Well here comes the tricky part of the journal. From here on out there’s some stuff that I have to censor... I’m really sorry but the situation is honestly out of my control. Nothing bad happened on our trip. Nothing too vulgar, violent, disturbing, or debauched; but there are still some things I can’t talk about right now. I hate to do it but you’ll have to trust me on this one, there are some very good reasons why I can’t write up everything that we did. This is serious, if you already know something about my trip then you’ll probably be able to see what I’m leaving out. I’m not going into my reasons for this omission, but believe me, I do have them. Perhaps if people are still interested or maybe just to please myself I’ll put the whole story up here one day, but for now, you’ll have to be contented with this truncated version of events.

We’d been planning on taking a camel trip for a night or even two out into the desert to see the dunes, and get some more interaction with the local Tourag culture. The Tourag are one of the biggest tribes in Western Africa. Actually they might be the biggest. They span an area ranging from Mauritania, to Algeria and Mali, out to Niger. They are desert people with a rich quasi nomadic culture and man are they tough. I think they have been fairly romanticized by legend in a way, I mean they are just people. But they have a very Arab flair, even though many of them are as black as other Africans. And I think just living in the desert, being able to survive where most people could not impresses others.

But onto the camels. We’d been recommended a guide via the Peace Corps bulletin board in Sevaré, and had written an e-mail to him. Unfortunately though he was out on trek, with a group of tourists and couldn’t take us, or respond to our mail. So once we arrived into Timbuktoo we set about finding our own guide. We met this kid Alhadji (sp?), and agreed upon a price only to go back to his compound and find that his older brother, the only who actually owned much of the families camels could really not accept the deal we’d made. I guess I understand in a way, this kid is trying to prove himself in the family business, thying to make his own deals, but he really shouldn’t be promising things he can’t deliver on. Anyways, we struck a deal with the brother, that was still very much on the good side for us, but I think he felt like his reputation had to be upheld after his little brother screwed up. As we were finalizing things though, we came to realize that the e-mail we’d sent was actually directed towards these boy’s cousin. This is a problem, we’d basically stuck a deal with these guys for a 3 day camel trek, and all of a sudden it looks to them at least like we’d agreed to a camel trip with their cousin. Now its all in the family, relatively speaking (haha), but who do we go with, or more importantly which head of the household will get the money from the trek... it was quickly becoming a family squabble, so we attempted to solve the situation by agreeing to go with the family of the original guy we’d e-mailed. Problem was the guide that was recommended, Momotie, was already on trek, so what could we do. Well, we met the father of the family, and he said we could go out with his other son. This sounded fine to us and so we signed the contract. Little did we know that this other son, our guide Almaheddy, really didn’t know anything about guiding, or tourists, all he knew was camels... but now I’m getting ahead of myself.

We’ve got a trip scheduled for 3 days and 2 nights out into the desert. 5 camels will be coming on the trip: 1 for each of us, 1 for the 2 guides (we got a second guide/cook/camel-wrangler thrown in, named Mohammad), and 1 for the baggage. We’ve been given the other guide, firstly to make us more comfortable with the highly inflated price, but also because Almaheddy apparently doesn’t speak very much French. Then again, how much do you need when riding a camel through the desert: stop, go, sleep, toilet, eat... not really so much. Anyhow we’re off now, the camels are ready and we gotta fly.