When I told friends I was travelling to Timbuktu, they laughed.
To most people it is a mythical town at the back of beyond. Most people have heard of the town but few knew exactly where it was.
Some thought it was in Asia, or in the outer reaches of the old Soviet Union.
Timbuktu is the most famous town in the northern African country of Mali. It sits on the edge of the desert.
It sprang up 1000 years ago because it contained a watering well.
It was the last stop before the long camel ride across the Sahara Desert to Egypt.
Timbuktu became more important 500 years later when political and military events forced scholars to leave Constantinople and settle there.
It became one of the most important world centres for scholarship at that time and about 20,000 students attended the city's university.
An invasion by the Berbers in 1591 ruined the scholastic ambition of Timbuktu and it has increasingly lost international significance since.
Timbuktu is a tourist town today and is where desert nomads bring their goods to the market.
The landlocked country of Mali is the 24th largest country in the world, but it is also one of the poorest.
It has a population of 11 million and relies on the Niger River, which runs through the country, for irrigation and its rice crop.
It was a 68-hour journey (including stopovers and plane delays) from Dunedin to Bamako, a city of one million, which is the capital of Mali.
I travelled with David Horne, the most-travelled New Zealander in the Los Angeles-based Traveller's Century Club.
The club lists 317 countries and territories on its list and Mr Horne has been to 216.
But being experienced does not count for much at an African airport.
You are still vulnerable to the sharks who are keen to make a quick buck from unwary and tired travellers.
A local African, posing as a travel agent, grabbed our luggage trolley and took us to a taxi. We called him Mr Smooth.
The going rate for a taxi ride from the airport to the Tamara Hotel is CFA7500. He charged us CFA20,000, the equivalent of $NZ140 for a 30-minute ride.
Advice does not come cheaply in African cities. If you ask someone on the street for directions, you are expected to pay for it.
We were joined on our 13-day trip around Mali by Elizabeth Migliore, an adventure specialist who works for a New York travel company, and Peter Kahl, a small-business tutor from Perth.
We travelled in a four-wheel-drive Land Rover with our guide, Sory, and driver, Mamadu. Our luggage was packed on the roof and covered with a tarpaulin.
Mali, a former French dependency, became independent in 1960. It is the third-largest producer of gold in Africa behind South Africa and Ghana.
Sory does not have a good opinion of the French stewardship of the country.
"They gave us fish but they did not teach us how to fish," he said.
Bamako is a city noted for people travelling around on motor bikes (cost $US800 new) and in old, green mini passenger buses.
The women wear bright-coloured clothing, including happy oranges and yellows. The men riding motor bikes also wore coloured clothing that sometimes resembled pyjamas.
Crash helmets are not compulsory on motor bikes or bicycles and people carry huge loads on their bikes.
The buses are designed to carry 20 passengers, but many more slip in and they are always overcrowded.
"Some of the women are pretty hefty, so the buses are bound to be overweight as well," Peter quipped.
We visited an outdoor cotton factory and saw women folding white sheets and then taking them across the road for outdoor washing and dying.
When dry, the sheets were taken to the ironing shack, where men beat the cotton using 5kg wooden hammers.
We visited the crowded Grand Marche, the mother of all Bamako's markets with its warren of streets clogged with traders of food, clothing and household goods.
It was a tight squeeze moving through the big crowds and narrow channels.
We saw the fetish stalls of the witch doctors, which are not for faint-hearted Western visitors. They offer a stomach-turning array of bones, skins, dried chameleons and rotting monkey heads.
We had lunch in quiet surroundings at the museum.
Outside, two men were sleeping on a concrete slab under trees in the hot conditions.
We saw a young boy sleeping alongside a statue of a large crocodile, but not at its mouth end.
We gained a bird's-eye view of the city from the hill above the town and saw the Niger River winding its way through the city.
In Mali, there are statues of some of the great independence leaders of Africa, including Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana.
Oil-rich Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi's Libya, a close neighbour, has invested considerable aid money in Mali, building several hotels in the capital and financing other development programmes.
In Bamako, there was a significant statue that was the symbol of African unity. Sory said it was easy for Africans to visit other countries in the region.
"There is a unity of all African countries," he said.
Islam is the predominant religion, with 80% of the population Muslims, but it is not the state religion in Mali. Other faiths are permitted and 15% of the population are animists, following the old religion.
Five percent are Christian.
It was the month of Ramadan when we were in Mali. Sory and Mamadu are Muslim and did not eat or drink anything during daylight hours.
We also stopped for a break in our travels when it was prayer time.
Mali remains a Third World country and this was evidenced by several power cuts during our stay.
We also saw the construction of low-cost concrete housing by the Government on our journey from Bamako to our overnight destination at Segou.
Mali
Population: 11,995,402.
Capital: Bamako (1 million).
Timbuktu: 32,400.
Government: Semi-presidential republic.
President: Amadou Toumani Toure.
Prime Minister: Modibo Sidibe.
Independence: from France 1960.
Area: 1,240,120sq km.
Currency: CFA franc. (XOF)
Religion: Muslim 80%, traditional 15%, Christianity 5%.
Official languages: French and Malian.
