Take On Africa

You are browsing the archives of 2010 April.

Earlier in the year when I was in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, I visited the Ola During Children’s Hospital. This is the only paediatric hospital in Sierra Leone. It is the paediatric hospital that the Welbodi Partnership is working with. The Welbodi Partnership is the charity I am raising money for by cycling to Cape […]

Last week I was asked by explorer Mikael Strandberg if I would write an article for his website. How could I refuse?! The tricky part was he said I could write about anything. That immediately meant I couldn’t think of anything to write about. Nothing. Nada. In the end I had a beer and just […]

I had heard that leaving Timbuktu can be a time-consuming challenge. So when I was in Kourioume, still 10km prior to arriving, I was searching out ways to leave. The day was Wednesday. We could leave on Friday. By public pinasse. A pinasse is like a large, motorized pirogue. A pirogue is a small wooden […]

Djenne Djenne is a sleepy place. Except for Mondays. Monday is market day. Market day means hundreds of people arrive in town, congregate, congest the streets. They usher in goats and sheep, set up shop on the street floor to sell anything (everything afterall has a price and if it has a price it can […]

One familiar sight in Senegal was that of young boys, in tattered rags, walking the streets clutching large, empty metal tins (think Heinz baked beans tins, super-sized) looking for handouts from tourists, leftovers from locals. The boys rarely begged though. They just seemed to wander, hopeful that their tins and therefore their stomachs would be […]

It’s been so long since the last proper update I hardly know what to write about. I guess the simplest thing is to start from where I left off…. and that was in Bamako having recovered from the previous weeks’ exertions paddling down the Niger river. That was over six weeks ago. Bike Ride from […]

Firstly, Timbuktu is a real place – a dusty town on the edge of the Sahara in Mali. Timbuktu is a place of legend and many early European explorers through the desert strived (and often died trying) to get to this fabled town. For those who did arrive in Timbuktu, leaving was often harder. Not […]

A month’s break from the bike seems to have been the perfect medicine for re-igniting my interest in my travels in West Africa and Mali specifically. It’s been a fascinating month and I’ve seen so much. I hope to get chance to write an update about the last few weeks (it’s been a while), but […]

Three days in the Dogon country is only just enough time to gain a small insight into the fascinating culture of the Dogon people who inhabit the small villages along the Bandiagara escarpment. The escarpment, a sandstone cliff up to 500m high runs for 150km. It is at the foot of this escarpment that many […]

I spent a few days walking through the Dogon Country, a fascinating place in Mali with fascinating people. Here are some photos of the children from the numerous villages along the Bandiagara escarpment who were all too eager to be photographed…