The Twenty Seventh Story

While we were in Mali, my mom and I wanted to get to Timbukto. There were two main reasons for this- the first was the libraries, and the second was the simple fact that it is Timbukto. I mean, you just can't get that close to Timbukto and not go. "That close" though, gives the wrong idea. It is still hard to get to timbukto. There is no road. There's the River Niger, and there's 4x4s. We got it into our heads that we wanted to take a boat. Boats are expensive. We had met up with a pair of British folks, and we were going to try and get together to find passage. They found some other folks (another british woman and a couple, one Danish, and one Bulgarian). The bunch of us ended up splitting a boat with another group from Spain, and a French lady traveling with her Senegalese husband. The last two actually knew what they were doing, the rest of us were dumbasses. Because we had negotiated separately, the english speaking group was to be sleeping on the boat, while the spanish speaking group was to be camping on shore. The first night, there was a storm. It was amazing- the wind was shearing horizontally, driving rain in front of it like a blade. The spanish tents ripped themselves to bits in their attempt to blow away. The boat was leaky, but designed for these storms and thus mostly fine. Clearly, the spanish people needed to come in. But the english speaking crowd had spread out blankets and mosquito nets and what not covering every inch of the boat, so for a long time, we ended up with all the Spanish people sitting in a row on three sleeping bags. Eventually, through diplomatic means, we were able to gain some more land, but there just wasn't enough room for everyone to lay down, so we all played cards and accused each other of cheating in languages we didn't understand.