Festival Au Desert and Timbuctu -- There and Back Again

The Road to Timbuktu

The last dregs of Dogon country’s vast escarpment, two black sandstone towers, mark the turnoff to Timbuctu, once the world’s most remote outpost, now quite the glamorous prostitute for many a rich (but poor foolish) tourist who puts herself through motor vehicle misery just to say “I’ve been to Timbuctu and back again.” We were ostensibly going for the Festival Au Desert, a music festival and traditional gathering of the nomadic Tuareg tribe, but during our six hour, bucking bronco voyage sans shocks and AC, swerving between a clay, potholed road to another sand bank “road” next to it, I began to fully appreciate the actual journey aspect of this journey, giving a good 23 “praise Allahs” to hoist our chances of even getting there. The scenery is disheartening, void but veiled in that kind of eerie and altogether seductive loneliness that belongs only to the heartiest of survivors. Thorny plants and sandy plains give way to a few goats or camels, some bored militia, and occasional mud houses, square blocks of earth against a flat blue sky that seem to dissolve right into the ground, registering as bumps, tiny hiccups in a matrix of otherwise unchanging, empty desert.

When our last legs, stomach, and bottle of Dramamine were about to give way, we finally arrived at the River Niger, which marked the last 20 km stretch of our journey to Timbuctu. But with that tricksty and downright saucy attitude of an oasis mirage, the river’s promise of soon to come dinner, cold beer and a solid ground evaporated in a haze of “good luck you fools”; to continue our travels on the other side of the Niger, we had to wait for one of two barges, the first of which appeared 45 minutes after our arrival, a tiny blue speck on the near shore, that held a whopping 4 cars at at time. At three pm, after nine hours of driving with our teeth gripped like bear traps, we were 40th in line, behind all of Belgium, most of Paris, and London’s suburbs. Do the math.

So doing what any proper and relatively rich American would do in a situation like this, we ditched our driver to jump a pinasse for the port (pronounced “penis”, which about kills me every time an African man approaches me to ask if I would like to ride his pinasse to the next town). Dumped on the other side of the river, we had 18 km to go, with no ride and somewhat faithful trust that our driver and bags would arrive at our Timbuctu hotel sometime within the next 24 hours.

We hopped aboard an open bed pick up truck with two Californias - one meeting a camel caravan in Timbuctu and one sporting a CamelBack water container - two French retirees, and an English musician hooking up with a couple of Berbers to play some “wicked sahara rock” at the festival. We reminisced about Burning Man and gossiped about the probability that Hilary had taken the primaries (none of us had had interenet access for a day, which prompted a quick call from my cell to the states, confirming our fears). Half an hour later an Arabic woman, shrouded in shimmery purple robes, gold rings, and a vixen stare, greeted us from a billboard that read “Timbouctou Mysterieuse. Bienvenue.” The temple of all voyages had materialized at last; we were dirty and internally pureéd, but otherwise alive and there in a city I thought for most of my life was just a metaphor for “somewhere in the middle of butt f*#!ing Egypt.”

A heap of square mud houses rose undramatically from reddish browns sand dunes, clutched by scrubby plants and piles of trash. A few men in dark indigo gowns and black turbans - the mysterious “blue men” Tuaregs - rode along next to use on camels the color and humpy shape of the land itself (true “camelflauged” animals...hehe). Our hotel, Passion du Sahara!! sat at the brink of another great expanse of nothingness, marked triumphantly with a stunning white marble monument - the Flam du Pays - that as its large concrete block of half-buried guns so starkly advised, paid hommage to the end of the first Tuareg rebellion. At the end of the road, the last barely visible hump of civilization before the blank part of Africa’s map, the Sahara Desert, swept onward for days, Timbuctu sat a quiet little outpost. It lulled with sleepy life, a fearless lack of ambition, and an overtone of mysterious energy that could only piggyback that raw, unkempt beauty of a place occupying the furthest periphery of anything and everything familiar.

The Road to Essakane, site of the Festival Au Desert

The next morning, we saddled up again to make the last 70 km trek to the Festival’s site, Essakane, guided by a tiny sign at the outskirts of Timbuctu pointing toward absolutely nothing, a rough dirt track, and our driver’s intution (which we hoped he had). Somewhere past sand dunes and more sand dunes, there sat a temporary Tuareg village, a large music stage, and a few hundred foreigners, waiting for us in an unmarked spot of useless, resourcless and largely forgotten desert identifiable 362 days of the year only by one small box of dirt. Essakane was the outpost of all outposts, on the way to....well, the Mediterranean Sea thousands of miles north with nothing but a few rabble rousing bandits and shifting seas of sand in between. As our quivering SUV sped through the biggest beach in the universe, I felt like we were searching for some lost treasure, a roving troupe of turbanned terrorists hot on our trail. Lucky for us, they were on camels.

Three hours later, Essakane poked its puny head above the dunes, a few packs of SUVs, outnumbered by elaborately decorated camels, and a small, brick archway guarded by jabbering militia, hard at work smoking cigarettes and drinking tea in the shade of thorny trees. It all felt like the film set of some bizarre, Hollywood movie (perhaps about terrorists or innocent little Arab boys playing with guns), the desert backdrop and camel grunts harkening what must have been Lucas’ inspiration for Star Wars (and as it turns out, Chewbacca’s voice is actually just a recording of a camel grunts). Skinny, denim clad Italians with hipster haircuts ran around with cameras and sound booms; Tuareg men in flowing dark robes squatted on the sand next to freely roaming packs of goats; a few dazed European suburbanites hid out in the shade of their SUVs until they could figure out what the hell was going on; and a few plastic tables and chairs sat under threadbare restaurant tents. We had arrived at the most remote music festival ever known to the Internet and New York Times, and we had absolutely no idea what to do next.

After a Vanity Fair article gave the Festival Au Desert an elite dose of international attention in 2007, it has grown increasingly popular since its initiation in 2000. This was fairly obvious from the rows and rows of identical white tents that housed large tour groups and a few circus freak do-it-yourself travelers like ourselves - all in all, about 800 Westerners were in attendance. What did we come for? The music - rumoured to contain Malian big wigs like Tinariwen - and the experience itself of wandering to the most remote ledge of the accessible universe having really no idea of what would be there waiting for us. Would we live like nomads, and finally understand that deeply mystical lifestyle of wandering the dunes, led only by the stars? Would we forge bold cultural bridges, the other Others’ brigade of colorless, godless and classless pioneers? Would we just sit in the hot sun for a few days, torching our behinds and proving to thick skinned Africans the flaky vanilla creme brioches we Westerners really are?

We waited for the answer to come that evening when the music would finally start - I pictured quiet fires surrounded by groups of nomads, strumming softly on the kora guitar. What we got that evening can only be explained by my new motto, an attitude of survival in this willy nilly, dysfunctional continent; “C’est Afrique!” It’s Africa. This simple phrase can be used to explain just about anything that goes wrong, starts late, or simply ain’t gonna happen. All of these things occur more often than not. On this particular evening, the music started four hours late, the sound was compqrable to high school dances held in the school’s gymnasium, and the headliner for the evening was a bunch of Swedish kids who sounded like they had spent one too many nights impersonating Led Zeppelin and White Stripes in their mom’s garage. Their classic rock wailing, which needed a good dose of puberty, was somewhat dignified by the Malian rapper MC Talkam granting the performance pizzazz points as at least an interesting experiment in Euro/African mish mash. But when M. Monte, an Austrian yodeler and one man show, boarded the stage, doling out an hour of flubbery, gritty riffs on his accordian, I had to wonder if we had paid 150 bucks to spend three days watching Euro MTV.

At the end of the night, when most of the Europeans had gone to bed and most of the Tuaregs bailed for smaller fires out on the dunes, Vieux Farka Touré, the famed Ali Farka Touré’s son, reigned in the discordant melangé of Euro pop gone terribly wrong with a stunning, rootsy performance of blues guitar, smooth mellow chanting, and that unmistakeable trip trop of African drumming.

The next two days of the festival would have felt mostly like a shopping spree if it weren’t for the twilight zone where ancient and modern worlds came together in bizarre and unpredictable ways. The incessant sales pitch of every Tuareg we passed was a turn off, but taken in stride it was an easy way to strike up a conversation about how many days by camel it took to trek to the Festival, or the importance of gathering in Essakane each year for the dispersed Tuareg tribes (the answer ranged from family meetings, to sharing music, trading a few goats, or as one goony Moptian put it so bluntly “the music is for the donkeys for all I care. I’m here to make money!”) Given the history of Timbuctu - a hugely important trading hub for trans Sahara transactions - it only made sense that a large part of this nomadic gathering would center around some sort of material exchange. It just so happens that currency today is no longer salt, tin, copper, camel hides and gold, but necklaces and decorative daggers peddled to tourists for whatever price the salesman can milk from them.

When it wasn’t a sale the Tuaregs were hustling, we were bombarded with Bambi-eyed pleas for un petit cadeaux, or a small gift that could range from the highly sought after Nalgene to an empty tin can (the most brilliant and effective recycling plan, as it turns out, is utter and abject poverty. Tell that to Al Gore). Determined to combat the stereotype that seemed to dominate all of the kids’ attitudes - hang around a white person for long enough and you’ll inevitably get SOMETHING from them - we sat with a British couple one afternoon exchanging songs with a group of scruffy looking Tuareg preeteens. We’d sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, explain the rough meaning in French, and they’d bust out with rich voices into that simultaneously haunting and joyful vocal strum of Arab-African chanting, their dirty little hands drumming whatever was around. "Un cadeaux?" they eagerly asked as we clapped for an encore. The Brits and I looked slyly at each other and smiled “Cadeaux, c’est la musique!”

The favor was returned the last night of the festival when my boyfriend and I left the Irish flutes of Liam and Paddy and a bizarre Inuit circus happening center stage for some low key wanderings out on the white dunes lit by stars you could touch. From a distant bonfire, we heard silky, deep wails of two women; and involuntarily led by the melancholy drifts of an unfamiliar scale and language, we found ourselves at a large fire circle, surrounded by mostly Tuaregs and a few quiet Brits sipping beers. We joined the circle and spent an unforgettable evening in the musical tides of a beautiful Tuareg guitar, accompanied by a man dressed in metallic brown and purple robes who sang what I could only describe as an Arabic lullaby. We sank easily into the steady ebb of his voice and strums, drifting away from the tourist chaos a few dunes away. I felt swept into a sense of aimlessness and easy enjoyment, what must have kept these nomads company for thousands of years during long caravans and their inherently lonely lifestyle. The time warp went on for a few hours, interupted only when the drunk Mauritanean would jump up every so often and shout “Sahara groove baby!” or I’d look over to find a beautiful, traditonally clad Tuareg woman (the only non-Western woman present outside the Tuareg camps themselves) yammering on her cell phone over a cigarette.

By the end of the festival, it became apparent that clash, coming together, hodge podge of ancient and modern worlds had reached the most remote corners of the planet with European style - the up and coming nomads were chic and battery operated. But the deeply Malian, Mauritanean, or Senagalese guitar riffs that railed between the Irish, Swedish, and Inuit performances, felt like coming to some borderless, primordial home - it was both at once the pillaged influence for Canned Heat and Janis Joplin and the cerebreal rapture of a totally unexperienced frontier of world music. It seemed, in the end, that the music of the Tuaregs itself had made the long voyage from Timbuctu, survived to see the West, and returned to its home, packing a few extra visitors in tow. It was only as the night ended and we wandered home to arrange our things for a sunrise departure, passing a pack of dredlocked Brits chanting “Om,” that I realized there was no place that custom could hide untouched forever, that goats would now and for as long as we know exist in the same playground as MP3 players, and that I would definitely be back again, maybe this time with a bit more tolerance for yodeling.

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