Return To Civilization

Alcoo served us tea at sunrise (and finally gave Jan Il a reasonable offer for the scarf!) and searched for the camels for our return. He only found three, so he had to walk back. However, I rode in front and he gave me the lone rein attached to the camel’s nose and showed me how to control it, which I enjoyed immensely.

We had a small breakfast upon our return and tipped Alcoo (apparently all of the money we paid went to the middlemen and he did it out of the goodness of his heart) and hurried back for the 4x4 that was to take us all back to Mopti. Because of all the time spent getting to Timbuktu, we only had three days to get all the way back to Accra. It left, eventually, and we took the ferry across the Niger and drove down the road to Douenza, which has to be the sketchiest road I have ever traveled on. We drove the entire time in the sand next to the road itself and got stuck twice going up hills.

In French, Joe quizzed the driver about this and that and we learned a lot from him (thus is the advantage of speaking the local language). We found out that he wasn’t merely a driver, but also a hardened rebel veteran of the Taureg civil war that was fought in the early 1990s between the government and the marginalized people. Thanks to a peace plan, he lives a normal life now and his brother is now a general in the Malian army. We also talked about Mali and Islam, learning a lot about local opinion on the matters.

The moment of Zen for us was when we approached the town of Bambara. He told us how he and his comrades used to conduct raids on the town, which was not Taureg. When we arrived, the people were more interested in seeing him than they were of us – a first for me in Africa. The first man who approached the window shook his hand and looked at us, saying “This man! HE is the killer!”, to which our driver replied, “HE is the assassin!” Suddenly we realized that he was speaking the truth and this other man was a former rebel himself. Incredible.

The rest of the road to Mopti was in good shape, but the driver miscalculated his level of fuel and by dark, the petrol station was closed, so we spent hours waiting for someone to sell us gas. Not pleased. We arrived in Mopti, as per usual, in the middle of the night. Joe and I didn’t bother sleeping the few hours until dawn and ended up walking around the town, planning ahead, meeting interesting characters and sitting at cafés, talking about life.