Day 6: It's The Journey, Not The Destination

As proof that we must be getting exhausted from the boat, we all slept in. I barely even bothered to watch the sunrise. We were so close to the end that we had packed in anticipation, but at our second-last stop we waited for almost two hours to leave. Joe found out that the crew was sitting around, drinking tea, which he was not pleased about. We sure picked a winner with this boat. Not only does the crew not care about their most expensive cargo (i.e. the high-paying tourists), the captain (and navigator) is only 26, which explains why we kept hitting sandbars – how competent could he be? To top this off, when cargo was being unloaded below deck, I noticed over 50 bags of dry concrete mix. No wonder the ship was so hard to navigate and get unstuck – the thing was carrying tonnes of concrete!

The boat left promptly after that. A lady said that we were almost there. I spotted a man riding a camel along the banks. Again, we must be close…

As we approached our final destination, we mused over the ridiculous journey we had just undertaken. For Mungo Park, getting to Timbuktu was a long and arduous journey and we thought that it would be just a matter of crossing distances from point A to point B. How wrong we were! Timbuktu, for many, is synonymous with the ends of the earth, the middle of nowhere and most people don’t even know that it actually exists. Getting there was a rather large undertaking and altogether a memorable experience. Unlike places like London, Cancun, Tokyo or Hawaii, the fun is in the journey, not the destination. That’s the point of going to Timbuktu – because you can’t just hop a plane any day of the week and be there in a few hours. Planes are infrequent and unreliable, boats are too and if you plan to drive, you need a Land Rover that can hack it for 12 hours straight – and in the wet season, don’t even bother. But we did it. And that’s what I will always remember: not the city itself, but the process of getting there. Beautiful sunsets, strange characters, bad rice, great books and what it means to be “inconvenienced”.