Mali

The lyrical kora sings to the beat of the tam-tam - a country in love with its own extraordinary music.

Beautiful people in a stunning landscape.

About the elements of my south Mali trips

Djenne

An ancient seat of islamic learning, an important trading city on the Niger river, a World Heritage site with the world’s largest mud building - the Grand Mosque - and one of the liveliest markets in west Africa, Djenne is a gem.

The Festivals

Malians are mad for their own music. So much so that they hardly look elsewhere for their musical nourishment. Even by Africa’s high musical standards, Mali surely towers at the top. The roll call of top class artists is as long as your arm: Ali Farka Toure, Salif Keita, Amadou and Miriam, Tinariwen, Toumani Diabate, Oumou Sangare...

The main festivals are The Festival Au Desert at Essakane near Timbuktu which takes place for 3 days around the 10th of January, and The Festival Sur Le Niger at Segou at the beginning of February.

The two festivals reflect the two Malis I talk of above. The Festival Au Desert, with its spectacular setting in the dunes of Essakane outside Timbuktu began life as a celebration of Tuareg culture and has an international flavour. The Festival Sur Le Niger, set on the banks of the great river Niger in the town of Segou, the old capital of the Bambara kingdom, is more of a celebration of all the cultures and music of southern Mali, and being more accessible, it has a bigger Malian following.

When choosing between the two, the main differences are that the desert festival is for the hardier traveller - we camp, it is a journey to get there (but then that is the point of Timbuktu!), there are lovely things called crum-crums to prick your feet and you will be sandy on your return - small costs for a truly remarkable 3 days.

The Festival Sur Le Niger is a more relaxed affair. Set literally on the serene and majestic Niger River, in the pleasant city of Segou, it is well organised, and always attracts the top artists . It also has a wider remit, being a celebration of music, dances, masks and arts of the multitude of Malian cultures. You stay in a hotel and come and go as you please.

The Dogon Country

The Dogon live in villages spaced along a 200km escarpment between the Dogon Plateau and the flat dry plain below. They are an animist tribe that believe in the spirit of things and they worship the Dog Star Sirius. We trek between the villages, staying and eating in gîte type accommodation which usually means sleeping out in the open on roofs beneath the night sky. Each village gets a tax for tourists that pass through and the gîtes are owned by villagers. The Dogon country is an extraordinary landscape and a fascinating people, far removed from anything you know or have experienced before.

The Niger River

The river Niger has been the life line of the people of Mali for thousands of years. A majestic, serene and otherworldly river, its source is only 200 kms from the coast of Guinea. It then makes a 2000 km journey towards the Sahara and Timbuktu beforere realising its mistake and turning 130º and heading south and south west towards Nigeria where it spills out into the Niger Delta. In Mali the river’s gentle flow and the seasonal flood plains of the Inland River Niger Delta have been the resource of empires, the inspiration behind its music and has defined the inter-dependent relationships between ithe different peoples which give Mali its very calm and friendly outlook as a nation.

Our boat is a “pinasse” - a long wooden motor powered craft. For three days we chug down the river, stopping off at little fishing villages perched on spits of land that break the wide horizon, visit towns with intricate mosques built in mud, maybe pop in to see the widow of Ali Farka Touré, and catch the market of Dire. We camp outside villages. All in all a very relaxing trip through another very different and very beautiful landscape.

Go to Tuareg Mali and Saharan Safaris

Mali is really like two countries in landscape, culture, politics and history. The bad news is that there is so much to Mali one trip is not enough - so you must come twice!

The heterogenous south, dominated by the Bambara who share this land with the Peul nomadic pastoralists, the animist Dogon, Bozo fishermen and the Songhai.

And the homogenous north where the Sahara desert has been home to the nomadic Tuaregs for thousands of years. Go to Tuareg Mali and Saharan Safaris

These two different worlds have for hundreds, even thousands, of years met and traded at Timbuktu, where the Sahara meets the River Niger and sub-Saharan Africa.

My different trips in Mali describe these two different worlds: the festival tours concentrate on the south - Bamako, Djenne, the Dogon Country, the Niger River and Timbuktu. My desert trips take you to the north, into the Sahara desert and the Tuareg nomads.