Kira Salak - The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu

In the beginning, my journeys feel at best ludicrous, at worst insane. This one is no exception. The idea is to paddle nearly 600 miles on the Niger River in a kayak, alone, from the Malian town of Old Sgou to Timbuktu. And now, at the very hour when I have decided to leave, a thunderstorm bursts open the skies, sending down apocalyptic rain, washing away the very ground beneath my feet. It is the rainy season in Mali, for which there can be no comparison in the world. Lightning pierces trees, slices across houses. Thunder racks the skies and pounds the earth like mortar fire, and every living thing huddles in tenuous shelter, expecting the world to end. Which it doesnt. At least not this time. So that we all give a collective sigh to the salvation of the passing storm as it rumbles its way east, and I survey the river Im to leave on this morning. Rain or no rain, today is the day for the journey to begin. And no one, not even the oldest in the village, can say for certain whether Ill get to the end.

Lets do it, I say, leaving the shelter of an adobe hut. My guide from town, Modibo, points to the north, to further storms. He says he will pray for me. Its the best he can do. To his knowledge, no man has ever completed such a trip, though a few have tried. And certainly no woman has done such a thing. This morning he took me aside and told me he thinks Im crazy, which I understood as concern and thanked him. He told me that the people of Old Sgou think Im crazy too, and that only uncanny good luck will keep me safe.

Still, when a person tells me I cant do something, Ill want to do it all the more. It may be a failing of mine. I carry my inflatable kayak through the narrow passageways of Old Sgou, past the small adobe huts melting in the rains, past the huddling goats and smoke of cooking fires, people peering out at me from the dark entranceways. It is a labyrinth of ancient homes, built and rebuilt after each storm, plastered with the very earth people walk upon. Old Sgou must look much the same as it did in Scottish explorer Mungo Parks time when, exactly 206 years ago to the day, he left on the first of his two river journeys down the Niger to Timbuktu, the first such attempt by a Westerner. It is no coincidence that Ive planned to leave on the same day and from the same spot. Park is my benefactor of sorts, my guarantee. If he could travel down the Niger, then so can I. And it is all the guarantee I have for this tripthat an obsessed 19th-century adventurer did what I would like to do. Of course Park also died on this river, but Ive so far managed to overlook that.

I gaze at the Niger through the adobe passageways, staring at waters that began in the mountainous rain forests of Guinea and traveled all this way to central Maliwaters that will journey northeast with me to Timbuktu before cutting a great circular swath through the Sahara and retreating south, through Niger, on to Nigeria, passing circuitously through mangrove swamps and jungle, resting at last in the Atlantic in the Bight of Benin. But the Niger is more than a river; it is a kind of faith. Bent and plied by Saharan sands, it perseveres more than 2,600 miles from beginning to end through one of the hottest, most desolate regions of the world. And when the rains come each year, it finds new strength of purpose, surging through the sunbaked lands, giving people the boons of crops and livestock and fish, taking nothing, asking nothing. It humbles all who see it.

If I were to try to explain why Im here, why I chose Mali and the Niger for this journeynow that is a different matter. I can already feel the resistance in my gut, the familiar clutch of fear. I used to avoid stripping myself down in search of motivation, scared of what I might uncover, scared of anything that might suggest a taint of the pathological. And would it be enough to say that I admire Parks own trip on the river and want to try a similar challenge? That answer carries a whiff of the disingenuous; it sounds too easy to me. Human motivation, itself, is a complicated thing. If only it was simple enough to say, Here is the Niger, and I want to paddle it. But Im not that kind of traveler, and this isnt that kind of trip. If a journey doesnt have something to teach you about yourself, then what kind of journey is it? There is one thing Im already certain of: Though we may think we choose our journeys, they choose us.