Merry Christmas -- You got malaria!

This post is bound to be long, so for those of you who want the three word summary: sheep, Timbuktu, malaria.

Last Sunday, we sent Oumar on a sheep mission in the market. Our only criteria: small and cute. That morning, the landlord and his family had shown up and taken over much of the courtyard. Remembering how bossy his wife and daughter had been when they had come at the end of the summer, I was not too pleased to see him there, but it turns out that he is really nice. He gave Oumar some more work to do on the house like painting the bathroom and trimming the trees. More on that later.

Just before lunch, I heard baaing in the courtyard. I peaked my head out the door, and there was Oumar leading a mama sheep with a tiny lamb in Hamidou’s arms. Apparently after scouring the whole market, this was the only ewe and lamb combination they could find. In fact, even these two had already been sold to someone planning to take them to Bamako, but we bought them out.

Kevin and I have had fun giving them many names, but the ones that have stuck are Boubou for the mother and either Petite or Professor Bean Pumpkinweather for the little guy. Boubou is quite robust with a dark brown front half (save for her little white shoes) and white on the back. Bean is mostly white, but with some of his mother’s dark brown splotches around his face. He’s probably about three weeks old now, and growing fast. Boubou is tied up by the garden, but Bean can prance around as he likes, much to the chagrin of his mother who grumbles whenever he gets out of reach.

While I thought the landlord or the neighbors would kind of begrudge us putting sheep in the courtyard, everybody would tell us how fine looking our sheep were and congratulate us on them. I guess now we’re truly Malian.

With sheep purchased, we were free to go to Timbuktu. Oumar and I went down to the freeway to get transport information. We found a 4x4 going up the next morning whenever it filled up—could be 4AM, could be 9AM. The guy took Oumar’s phone number and said he would call when the car was going to leave.

Sure enough, at around 6 the next morning, I awoke to Oumar knocking on our door, saying he had gotten the call. We threw on some clothes and trudged like zombies to the roadside. Of course I should have known there was no rush. Why would anything leave on time in Mali? We sat there waiting for the car to leave until probably 8 or 9. I’d reserved the two seats up front next to the driver, figuring it would be slightly more comfortable than the middle seat with four people or the trunk with six.

The road to Timbuktu is awful. It’s a sandy dirt track engraved with mysterious ridges that bother the driver so much that he chooses to drive off-road in sandy ruts that make the vehicle fishtail. Not to mention that our driver looked to be about 16. Every now and again, we would stop and pick up some hitchhikers who rode on the roof on top of the baggage.

As you get further north out of Douentza, the landscape gets sparser and sparser. More sand, less trees, no cliffs. There were also an inexplicably large amount of donkeys in places with no villages in sight. After a grueling five or six hours, we drove into water world, where the Niger river sprawls over the dusty earth. We drove out onto this little dirt causeway and parked to wait for the barge to carry us across.

It took at least three hours for the boat to come. I was not feeling great at this point, sitting on a wooden bench, exhausted and slightly nauseous. Even when the barge got there, at the cusp of evening, I wasn’t sure we would get our vehicle on, such was the queue of cars and trucks waiting. They crammed an incredible number of vehicles on, though. Four SUVs like ours and two trucks, plus a small herd of cattle who would occasionally slip and fall in their own shit. Nevertheless, it was certainly pretty watching the sun go down over this wide expanse of water, with villages on little islands, their mud houses built right up to the edge of the water.

It was nearly dark when we drove off on the other side at the port city of Koroume. The drive from there to Timbuktu proper probably took no more than twenty minutes, since the road was actually paved. Driving in, we could already sense that we had crossed some cultural divide: the cobbled streets with adjoined buildings felt like some medieval European town and almost everyone was wearing turbans.

We were dropped off in the center of town, where we picked up our guide, since we had read you would be hounded constantly if you didn’t. His name was Ali and he showed us to our hotel, the Hotel Bouctou, and gave us a rendezvous for the next day at the hotel.

The hotel was simple, but it did the trick. There was a strange assortment of furniture in the room, as if someone knew that putting furniture in was a good idea but didn’t know how to properly carry it out. For instance, there was an armoire, but it had a chair right in front of it, rendering it totally useless.

We ordered some food at the hotel’s restaurant, the first thing we ate basically all day. I got through a bowl of vegetable soup when I started to feel cold and unwell. When my couscous came out, I had absolutely no appetite and only ate a couple of bites. After dinner, we retreated to the room, where I lay shivering uncontrollably fully clothed under a heavy blanket. I fell asleep that way, but the sleep was choppy and troubled.

The next morning, I was feeling okay enough to go out on our tour of the town. We started out looking at a couple of the old mosques, built in the 15th and 16th centuries, but redone every year, since they’re made of mud brick. Timbuktu is also full of beautiful carved wooden doors and windows, which our guide pointed out to us. Apparently they are all made by one family, and have been for centuries. We went into a little Podunk museum that showed a traditional Timbuktu house with artifacts and all. It was sort of interesting, but basically just overpriced. From there, we saw some of the old European explorers’ houses, Barth, Caille, etc., who braved desert raids and malaria to reach the fabled city. Those were only the ones who made it. The guide also showed us the Flamme de la Paix peace monument that was built after the large Touareg rebellion of 1996. They melted down some three thousands weapons after the cease fire, which gives you some idea of the scale of the conflict.

From there, we got sucked into a Touareg tent “for tea”, which was really an excuse for the Touaregs to sell us their goods. It was interesting being in the tent, a low building made of wooden poles covered in woven mats, but man, those guys were ruthless hawkers. And all of them will tell you the same thing: “You won’t find one like this anywhere else. Each piece has a story. For you I’ll give you a good price.” We basically got pressured into buying more stuff than we needed or wanted, but that’s okay.

After finally escaping from their clutches, we took a quick swing through Timbuktu’s market, which is basically like Douentza’s, then went back to the hotel. I rested up for a few minutes, then Kevin and I went out to find lunch. We ate at this little restaurant called the Poulet d’Or (golden chicken), even though when we ordered their chicken, it turned out they didn’t have any.

We were supposed to go camel riding at 4 o’ clock. However, after lunch, I started to not feel real great again. I felt sort of feverish and chilled. Kevin convinced me that it would be a good idea to go to the doctor just to make sure I was okay, since I hadn’t brought my thermometer or anything with me. Around 3:30, we asked the man at the reception about clinics, and he sent us on motorcycles with our guide and another guide to go see a good doctor, Dr. Toure.

He saw me right away. It turned out I had a pretty high temperature, at least 100 degrees, though I’m not entirely certain on my Celsius conversion. He sent me to the lab, where the technician took a quick blood test and confirmed that I had early stages of malaria. The doctor prescribed some malaria medication and aspirin to me, then told us to wait while he removed some cyst or something. We had to wait nearly an hour for him to finish doing that, just so he could write us a receipt. I guess I shouldn’t have expected a Malian clinic to actually go fast, even when it had started out that way.

The problem with the medication was that it needed to be taken with food, but I had no appetite. I picked up some bananas and oranges and bread at the market before going to the hotel. After taking the medication, I slept fairly well and woke up feeling okay. We spent the morning resting up, then headed out for lunch. We ate at this strangely American-themed restaurant and bar, which offered basically no American food, but it had a cow skull and some American license plates. Unlike the Poulet d’Or, they had chicken, and it was great.

Before our rescheduled camel riding, we thought we might go see some other sites our guidebook had talked about. We wanted to see the institute that archives all of the manuscripts, I think that must be where Jeremy works, but it was closed because they built a new building that wasn’t open yet. The guidebook also mentioned a water tower you could climb and get a good view of the city, but the guide seemed to think that you couldn’t go up that. We asked if we could go in the mosque, but it was closed for renovations. Finally, we settled on a library that archived some of the manuscripts, but it was also closed for the time being. The guide told us to just go have a drink at the hotel and we could stop back at the library before the camels.

In the end, the library didn’t open early, so we decided to ride camels and then hit up the manuscripts in the evening. We tromped over some sand dunes out the back of our hotel to where some Touaregs were waiting with camels. The style of riding is completely different than it was in India. Whereas there, you road the camel basically like a horse, with stirrups and all, here you sat in this big wooden chair-like saddle with a plank both at your back and up between your legs, and you crossed your feet on the camel’s neck. It was actually a much easier way of riding. But I suppose these guys are desert nomads, it goes without saying that they would have figured out the easiest way of riding.

We were led out into the desert by the group of Touaregs. Two men to lead the camels, one man to act as the main guide, another guy to speak to Kevin in English a bit, and the last one whose only purpose seemed to be to ask us “Ca va?” every three minutes. We reached the “door of the desert”, the place where the real dunes of the Sahara began. There, we got off the camels and scrambled up a dune to sit and observe the desert in all of its splendor. Here, the sand was still dotted with scrubby bushes, but apparently three days out, it becomes only sand as far as the eye can see. These guys do salt caravans: fifteen days out by camel to pick up the salt and fifteen days back. They taught us a couple words of Touareg, which I have completely forgotten, but it was interesting at the time. And of course, obligatorily, they hawked some goods with all of the same catch phrases.

After a while of resting on the dunes, watching little scarabs leave bird-like tracks in the sand, we got back on our camels and headed for home. At this point, I began to feel sort of nauseous. Maybe it was the rocking of my desert ship that was doing it, I don’t know. When we got off where we started, I just wanted to power back to the hotel. We rested a few minutes, then I pulled together some energy to go see the manuscripts, all the while feeling rather queasy.

The library was a beautiful building, if nothing else, with lovely doors and windows and a nice stone courtyard. They had a small room devoted to manuscripts, with some of the more interesting pieces displayed in glass cases. They had what seems to be the Gutenberg Bible of Korans, illuminated with real gold, as well as texts on Islamic law and grammar and science. It was a quick tour, but interesting.

It was dinner time, but I certainly didn’t feel like eating. I choked down a banana and a couple of oranges to take my medicine, but that was all I could handle. Kevin ventured out on his own for dinner, thankfully unhassled in the dark. He went back to the same American restaurant, where apparently the power went out for about twenty minutes, leaving him to drink beer and ponder in the pitch blackness of Timbuktu. Meanwhile, I just lay uncomfortably in bed, wanting to throw up but not being able to.

That all changed in the middle of the night, when my stomach decided it had had enough with the banana and oranges. Unfortunately, it didn’t make me feel completely better. When we got up at 4:30 the next morning to wait for the 4x4 to take us back, I was still feeling exhausted and nauseous. Luckily, the trip back went much more quickly than the trip there. We got all the way from Timbuktu to Douentza in about 6 hours, as opposed to the 10 for going there, but it was still a painful trip, bumpy and stifling since the driver had the windows up and no fan on.

Christmas day, and we were back in Douentza. We trudged back home, only to find with horror that Oumar had hacked all of the branches off of our two trees. Just splintered trunks standing like corpses beside our garden. No more shade. No more little chirping red birds. I was so depressed I could cry just looking at that. To escape it, I collapsed in bed. In the afternoon, we walked up to the post office to see if any of the mail I was waiting for had arrived. It hadn’t, but on the way back, as usual, a herd up sheep ran by us, and Kevin says, “Isn’t that Bean?” Sure enough, the little brat had gotten caught up in the herd and was crying incessantly, examining each ewe to see if it was his mother. Kevin ran to check if Bean was indeed gone, while I chased the little lamb back towards the house. Eventually, he ran into somebody’s courtyard, where I followed him and scooped him up in my arms. Kevin found me en route as I carried him back, confirming that indeed this was the Professor. The reunion of mother and child was ever so cute. When we got in the door, both Boubou and Bean starting crying and running towards each other. Bean proceeded to suckle, his little tail wagging. He is quite a naughty boy.

For Christmas festivities, we opened some presents my parents had sent to us, which made it feel like we weren’t quite so far away. I just wish I had been in better health. The whole time, my head was still throbbing and I had no energy.

Yesterday was no better. I spent the whole day lying around like a lump. In fact, I probably gave myself a headache just because I was sleeping so much. We tried to watch Wall-E last night, which my parents gave me for Christmas, but I just feel asleep. At 2 in the morning, I woke up, unable to sleep anymore, so I paced around the courtyard for a while in the cold night air until I went back to bed and drowsed until 6:30, when I needed to put my foot down and stop sleeping. Today, I’m finally feeling better. I thought it would never happen, but I have an appetite and my headache is gone.

All in all, not the most pleasant last few days, but still exciting and novel. I mean, where else can I get malaria in Timbuktu on Christmas?