green shuttered archways had minarets of mud and logs.

Colourfully painted donkey carts and buses piled impossibly high with luggage careened down the road in both directions.

Hours passed. Ibrahim remained alert.

Finally, as dusk fell, we came to the town of Mopti on the bend of the Niger river.

Long pirogues were poled across the pink and silver currents of the river at sunset, frogs called loudly from the banks and huge bats swirled overhead in the last of the light.

The heat was oppressive and we still had 250 miles to go the next day.

Ancient human landscape

We left shortly after dawn.

Camel trains often travel at night using the stars for navigation

North of Mopti, the landscape grew harder and more bleak. There were hardly any villages now.

But, as remote and forbidding as it is, this is an ancient human landscape, settled and travelled across for millennia.

For well over a thousand years, camel caravans have traversed the dry sands carrying salt, gold and slaves.

Finally, after another eight hours of driving, we came to the Niger river again. We crossed by ferry and drove the last few miles to our destination.

"Welcome to Timbuktu. The city of 333 saints," read a battered sign along the road.

Soon a low mud gateway appeared in the fading light. It was a disappointing entrance to the fabled city.

A few yards on, goats browsed among piles of garbage. We passed through a few streets with houses of mud and cracked concrete.

There was little to see. The marketplace was filthy and rundown, the people brusque or insisting that we buy their overpriced souvenirs. The heat was near unbearable.

There was, it seemed, not much left of the mystic grandeur of Timbuktu.

We were exhausted and disappointed. Moussa and Ibrahim brewed more tea on the steps of our hotel.

Centre of learning

The next morning we saw the ancient Djingareyber mosque.

As non-Muslims, we could not enter but inside is an ancient door which, legend says, if it is ever opened, it will signal the end of the world.

A few crowded sandy lanes away is the ancient mud-walled Sankore mosque, the site of Africa's first university.

Timbuktu was once a centre of great learning and there are an estimated 700,000 manuscripts dating back to the 9th Century in its libraries.

Many have been damaged by water, sand and termites, but all of them offer a gateway to a past that has been almost forgotten.

The thousands of leather-bound volumes are filled with beautiful calligraphy, ancient medical secrets and even maps of the stars.

As we walked the streets of the town, I began to see something different about it, that its glory may be gone but its wealth still exists.

What I had learned was that the road to Timbuktu is a journey not only into geography but also into the realm of memory and imagination.

The old saying "from here to Timbuktu" might not mean what it used to, but I am glad that I have been there.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Thursday, 3 July, 2007 at 1100 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.