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How From Here 2 Timbuktu seeks to help single travellers.

Sat, 22 May 2010 15:47:02 -0400

Women and Adventure Travel

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:35:39 -0400

Chloe and Daisy, Cameroon 2006

My first experience of guiding travellers in Africa was when my two young cousins, Daisy (25) and Chloe (23), came out to Cameroon. I was doing research for trips before From Here 2 Timbuktu existed. My brother was running a primate conservation project and they came out to see him, but he was busy so palmed them off on me.

Chloe was quite the tom boy and very at ease with the rigours of travel. In many ways she travelled like a man - no concerns of threat to her person, a total lack of consciousness of her femaleness to the point I had to tell her occasionally to put some clothes on! Daisy was different - very much the conscious feminine opposite of her sister. To begin with she was worried about everything - from dust to a paranoia about food hygiene to where was her next toilet stop to sitting next to someone on the bus. I told her that travelling with her was like travelling with Penelope Keith (the well known British actress who always plays very posh roles) and so her nickname became Penelope.

Everything changed for Daisy one day when she got fed up with tagging along behind Chloe and me wanting to do boy’s stuff. We were in a market village in Chad. We had waded across a river from Cameroon and were camping out as guests of the chief of the village. On our third day there I decided that I wanted to hire small motorbikes and venture out to the plains to see the nomadic Fulani cattle herders. Daisy didn’t want to do this and the heat was getting to her - she wanted to return to Marroua, our nearest big town a 2 hour journey away. So I pointed to the river and said:

“Daisy you’ll be fine. Wade across the river, pick up a bike to take you to the village 2 miles away, wait under the tree with the men playing chess for the bus. They’ll put you on the bus and this evening you’ll be in a nice hotel with a cold shower and a swimming pool. And I promise you you’ll be as safe as houses.”

To our amazement Daisy just got up, waded across the river and slowly her speck disappeared out of sight.

Then Chloe and I began to worry for her. Up until now, Daisy had done all the worrying for us. Now mum had gone, we needed to worry for her.

Two days later after Chloe and I had had an extraordinary time camping out in the plains of Chad with the Fulani we got back to Maroua not too sure what sort of state we’d find Daisy in.

There she was, happy as Larry in her hotel, spick and span, our places all booked, her washing all done, our table for dinner booked and set out. She had had the journey of a lifetime. She had had half a village trying to sort out her bus transport and when the bus had arrived the driver insisted she took the best seat in the bus - next to him!

This was a massive turning point for Daisy.
She had ventured out alone beyond the comfort zone. And she had discovered the first rule of travel - let down your guard and the world will open up. If you really want to understand a culture you have to just trust - trust that you, as a guest, are the most respected person and that the community through which you travel will look after you if you seek their help. We are more at risk when we mistrust the community and try to do things on our own.

Six months later she was travelling on her own across southern Africa and now lives in Kenya.

Security in Mali

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:31:17 -0400

Western double standards - aid, trade and security.

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:00:00 -0400

One of the first questions people often ask me, if they don’t know Africa, is: “is it safe?”

And it is no wonder. The images we get are so negative. All we hear about in the west is famine, disease, bad governance and corruption, war and tribal conflict. Our only positive image is the wildlife. Left out of the picture entirely is what makes Africa so inspiring - the people and their incredible resilience, colour, warmth, happiness and hospitality.

I’m not a fearful person, but I feel safer in Africa than I feel in the UK, no question. In Africa I have a whole community looking after me wherever I go. As a guest, a visitor, a traveller and a stranger I am highly respected and receive the utmost hospitality.

I see it like this: in the western world we have a bunch of institutions - legal, political, education, welfare, police - which sustain and bind our society. Because of these institutions we have lost the need for our community. In Africa it is the reverse - they tend not to be able to rely on their institutions and it is their community which holds the whole thing together. Wherever you go as a traveller it is this sense of community EVERYWHERE that watches over you. If your car breaks down the whole village gets involved to help repair it; if you are stranded anywhere the village will take you in, feed you, accommodate you and see you on your way; if a child is misbehaving or in danger the nearest adult is responsible; if there is an argument (very rarely do you hear raised voices, personal disputes, verbal aggression) it is dealt with there and then by all who are present; if a thief is caught in the market they better hope they get taken to the police station damn quick because better to be locked in a cell for a week than dealt with by street justice - african society cannot tolerate thieves in its midst because there are not the police to deal with them.

I know that I am far more likely to be pick pocketed, aggressed verbally or physically, or be unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and stumble across a terrorist attack on the tube in London than I am anywhere in Africa. Of course there are dangerous areas - there is Johannesburg with it’s car-jackings, Sudan and Dafour, Somalia, eastern DRC. But let’s put it all in perspective. It is very difficult talking about Africa as a homogenous entity. Continental Africa is the size of Europe, the USA, China, the Indian subcontinent, Argentina and New Zealand (!) put together. The USA will fit into the Sahara desert and still not touch the edges. In all that land mass, and given the mess colonialism made of dividing up Africa, and the greater mess we made of de-colonisation, of course there are pockets of problem areas. But would you not travel to France because of problems in Yugoslavia? Or London because of the Al Quaida presence in the UK? Is China dangerous to visit because Tibet is occupied? Are you likely to witness gun crime in the USA? Would you avoid New York, Paris or Madrid for fear of a terrorist attack?

Mauritania is a classic example of how there is one rule for Africa and another for the rest of the world. Last December 4 French tourists were on their own without a guide in the desert in Mauritania and were shot. When the reports first came out I thought bandits - an opportunist attack. But out came the speculation about Al Qu’aida - a load of towel heads, a muslim country, big empty space (Mauritania is four times the size of Britain with a population of 4 million). The Foreign Office have it down as a no-go country. After the shootings the Paris-Dakar rally was cancelled. This rally brings much needed revenue to a very poor country. This year it has been moved to the continent of America. Hmmm!. Was the London marathon cancelled after the 7/7 bombings? Weren’t we given the Olympics a year or so later? Are foreigners advised not to bring their teenagers to London where they go round stabbing and shooting each other?

Despite all my experience of over inflated security warnings about African countries, even I was worried about going through Mauritania because of all the talk talk. And then last summer they had a military coup - maybe this WAS a dangerous country, maybe the army are taking control of a country in security chaos? When I got there people couldn’t have been more hospitable, there was no sign of military presence anywhere, no warnings on the ground from people about not travelling into the desert. Don’t go alone, take a guide, preferably have 2 vehicles, but the issue is the desert - a vast empty space and you need someone who knows where they are, can speak to people, knows which tracks to follow. Whenever you hear of kidnappings or incidents with tourists in the desert it is people on their own, with one vehicle and without a guide. Would you climb Everest without a sherpa? Would you cross the ocean without an experienced sailor?

When I talked to people about the coup the feeling was that the government were abusing the country, ministers sending their kids to expensive European schools, living it up in western hotels, their money was flowing out of the country. Now the military are in control there is less corruption.

Ever since I have been coming to Mali the foreign office have advised against travel to Timbuktu and the desert to the north. There is a domestic issue here between the Tuareg and the Malian government. The Tuareg feel that the government have reneged on promises for more development in the region. Over the past 2 years there have been 2 or 3 attacks on Malian military personnel and installations. Never have tourists been targeted. In December this year there was an attack on the military in Nampala, an obscure and remote outpost on the Mauritanian border 300 kms from Timbuktu.`

Then the day before The Festival In The Desert I was informed that the Foreign Office had issued a security warning about the Festival and that tourists were going to be targeted for kidnap by Al Qu’aida groups. I tried to contact the British Embassy via all the telephone numbers listed on the web site. I couldn’t get hold of anyone. I left messages saying that I was taking 14 tourists to the Festival and therefore needed to speak to someone urgently. I never heard back. Some urgency to protect British nationals!

These warnings which appeared in the USA, the UK and Australia had the effect of turning 50% of the tourists away from the festival, Mali’s main tourist attraction. My group decided to go and we had a wonderful festival. The security presence was normal and there was no sense of heightened alert. The organisers were at a loss - they told me that every year the British warn about travel to the Festival, and were adamant that if there was any real intelligence about a possible attack the Malian government would know and would pull the plug.

When I questioned what on earth Al Qu’aida could gain from an attack on the Festival, someone said to me “Oh come on Guy, it would be a great coup to attack westerners in The Festival In The Desert”. Firstly, who apart from a few world music fans has ever heard of the Festival In The Desert? And secondly I think there are many easier targets around the world than an obscure festival with 500 westerners.

I remember being at the Notting Hill Carnival a couple of years ago and a car drove straight through the crowd. I was standing next to a policeman who calmly told the driver that he couldn’t get through here. I suggested that it would be a very easy terrorist target. The policeman told me that the terrorist threat to the carnival was negligible, that their targets were purely economic and symbolic. So our festivals, our carnivals are fine, but African ones - wooooah!

Where do these “security” alerts come from? We are told of “intelligence” but then nobody is available to advise on this. I suspect a bureauocrat in London flicks through the internet and finds a domestic issue going on in a far flung country which they have never been to and they decide to cover their back by issuing a warning, just in case.

Well “just in case” is putting a serious spanner in the works of African progress. Tourism is one way in which African countries can trade with the world on its own terms, it can show the world what it has to offer. But our governments’ attempts to assure our security (if they can’t do it at home why do they expect to be able to do it for us abroad?) hinder this progression.

Furthermore this attempt to assure our security has a dangerous and an opposite effect. No one who travels seriously in Africa takes warnings from government web sites seriously because they know they can’t trust them. So when there is a real problem somewhere, like in northern Niger at the moment, good advise goes ignored because travellers are too used to the cry wolf syndrome. If there is ever a real security issue it is the word on the ground that gives the best advise.

Our politicians talk the talk on African development but hinder the continent’s attempts to do this for itself. It is the same with the Aid versus Trade issue. I am fundamentally opposed to the principle of aid to Africa. I don’t think it needs it. Yes it needs support in targeted areas like healthcare (we could stop stealing their doctors and nurses instead) or education (how easy would it be for the west to support the whole continent by paying for free education for all when it costs £15 a year in fees for secondary education) or the installation of pumps for clean water. But if Africa could trade with the world on an equal footing it could probably provide these things for itself. But I don’t think we really want Africa to be able to sort out its own problems, we prefer its dependency than its competition.

Again our politicians talk the talk but wont walk the walk. If you really want Africa to resolve its own problems, and if we really wanted to stop putting donor money into politicians pockets, get rid of European and American subsidies to industry and agriculture and let Africa trade. But you know what, we don’t want Africa to progress, we want to keep it dependant on us - or rather keep it thinking that it is dependent on us. The reality is that remittance to Africa (money sent back to Africa from Africans living in the West) is greater than international aid. That is an incredible fact and is the way forward for Africa: African solutions to African problems.

It amused me to hear that the Australians have London and Mauritania in the same risk category for travellers! At least that is slightly more balanced, though I’d still say Mauritania was losing out on that comparison!

Anyway, must get off my hobby horse and move on to how much fun there is to be had out here.

xx

Since writing the above 4 westerners have been taken hostage on the Niger border with Mali. Before anyone tells me that I am complacent about security, this kidnapping underlines exactly what I am saying. The tourists were at a festival on the Mali side of the border and were driving to Niger. They were taken right on the border. The attack has all the hallmarks of Nigerian Tuaregs in today’s climate and none of Malian Tuaregs who have never attacked tourists. Word on the ground at the moment is don’t go to the North of Niger where these tourists were heading. But certainly if they had read Foreign Office web sites they would have had very little to go on to differentiate between the situations in the two countries. Perhaps they travelled through Mali and saw that there was no security issue in terms of heightened military presence, and they could be forgiven for assuming the warnings for Niger were similarly over blown.

But poor old Mali will suffer from this because news reports again don’t differentiate between the different situations in the two countries. All they mention is that the tourists were in Mali at an obscure festival. Any attempt to increase the security threat in Mali because of this would be like increasing the security risk of going to France after an ETA attack in the Spanish Pyrenees.

My Mali Blog - by Stefan

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 20:00:00 -0400

Mali - c’est magnifique. A land of dust and music: friendly, relaxed and stunningly beautiful.

I arrived in Bamako in the early hours to be met by Guy, tanned and cheery after his epic journey. We waited for Vincent, a big ginger Yorkshireman I’d met on the plane, to get through arrivals, then all piled into Orence, Guy’s 4x4 (named after Lawrence of Arabia). Orence purred her way through the bustling street-lit streets of Bamako, crossing the expansive river Niger, to our hotel. After a large Castel beer in one of the local bars (still pumping at 4 in the morning) we called it a night before Vince’s flame red-hair could attract too much unwanted attention.

We had three days before Fiona flew in from New York, and I immediately went about orientating myself in Bamako. A good French patisserie for breakfast, the bank to change my Euros, up to the impressive national museum and then straight into the five star Libya hotel to spread out by the pool. Guy wasn’t impressed. How could go to the Libya when I could be experiencing ‘the real Africa’ instead? Well, I spent much of my first days in Mali submerged in the cool waters of that pool. Partly it was a desire to feel the sun and water on my skin after the dark cold months of the English winter, but it was about something more. The fact that I was about to cross hundreds of miles of arid desert made me want to soak myself for as long as I could, like a bear gorging himself on late autumn fruits before his long hibernation.

I like Bamako very much. Delicious food, the best I’ve tasted in Africa outside South Africa, with French influences (crusty bagettes and garlic) as well as North African influences (chillies and couscous). There is music everywhere: Malian hip-hop and reggae as well as the more traditional fusion music. There is live music every night, and although we missed Toumani Diabate, we went to a great jamming session with singers, guitars and djembe players that went on into the early hours. Me, Guy and Vince all ended up being pulled onto the dance floor by this HUGE man who had ripped his shirt off to display the biggest pair of moobs I’d ever seen (the photos should be on this site soon). It turns out this man-mountain is the mascot for the Malian national football team - their own Johnny Five-Bellies.

Fiona arrived safe and sound and we headed off with Vince and Emmanuella to Segou (for lunch...and another swim in a pool) and then on to Djenne. The festival of the Niger is in Segou, right on the river banks, and is the perfect setting for a festival (one for next year maybe). Djenne had a tranquility that seems to affect all who go there and I could have happily stayed there for a week. We stayed in a beautiful Moorish hotel overlooking the massive mud-built mosque but had to vacate on Sunday because all the tourists were arriving for the famous market the next day. Vince (who had a dodgy tummy) and Emmanuella (who’d puked in the car) decided to stay on at another guesthouse whilst we drove on. We got beyond Mopti onto the road to Timbuktu before turning off and crossing the sand to a clearing where we slept out in the desert. The darkness of the desert and the lack of moon meant that the night sky was filled with more stars than i’d ever seen. We lay back on a mound, a ‘wee dram’ of duty-free Jura in our hands, watching the sky and cooing at the shooting stars (one of which was so spectacular it unzipped the entire expanse of the sky).

The next morning we were woken by the sound of a thousand hooves and rubbing our eyes in the half-light we saw a huge herd of donkeys passing just by. We got up as dawn was breaking, had our coffee, then piled into Orence and set off to Timbuktu. After an hour or so, approaching one of the regular police road blocks (a barrel in the road), Guy tried to slow the car down and realised that Orence’s breaks were not holding. Luckily there was a wide expanse of of sand near by and Guy was able to swing the car round and bring it to a stop beside a stern looking policeman. “Vous avez un probleme avec le voiture, Monseiur?”. Nothing serious we assured the policeman and drove on to the next village where we found a mechanic to patch up the brake pipes before driving on to Timbuktu. It was lucky we had the brakes fixed as we needed them on a few occasions (!!!) but we crossed the Fleuve Timbuktu at lunchtime and, after a photo session beneath the ‘Bienvenue a Timbuktu’ sign, we headed into town to be met by Ali Dicko and his friends.

Timbuktu has a very relaxed atmosphere. It is a town of 30,000 but feels very small and friendly. After just one day, I find myself walking around the narrow streets to calls of “Mustapha! Mustapha” (‘Stefan’ always gets abbreviated). We happened to pull up into Timbuktu just as the camel train arrived from the salt mines 1000km away and we watched as the men of the caravan, serene after a month crossing the desert, gently forced each wailing camel to its knees and unloaded the huge slabs of rock salt.

We leave tomorrow. Guy is giving Orence a full service. He’s also giving him a wash which is a bit of a waste of time since he will be coated in dust as soon as we get on the road - we all will be!). We are about to go shopping to stock up on food and water and kit ourselves out with turbans and booboo’s ready for our journey across the desert to our Christmas festival with the Touregs and the Festival of the Camels up by the Algerian boarder.

A Merry Malian Christmas and a happy new year to you all.