LISA LINDBLAD TRAVEL DESIGN February 2009 Extraordinary travel is magic often created in the simplest of terms. Dear Friends, 37 years ago this month I was driving across the face of Africa. I embarked in London with a group of ten travelers. Our destination was Kenya, and we had budgeted $800 and 8 months to complete the journey. Each of us had his own reason for being in Africa; mine was a broken heart. I was following a lover who had left me for the freedom of the road and the excitement of a front row seat on Angola’s Independence struggle. I went looking for one love and on that journey I found another — Africa, itself. On that long trip which sliced southward from the Mediterranean and then due East to the Indian Ocean, I saw landscapes and cultures I had no inkling existed. Yet, in a strange way, from the moment I landed on the continent, I felt surprisingly at home. The deep contentment I experienced when I touched foot to soil has never changed. Over the years, I have spent much time in North, East and Southern Africa. And yet I have never returned to West Africa — until now. While clients and friends were casting around this Christmas for last minute deals in the sunny Caribbean, I booked a ticket to Dakar, Senegal and then onwards to Bamako, Mali. Not a “travel designer” for nothing, I benchmarked my itinerary with Goree Island, Dakar, at the start and the Mosque of Djenné, Mali, at the close. Both sites, which have been on my wish list for years, provide a window into the dark and the light places of the human soul. My travels in between focused on the richness of the ordinary — markets, music and creativity. DAKAR & GOREÉ The Jo’burg-bound Delta flight landed at the ungodly hour of 4:45AM and dumped a handful of us into that velvety African night scented with traces of fire smoke and ocean. After four hours of sleep I took a whirlwind tour of Dakar, Senegal’s shabby, dusty capital. There’s some good stuff here --- the marketplace with its tailors and embroiderers who vie with each other to make the most outrageous clothing, shops of Mauritanian tie-dyed voile and Basin, dyed cotton pounded stiff and shiny. Worth a visit are the hand-woven textiles of Aissa Dione, Octavio Fleury’s funky furniture at Nulangee Gallery in the old port of Rufisque, just up the coast, and the Aubusson-style tapestries in Thies. One of the crown jewels of President Leopold Senghor’s 1930’s literary and artistic movement, négritude, the Thies factory produces cotton tapestries woven on hand looms with quintessentially Senegalese colors and designs. But the main attraction of Dakar is Gorée Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that has been used to dramatize the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. A short, very crowded ferry disgorged us in a port whose delightful French colonial architecture, open-air restaurants and art colony atmosphere contrast chillingly with the island’s history. I visited the House of Slaves with is central courtyard and windowless cells where prisoners were kept. And then, next door, I found the lovely house of a fourth generation islander that I had seen photographed in a book on African interiors. Vermillion walls, sea green trim, a tangle of potted plants in the central courtyard and a child’s laughter upstairs --- upstairs, above the same dank, dark cells I had seen in the Slave House. Yes, indeed, all of these houses built cheek by jowl on this rocky lip fronting the Atlantic and the New World beyond had been warehouses of misery, holding pens with a single exit, the “last door” as it was called --- a bolted gate through which men, women and children, Africa’s black gold, were thrown on to waiting dinghies and ferried to ships anchored on the horizon. BAMAKO, MALI Mali is the seventh largest country in Africa and one of the poorest nations in the world. Yet there is an unbelievable richness to the country --- in ready smiles, in vibrant textures, in musicality, in elegance and grace. The lifeblood of the country, its critical artery, is Africa’s third longest river, the “strong brown God” as it is often called, the River Niger. Wide and sluggish, clogged in places with sansevieria, smooth as satin in others, the River seems to feed a country. Capitaine and catfish --- fresh and dried --- are on offer everywhere, and the emerald gardens along the Niger’s bank, watered painstakingly with calabashes, produce the most astounding vegetables. The Niger is a highway, an irrigation source, a trough, a washbasin, a pool to splash in. A short evening flight landed me in Bamako, Mali’s pulsing capital that straddles the River. Frenetic, dusty Bamako, with its crazy mad traffic, its Grand Marché bursting at the seams, and a serene National Museum dazzling the visitor with a superlative textile exhibit. Bamako’s soundtrack is Toumani Diabaté’s Kora masterpieces, the sweet voice of Salif Keita, and the songs of Amadou & Mariam. “Taxi Bamakò, òu tu veux, je t’amène, taxi Bamako, taxi Bamako” they sing on Dimanche à Bamako, a refrain lifted from life on the swirling streets. You can find the social history of Bamako in the images of two of Mali’s great photographers, Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe. Keita is gone now, but I spent a morning with Sidibe, well into his 80s and nearly blind from the magnesium flashbulbs he used to make portraits of the thousands of Malians who came to pose in his studio. That “studio” is a curtained closet of a storefront, lined floor to rafters with hundreds of cameras and lenses. Sidibe fetched me the Brownie he started his career with 50 years ago, and we poured over portfolios of tear sheets dating back to the 1960s. And that is the Bamako I love --- ancient strings plucked on a street corner, a legendary photographer reminiscing on a life he deems ordinary, a master textile designer sharing the secrets of indigo he has spent a lifetime learning. Bamako is a quintessential African city within which nestles the old habits of the rural countryside. Bamako’s Best: Hotel Tamana, Le Relax for lunch, Blah Blah Café for dinner and Moffou, Salif Keita’s club, for music; Studio Malick (worth a visit even if Malick Sidibe, now an old man, is not around); Aboubakar Fofana for his beautiful hand spun and hand-dyed indigo textiles. Recommended Listening: Deedee Bridgewater’s Red Earth: A Malian Journey. SEGOU The road to Segou is a tarmac ribbon unfurling through a landscape studded with karité and baobab trees dusted ochre in the dry season. Mud villages rise out of and disintegrate back into the earth, leaving organic forms that are often very beautiful. Market towns spill on to the highway and, at intervals, roadblocks of rusted 5-gallon drums, manned by guards in meticulous army fatigues, halt overburdened taxi buses. Along the roadside the women walk, dressed to kill in costumes fit for a party. Stitched by market tailors who advertise their stylish designs on great picture boards, the women take infinite care and, obviously, infinite pleasure in decorating themselves. What amazes me is the meticulous way they turn themselves out. In a land where even a Ziploc bag cannot keep the dust at bay, I have yet to understand how women emerge from their mud brick houses, no cupboard or chest for storage, dressed in floor length gowns and flamboyant headscarves, ironed to a crisp finish. And together, like a flock of showy birds, they set to their tasks, drawing river water, harvesting millet, tending goats and nursing babies. Segou is Mali’s second largest city, but with none of the tension of Bamako. It stretches lazily along the Niger like a cat taking the sun. I believe, however, that its boulevard of shade trees, French colonial and neo-Sudan architecture, and growing expatriate population will, in due course, turn it in to another Marrakech. Guest houses, galleries and shops, boat trips on the river, private houses mimicking the arabesques of the town’s celebrated architectural style are proliferating. Segou’s answer to Bamako’s indigo master is Boubacar Doumbia, Mali’s legendary mud cloth artist and expert on natural dyes. He is the founder of the Kasobane collective whose mission is to conserve the natural dying techniques and designs of Mali, particularly bogolan or mud cloth. From the spinning and weaving of the organic cotton to the dying and decoration, all the work is hand done by craftsmen whose panels are shipped worldwide. I spent the morning with him in the adobe studio surrounded by bogolan artists, each applying designs in mud on an outstretched cloth dyed in differing hues of yellow ochre. With a piece of chalk he schooled me in the symbolism of the iconography, drawing parallel lines, spirals and crosses on the concrete floor. And then he drilled me on my lesson and had me design and interpret my own patch of bogolan. If you want to learn, you must begin as a child. Another lovely day was spent on the river aboard a simple pinasse, the graceful dugout canoe that plies the Niger. Our destination was Segou- Koro, old Segou, the original capital of the Bamana Empire interesting for its old mosque and the town’s ancient mud brick buildings. Only five miles to the west of contemporary Segou, by pinasse it took us almost two hours and offered a slow motion movie of life on the river: Bozo fisherman gathering nets, women and children fetching water in calabashes to irrigate the gardens running alongside, goats drinking and children playing under massive old mango trees, root systems grasping at the eroded shore.