Still remote and hard to reach, this place is. Nine-hour bus ride to a town called Mopti. Then a three-day river trip up the Niger.

Mopti is a bustling river town where gondolas, called pirogues here, are still for transportation and fishing foremost, not tourism. One can hire their larger, motored cousin, the pinasse, for a three-day trip to Timbuktu, if one can endure the swarm of guides, brokers and boat owners that accumulates around toubabs, as the pale folk are called. We joined a trip that two Spaniards had already arranged.

Miguel and Gustavo were perfect companions — engaging and fun, but also experienced sailors, and thus able to reassure us when the 12-year-old cook boy started bailing out water with a pail. They also knew to take a hard line against continuing at night without a light, despite the reassurances of the captain, who was maybe 18 but had the brain of a 12-year-old cook boy.

The boat was long, thin and wooden with a woven straw roof and something of a “toilet.”
Believe us when we tell you that lying back on that roof, bouncing up the Niger, passing miles of white sandy beach interspersed with little villages of mud or straw huts, waving to herders and fishermen, the wind in our hair, the sun on our skin, the Spaniards keeping an eye on the captain, was something approximating heaven. We stopped now and then for bread or fish, and saw women washing clothes, children playing in the water, men repairing nets and boats, donkeys carting, chickens pecking and camels getting on a ferry once.

The first night we set up camp in the dark, in a pasture, which was unremarkable except to say, as Gustavo did after scanning it with his flashlight, that it was not necessary to be selective about where one relieved oneself.

On day two we stopped at dusk on a beach that could well have been on Cape Cod. We built a fire and made use of the road-weary little travel guitar we bought in Italy. It was a great evening, though it was interrupted briefly when about a thousand eyes appeared and it became clear that they belonged to a herd of goats, about the width of the beach, heading our way. It was a concern. But the herder issued voice commands, and they lined up single file and passed politely between our fire and the tents.

Timbuktu, with its mud buildings, turbaned Tuaregs, sand streets and donkeys, and the Sahara a short camel ride away, was great, notwithstanding the Al Qaeda cells.