Memories after the event – The Niger in Mali

My first memory will be of the river trip that I took en route with my 2 Australian travelling companions. We took the boat from Mopti which is a heaving city/town on the Niger. Although Mopti is a long way from the sea, the river is surprisingly wide at this point considering it’s got a few thousand miles to go before it empties into the Atlantic in Nigeria. The river had started just 150 miles from the sea but headed first for the Sahara before turning east towards where our boat was waiting.
Mopti has hundreds of long wooden boats powered by outboards or teenagers with poles. Maybe 2 dozen of them are for tourists and ours has 2 crew and the 3 of us so there’s luxury in terms of space. It’s even got a toilet which is a cubicle at the front of the boat with a hole to the river below. It has a tin can on a piece of string, not to act as a telephone but to act as a receptacle for water for washing/flushing purposes. There’s palm weave flooring and a roof and curtains for shade. The boat goes slowly and quietly on the slow waters heading notionally down river but the flow is so slow you can’t really tell. We pass vastly overloaded boats and boats owned by individual families who live on board stopping for fishing or to wash clothes or trade

We pull into 2 riverside villages which are interesting for their mud mosques; the children there follow you around, holding your hand, but slightly erksome with their requests for cadeaux, bics or argent.

Our lunch stop location however is much more relaxing. We pull up onto the sandy Northern shore of the river. Little can be seen apart from some temporary huts that have been constructed by the nomadic people and which will disappear into the river when the rainy season arrives. Lunch has been cooked with vegetables being chopped with a machete and cooked in the pot on the onboard charcoal fire as we went along. It’s hot but the boat is low enough for hands to be dangled in the water and there’s a canopy to provide shade. After lunch we notice 5 boys of around 8 years old who are eyeing the boat from a distance. It takes them about 30 mins to get close enough to see that we are friendly. Joe gives one of them a boiled sweet (okay, not my idea of a good idea, but whatever). It is shared with his friends being passed from mouth to mouth – it’s going to last a long time as it’s still in its wrapper and to be honest, when they try it without the wrapper they don’t seem that much more impressed. Maybe it’s like me being given a sheep’s eyeball as a delicacy. After a while, the stares of the children become poses for the camera and then there’s swimming and acrobatics in the water. We don’t have a ball but an improvised game of “piggy in the middle” takes place using a filled water bottle.

When it’s time to go, after a few hours sitting in the still water, the 5 children push us off of the sand and back towards Mopti. More tea is drunk in a 5 stage process where the tea gets stronger and sweeter as the sun sets; silhouetting donkeys and more mosques as it does.