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| go to excerpt | By Mark Jenkins
+ + + + + + + + Reviewed by Morris Dye "to Timbuktu: A Journey Down the Niger" gets off to a bad start when author Mark Jenkins kisses his pregnant wife goodbye and impulsively skips off to Africa to get some ya-yas out before his first date with fatherhood. With
only a month of planning under his belt, he and three companions set
out to attempt the first descent of Africa's third largest river, the
Niger, packing collapsible kayaks, camping gear, medical kits, two handguns and a
collection of maps that provide only a crude approximation of
their route. ("Maps encourage boldness," Jenkins writes. "They're like
cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible.")
Jenkins' sudden departure on a risky, poorly planned and open-ended
expedition during the final three months of his wife's first pregnancy is
not the last time you'll question his judgment. While two members of the
team, Rick Smith and John Haines, play the straight men, Jenkins and
his longtime buddy Mike Moe
run head-first like vaudeville comedians into every obstacle, evidently
thriving on the bumps and bruises that inevitably result. And when these
two intrepid travelers decide to abandon the expedition, it is not because
they've had their fill of deadly encounters with crocodiles, hippos,
marauding bees and unscouted rapids: They simply lack the patience to
paddle uneventfully through the endless miles of flat water that await
them once they've cleared the more treacherous upper reaches of the river.
While Smith and Haines go on to complete the descent, Moe returns to his
wife in Wyoming and Jenkins continues overland to fulfill his longtime
dream of visiting the city novelist Tom Robbins has called "the end of
everybody's road. The capital of Nowhere. Geography's perennial
avant-garde and the armchair traveler's inevitable cul-de-sac." After
crossing hundreds of miles of desert alone on a motorbike and then
completing the journey back on the river aboard a lumbering ferryboat,
Jenkins finally walks into the fabled city of Timbuktu, only to find, like
many explorers before him, that "Myth, always and forever, is greater
than fact."
The clouds of testosterone that swagger off the pages of this book at times make you want to give Jenkins and his pals a good spanking and send them off to bed without any supper. On the other hand, the best adventure travel books are generally not about prudent, well-conceived expeditions in which nothing much goes wrong: Think of young Tania Aebi sailing solo
around the world in "Maiden Voyage" or Tracy Johnston's dicey rafting
expedition in "Shooting the Boh" or Jeff Greenwald's improvisational
circumnavigation of the globe in "The Size of the World."
It is the
mistakes and misadventures and near-death experiences that make these
narratives so compelling to the reader sitting safely at home in an
armchair biting his or her nails. And although "To Timbuktu" gets off the ground with all the trappings of an annoying, self-absorbed midlife crisis, as
the narrative progresses -- weaving together rich accounts of earlier European explorers with memories of a teenage journey to Africa -- you're likely to find yourself unexpectedly seduced by the author's boyish enthusiasm and sharp, unpretentious voice.
A coda to Jenkins' book provides a sobering reminder that the price of
adventure can be high: Less than four years after abandoning the Niger,
Mike Moe, his brother Dan and two other companions drowned in remote
waters off Baffin Island when a small boat in which they were riding was
tipped over by a whale. Morris Dye is a travel writer and an editor at San Francisco Sidewalk. | e x c e r p t | BY MARK JENKINS | The days are so hot that one morning I get up at four. I think it is an early start but when I get to a well, the women are already there. They are in a circle clapping in harmony, taking turns bouncing their whole body weight on the big handle and shoving large plastic buckets beneath the invisible gushing. They are surprised to see me, a man, awake. They are mothers. Mothers and their daughters who are mothers and their child daughters who will be mothers. They are standing with bare feet in shallow black pools of water. They stop clapping and pumping and laugh at the sight of a man awake at such an hour, their faces turning up to the starlight and their breasts shaking. I shut off my motorcycle and get out my canteen. A small girl takes it from me. Someone pumps and she holds it under the phosphorescent splashing until it is overflowing. She brings it back to me. I thank her and put the bottle back into my pack and get back on my bike and the women resume clapping and pumping. I have been alone and do not want to leave this sound, the coitaling of hands in the darkness. I sit on my motorcycle and listen. It is not random clapping or even just hands smacking in unison, it is a song. There is melody and rhythm and syncopation. Solos leap from different women. It is complicated and beautiful. But once the women have filled their buckets, they are done. The pump stops spilling out water and the clapping stops and the women turn to their buckets. Every woman and child must carry one bucket on her head and one in each hand, so they cannot clap. They are moving off in single file into the desert and I am just about to start my bike when one of them begins singing. When the chorus comes around, they all join in. A small dark object alone in the immensity. I noticed it ten minutes ago. It was trembling in the golden heat and I couldn't tell what it was. Could have been a post or a stump. Now I am closer and I can see that it is a human. We are on the same track on a plate of desert, puny as ants below the mouth of the sky. The figure is moving but I am too far away to know whether it is walking toward me or away from me. It is a man, not a woman. I can see that now. He is walking toward me. We are eating the distance between us, I much faster than he. The man has something on his head. At first I thought it was a hat but no, it is a small bundle. I am coming up on him. I downshift and then stop. I shut off the engine and welcome the silence. Rock the motorcycle up onto the kickstand, flex my knees, spit through cracked lips, adjust the back of my turban to cover my neck. He is moving swiftly so he also downshifts to slow himself. Pulls back the thrust of his body, stops his swinging arms, halts the snap of his legs. Bonne journée, monsieur." "Good day to you." He is wearing Western clothes. A blue long-sleeve shirt, dusty trousers, what once were sneakers. Snakes of sweat slide out from under the small bundle on his head. His armpits are wet down to his waist. "I spake Englis. Ahmoud Al-Kan Koumbi is my father. I am Ahmoud Afma Al-Kan Koumbi. I am fourteen years. I go to Mopti for to work rice. My uncle work rice. I want work rice. Where are you go, sir?" "Timbuktu." "Ah. You have hunger, sir?" "No thank you." He raises his arms and lifts the bundle off his head and sets it on the ground. He unties the knot in the leather and pulls the corners back. In the middle of the chamois is a spare cotton shirt. It too is blue, neatly folded. On top of the shirt is a calabash the size of a large grapefruit. It is half full. He raises it by the handle and holds it out to me. This is all he has and he will need it but that means nothing in the desert. He has offered. I must not refuse. I hold the bowl with both hands and lift it to my lips. I am not going to fake it. He is watching my throat. I take a big drink. It is millet porridge. Warm, acrid, foul, the camel milk long soured. "Thank you." "Sir." I turn around and open the top of my pack. I have ten oranges. It is too many. I must not give too much. In the desert the obligation to return in kind is immutable, sometimes fatal. I lift out four and close the pack and squat beside him. I split each orange in two with my pocketknife, setting four halves before him, leaving four halves in front of myself. It is my offering and he cannot refuse. We have a picnic, resting on our haunches, starting out into the shimmering distance. We eat slowly. You only eat fast when you have too much to eat. We eat with our right hands, lapping up the drips between our fingers before they perish in the sand. He wastes nothing. He gnaws at the pulp on the inside of the scraps until they are transparent. It has not been perfectly equal. He is only fourteen but he is acutely aware of this. He pushes his calabash toward me but now I am not obligated to consume more of his food. I unfold my map. "Where are you from?" He speaks the name of his village. I scan the map but have no idea how it is spelled. He swivels his head. The sweat has evaporated leaving tracks of salt down his cheeks and neck. I don't think he can read a map. I slide it over and point to approximately where we are. He nods. He moves his finger north to a small word in the blankness. "Zemraguie?" He nods and repeats the word but it sounds nothing like what I have said. "It not my village. My village small walking to this place." I ask him when he left his village. He says yesterday morning. I look on the map. "You walked the whole way?" "Sir. My uncle write letter. He tell Afma work rice good work. He tell Afma Mopti three days walking." My eyes leave his and return to the map. I hold my thumb and forefinger in a pincer position on the scale, then measure the distance. "Did you stop to sleep?" "No. My uncle say three days walking." "Did you stop at all?" He smiles. I have not been attentive. His calabash is half empty. He must have stopped to eat at least once. Probably several times, rationing himself. He is reknotting his bundle. He stands up and places it back on top of his head. "Bon voyage, monsieur." He shakes my hand softly. I can feel the rough calluses. "Good-bye." He strides away, quickly getting up to speed. It is ten in the morning. He has been walking for twenty-eight hours and covered one hundred miles. Mopti is a hundred more. One day my motorcycle journey ends. On a desolate track winding through hills of sand a vehicle appears ahead of me. As we approach each other, it grinds off the trail. A hand comes out and flags me down. I pull alongside and stop. It is a tan Land Cruiser with blue stripes and tinted windows, spare fuel tanks welded to the sides. The windows open. There are half a dozen soldiers inside holding rifles between their knees. They are wearing sunglasses. They speak to me in French. I don't understand much but they are clearly telling me I can go no farther. I nod. They keep talking to me and I catch only words. Something about shooting, killing. I am waiting for them to drive on. Once they are gone, I can continue. They are waiting for me to turn around. One of the soldiers knows a few words in English. He explains that I am in dangerous country and that I should not be here. They will escort me back to the last well. I tell him I will follow behind them. He says no I will not. I will ride in front of them. I consider shutting off my bike and sitting down on a rock in the incandescent heat. Taking out my lunch and eating slowly, looking around, waiting them out. But they don't look like the type to put up with this routine. The well isn't that far back. If nothing else I can camp nearby and slip out at night. They follow right on my tail. Along the way there are places where I could dart into a narrow wadi and evade them and even if they started shooting, I would probably get away, but I think better of it. At the well there are two vehicles, another military Land Cruiser and an unmarked Land Rover. My escort sidles up beside its counterpart and windows come down. I ignore them and stop near the well. I prop up my bike and begin to untie my backpack. A lean white man steps out of the Land Rover and walks over to me. He is in wrinkled khakis and without a hat even though he is bald and the sun is malevolent. His eyes are a shocking white-blue. He introduces himself. I don't quite catch the name. A Scandinavian on contract with someone. He doesn't exactly say. "You have come this far, so you can obviously do what you want." "Thank you." I ask him what's going on. He says the Tuaregs attacked a small village where there were a couple of development workers. They didn't kill anyone. They tied up the foreigners and ran off with one vehicle, one motorcycle, and one moped. He is friendly. We slip into a large discussion about what is really happening in the desert. He says it's complicated. The Tuaregs want their own country. They want the Sahara. Their homeland was drawn and quartered by colonists -- Algeria annexed the north, Mali the south, Mauritania the west, Niger and Libya the east -- and they want it back. He says he has suspicions that Libya is providing arms to rebel factions. I say that he Tuaregs seem to be the only people who could possibly live in the desert, so why not just let them have it. "Well, yes, but ..." He pauses and gives me an odd smile. "You see, there are these nasty rumors that oil has been discovered somewhere out here, somewhere deep in the dunes." He points with his chin in the direction I have just been escorted in from. "I see." "Of course oil is like gold, isn't it." He grins, but his eyes are as cold as snow. "Makes people do crazy things." I don't trust him but I like him. He has bigger issues to deal with than me. I'm just another wayward traveler. I decide I can be honest. I tell him I want to go to Timbuktu and ask him what he thinks. "I think they will track you down." He says my motorcycle is too valuable. They will follow me and find me. They may or may not kill me, probably not. It is unnecessary. "They will simply take your motorcycle. The desert will do the rest." The Land Rover honks. "Excuse me." I stare into his eyes. "Who are they?" He lowers his head, then looks up. "Good luck." He stands and salutes casually, flicking out two fingers in front of his forehead. I realize he is not as old as I thought. He has just been out in the desert so long it has lacerated his face. He walks back to the Land Rover. Somebody inside opens the door for him and hands him his sunglasses. He shuts his door and the Land Rover pulls in front of the two Land Cruisers. Something is exchanged, then all three drive off into the desert. I spend the night at the well thinking. Sometimes you want people to care about you but sometimes you don't. If they care about you, it clouds their judgment. This man, whoever he was, didn't care in the least about me. He was not trying to scare me. Whatever happened to me was my own problem. In the morning I get out the map. I am still on the north side of the Niger. On the south side of the river there appear to be several stretches of road that hopscotch toward Timbuktu. Why not? I turn around and head south. When I drop into the Niger floodplain, I am stymied over and over by great strips of muddy water. Each time I eventually find a fisherman with a dugout and hire him to pole me and my motorbike across. It is two days before I ride up onto the southern shore of the Niger, find a piece of highway and hook north. Somewhere beyond a village called Douentza I come upon a roadblock. This time there are several jeeps and a troop truck and dozens of soldiers. They point their guns at me and tell me to turn around, and I do. I know I could go around them. There are no fences, no trenches, no barbwire. The desert is open. I could simply backtrack a few miles, turn left, ride out into the desert for twenty miles, turn left again, and continue northward. I am tempted. But I am also not stupid. No sense getting killed. Not when there's another way. The Niger flows right by Timbuktu. Back to the river.
Mark Jenkins is the author of "Off the Map" and is an investigative editor for Men's Health. He lives in Laramie, Wyo., with his wife and two daughters.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + Copyright ©1997 by Mark David Jenkins. From his book "To Timbuktu: A Journey Down the Niger," published by William Morrow & Co. All rights reserved. Reproduction or distribution without the author's express consent is strictly prohibited. + + + + + + + + + + + + Select |
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