Hotel Hendrina Khan Timbuktu

... with the mud walls being repaired. Took at path visiting the following: Sankore Mosque, Grand Marche, Ethnological Museum, Place de l'Indepence, Dyingerey Ber Mosque and Maison des Artisans. The harmattan (sand being blown in from the desert) was blowing through the city during the time we were there. Went for a camel ride into the desert with Tuareg and into one of their ...

Leaving for the myst**ious and exotic destination of Timbuktu. It conjures up images of an unreachable destination. A place that people have tried to reach for centuries and have failed. Now its my turn.



The plan is to take a 2 day boat journey downstream on the ***** riv**, then a small truck to Timbuktu. The local boats in this part of the world are called Pinnasse (pronounced PENIS-EE), they transport anything and ev**ything along the ...

... ve all learnt a little more about each other. So when the suggestion is made that we can visit each of the families of the five artisans and take Tuareg tea with them outside the strictures and expenses ( for them) of formal dinners when goats have to be slaughtered - it's greeted with enthusiasm on all sides! We see how the Tuareg nomads have adapted to town life when we visit Mohamed Tasak and his family in his house on the edge of ...

... bills too. Hmmmm. I wond** how many decades I'll have to wash up in the hotel to earn my keep. Will I ev** see Cradley and Home End Farm again? Just when things are looking a bit bleak , my mobile phone springs to the rescue and suddenly picks up a signal ( It had been lying dormant since we left Mopti) I text a v**y good friend : No money and can't get any on card to pay hotel bill. Please send money by West**n Union. ( This is a v**y good ...

... our Tuareg artisans. We were asked to say a few words and say why we were there. So I learnt that the man sitting next to the Mayor was Steve from Gwernyfed High School in Hay and representative of the Hay Twinning Committee, the two other women were Sandra and Beth - also teachers from Gwernyfed, and Paul was one of the doctors from Hay. The teachers were there to forge links with Timbuktu secondary schools and to do risk assessments for ...

... I struggle with the tooth grinding sand in the bread and dip it tentatively into the mutton stew. I wond** if they complain that our bread has no texture? A Malian who visited Hay on Wye commented that Britain is a beautiful country but shame about the food ! It seems that ev**y home he visited off**ed tea and cake, which he found unpalatable. Luckily he didn't visit blue-ging**! It's quite a walk to find ...

... Festival, met three Tuareg artisans, including Mohamed Al Hare.He has an infectious laugh and a warm and friendly p**sonality. They tell us that they left Timbuktu at 6am, and have driven without stopping (except for pray** and refueling )to arrive with us at 3.30pm. And they want to make a quick turn-around and drive back through the night, while it's cool. We p**suade them to have dinn** with us and Steve finds accommodation for them, and we come to ...

... at the airport, we were, of course in plenty of time so I took myself to the loo and the first bout of the inevitable trots had started... oh joy, right before I had to get on a plane with no toilet for an hour... what to do? We stood around staring at one another as I have discovered is the way of things in African Airports, no one is entirely sure what is happening, but you generally all get boarded onto the plane with 5 minutes until take off. An ...

... of ancient, and beautiful manuscripts. All in terrible disrepair, in need of preservation and a good musuem cabinet. They looked absolutely stunning with their Arabic writing and decorative scripty gold fonts. There was even one written on very fine lambskin (unborn lambskin I think). It was fascinating but language barriers made it hard to get the full picture of anything. We had some time to kill ...

It was one of my most successful trip ev** !
Mali means hippo in Bamana language and we saw them during our cruise on the ***** Riv**.
We headed to Timbuktu the city of legend that truly exists on the fringes of the Sahara Des**t
and we attended the Grand Opening of the new library of Ahmad Baba's Cent** for ancient
Manuscripts, financed by the Republic of ...