Take On Africa

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Entry into Ghana was overshadowed by leaving Burkina Faso, which I was a little sad to be leaving.
But the immigration officials were friendly enough. While one slowly and meticulously filled out my immigration form (I could have completed it in a fraction of the time, but time is no matter here), I watched cartoons on [...]

Ouagadougou – Bobo – Banfora – Bobo
Any Which Way
Leaving is always hard. It’s not that I fear the open road. I don’t fear the unknown. On the contrary. That’s why I travel. That’s why I travel by bike. But no matter how much I know I will love the freedom and the new experiences, leaving [...]

I spent two weeks in Ouaga. Camping in the car-park of the OK Inn Hotel. Sandwiched between  a truck park and the hotel reception. Doesn’t sound so OK. But what more do you need when camping than a flat piece of ground in the shade? Not much. Included in the free camping was use of [...]

Leaving Mali
Leaving Mali was tougher than I thought. Not due to any particular attachment, although I did enjoy my time there. It was the wind and the rough, corrugated, roads. Mostly the wind though. It tried it’s hardest to blow me right back into Mali, even after I’d got the Burkina Faso entry stamped permanently [...]

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 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 Bamako [...]

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 many [...]

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 [...]

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 of [...]