I'm so happy Kati's took the time to share the few moments of our journey. Here's another piece from her, and you can see the photos illustrating what she's talking about in the Mauretanian and Senegalese gallery...
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Big sigh from Bamako!
Gorgeous things keep happening at such a velocity that it almost makes me panic.  I hardly begin to digest one striking moment, when the next is already in full bloom. I am spinning in circles trying to grasp at each experience so that I can remember and share it, but it is an impossible task.  Even now I have to force myself to sit down and write, because there is so much life just outside the door that it feel absurd to be behind a computer. But now that I am here writing, I realize that it will take great restraint not to inundate you with a thousand and one anecdotes, because so much has happened.  Hence the big sigh I mentioned above. I will give you the much much abridged update, which does no justice to the details where the real magic resides.

So, last time I left off Kinga and I were in Mauritania trying to hitch a ride on a cargo plane with some drunk Bulgarians. We ended up getting kicked off the tarmac just moments before the plane took off.  Our feathers were ruffled a bit, but it was quite easy to be philosophical, because if we have learned nothing else from traveling, it is that there are really no wrong turns.

Soon we would see why life wanted us to stay in  Nouackchott for a moment longer. We found a psychedelic Mauritanian tent to sleep in, and rejoiced at the thought of being able to wash our clothes.  At this point we were so dust covered that I was spending a good deal of time spacing out and having fantasies about doing laundry. Soap suds seemed inconceivably exciting to me. So we got clean, so that the new dirt would have a fresh canvas to cling to.  A man named Mostapha fell in love with Kinga and bought her vegan pizza. We ate cold french-fry sandwiches and broke the hearts of many men.  And somewhere in the middle of this, Rebekah showed up. And then it was clear why we had missed our plane. We are now a family of three.

It is rare in life to find anyone who hitchhikes.  Rarer still to find female hitchhikers.  So what are the chances that three hard core international lady hitchhikers would all be in Noackchott at the same time?   We agreed that this was an astral alignment as significant to the hitchhiking world as the meeting of Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley.  Rebekah is lovely German girl with a passion for Nobakov and languages.  It is really handy to have her around, incase we ever need to know the precise etymology of the nineteenth generative declension of the ancient Urdu word for "flagellence".  Also, she speaks French. So Kinga and I hide behind her and push her forward as our ambassador any time a confusing situation arises, which is pretty much every time we blink.

Rebekah had a mission.  Last summer she had been picked up hitchhiking in Spain by some guy she knew only as Pedro.  Apparently he lived somewhere in Mauritania, but she didn't know the name of the town. Rebekah wanted to find him, just for shits and giggles. So, armed only with a firm sense of absurdity, we set off hitching through a desert country three times the size of Poland in search of someone we knew simply as Pedro.

What occurred over the next few days is too full of profoundly beautiful scenery and knock-you-on-your-ass generosity for me to do it any justice in this email. What Mauritania may lack in material wealth, it beyond compensates for with its beauty, its landscapes, its people. I could go on for pages describing all the random homes we were welcomed into, all the strange food that we ate, and all the unexpected places we slept. Not to mention all the marriage proposals.  Being such a dusty place, Mauritania is probably one of the few places you will ever get a marraige proposal by someone who is simultaneously picking their nose. It is so lovely.

Once we were driven way off the road into the desert with a merchant man in search of his flock of camels.  We ended up sleeping in a nomad tent in the middle of nowhere, under a full moon so bright it made us squint.  We woke up to the chorus of 300 goats bleating all around us.  Another time we were dropped off fr away from any town rather late at night. We tried hitchhiking  by the light of the moon. We suddenly realized that we had joined the ranks of people who appear in the desert out of nowhere. We assumed that wouldn't work, and we would be spending another night in the sand and wind, but instead we ended up getting taken to a man's home, where we were stunned to find a lush tapestried room with soft cushions and sweet tea. We felt like royalty.

Ack, it really pains me to breeze through these stories without embroidering them with all their shades of significance. I think I will have to write about them at another time, or I will end up shamelessly disregarding the etiquette  of group emails.... So, I will not tell you about any more of those magical nights spent in the desert, or the days we spent tooling around in a funny old blue car (a Citroen 2 horsepower.... see the pictures). We visited springs and ancient ruins and infinite sand dunes.  All scenery inspired dramatic thoughts. There were so many moments in there that just brought tingles. A lot of synchronicity and humor and moments of pondering.  I will just leave it at that for now, even though it hurts to have experienced things so lovely, and want so badly to share them.

And then there is the story of Pedro. We never found him.  But I am convinced that we would have if he were around.  Despite its vastness, there seems to be no anonymity in Mauritania.  We discovered this several times a day, when new acquaintances bamboozled us with statements like, "Weren't you at the train station in Nouadhibou 10 days ago?" or "Aren't you the girl who tried to get her visa extended in Atar?" or "Remember me?I tried to sell you a watermelon once".....ad infinitum.  We felt like quasi celebrities, because everywhere we went, people seemed to already know about us.  In this same note, on our quest for Pedro, we heard so many times about a Spanish doctor in Chinguetti, and a Spanish man married to an American named Alexis, that I began to feel like I knew them.  Mauritania is weird. I quite like it.

And I really can't take the time here to even begin spelling out thehilarity of the many Mohameds we meet. It is now just a joke.  You get three points for every Mohammed you meet, ten points if he suggests marraige.  So many times a day we stifle giggles and shoot sideways glances at each other upon making a new friend.  "Three points!!!" we whisper.  We lost count so long ago.

Another thing I can say about Mauritania is that it really heightens your appreciation.  Food is so sparse and unappealing, that you spend half your tile searching for anything edible.  I remember the joy of finally reaching a sizable town, and we went off to scavenge food.  Half an hour later we reunited and shared our triumphant spoils -a jar of mustard, some decaying dates, and a bouillon cube.  Who would have guessed that a mustard and date sandwich could be so appealing?  And When we were lucky enough to have something as magnificent as rice, we could be heard exclaiming with absolute sincerity, "Wow, this is so good.  It has hardly and sand in it!"

A thousand other things happened, and then we hitched to Senegal. We thought after braving 80 kilometers of cratered dirt roads with a convoy of obese, sweaty, shirtless, piggy frenchmen, that crossing the border would be a relief.  But instead much madness ensued. We exited Mauritania, but then they wouldn't let Kinga into Senegal (because of her Polish passport).  Then they wouldn't let me back into Mauritania because my visa was used up. 
So, we were stuck in no man's land, on a bridge between two countries as night began to fall. A lot of sneaky solutions were proposed, and it was decided that Rebekah and Kinga would wait until darkness and then try to hike thru the marsh for 17 kilometers to the town of St Louis. I was a bit to lazy to contemplate such a sketchyhike, so I generously offered to take their bags and wait in a comfortable hotel room, poised to contact their loved ones if they ended up missing or imprisoned.  But our careers as international border smugglers was cut short when we were apprehended on the bridge by border officials, and taken into custody in the Mauritanian border post. Since there was no traffic passing in any direction,we had to spend the night there, in no man's land. So, incase you have ever wondered how two girls with three nationalities can be sleeping in one sleeping bag in two different countries....there is your answer! It was a sketchy situation, but we managed to laugh about it, and
appreciate the free accommodation. 
"So Kinga, how is the weather there in Mauritania?"
"Oh, its great.  Hey, be careful, I hear they have malaria in Senegal"....
I think initially the border guards were trying to suss out the situation and figure out if any of us were single.  They went out of their way to get us vegan food and cater to our every whim.  We acted just ever so slightly like prima donnas, and soon enough they grew sick of us (a development that occured shortly after we revealed that we were all "happily married")..... By morning we were angrily awakened and tossed in an unchivilrous manner into the back of a pickup truck which took us far far away from them. It was ugly and funny at the same time, and at least I got a free entry back into Mauritania.

A few hours later we snuck into Senegal over another border. We traded in the ubiquitous camels of Mauritania for the cartoonish baobab trees of black Africa.  The contrast was marvelous.  It is  a delight to soak up all the colors, and marvel at the striking silhouettes. I love seeing all the babies tied to their mother's backs.  And I never tire of watching how adept these people are at balancing things on their heads.  We saw one woman with six water jugs stacked so high on their head that they nearly doubled her height.  And another lady was just standing around, chilling out with a cinder block on her hear like it was nothing.  All day long we oooh and aaaah.

And again, six-hundred -seventy-three-thousand-one-hundred-and forty-nine profoundly beautiful things happened. Then we realized that if we hitchhiked like MAD, we could make it to Bamako, Mali, in time for the World Social Forum and a sure-to-be-mind-blowing concert by the African Reggae giant Tiken Jah.  We stuck out our thumbs and made record time hitching teensy rides across the north of Senegal.  By this point I was pretty much whimpering about all the beauty, and actually hoping that nothing amazing would happen, because I simply did not possess the capacity to digest on more morsel of wonder. This leg of the journey is a blur.  Somewhere in there there was an all night ride in a truck cab with 7 people, where I discovered several dozen new incredibly uncomfortable positions to not sleep in.  And there were a couple of nights spent with snippets of sleep along the roadside.  And miraculously, after a very fortunate ride with a member of one of Mali's Royal families, whose grandfather had 11 wives and 70 children, we made it to Bamako just in time for the concert.  We went, bleary and exhausted, to the stadium... Where we promptly laid down to sleep and missed the show.  And so it goes.

And maybe tomorrow we will go head off to Timbuktu. Life is such a cartoon!
Phew!
hugs!!!!
kat
 

So much is happening I don't even know where to start, and I just hope Kati will find a while to describe it all, or at least some of it. I mean sometimes there's so much happening, and other times we get stuck in the middle of nowhere waiting for two days for a vehicle to pass and bring us back to civilisation. That's what happened after we got a ride with a long wooden rice boat up the Niger river from Timbuktu. And we thought Timbuktu was the end of the world... Until we got off the boat two days later in a 'town' of Rharhus. A place that boasts street lamps along two sandy roads but electricity only comes when a minister visits the town. Anyway, after two days a pickup truck was heading through the desert to the main road and we got a ride with fourteen other people at the back. Then crossed half of the country again and made it to the festival in Segou where we're going to dance away the third night tonight. Anyway, I hope to put some photos from Timbuktu, from the river, the desert, the villages and festival soon, and hope Kati will write more.

And now from here... Kati and I are heading towards Burkina Faso soon, from where, sadly... she's flying home. Rebecah wants to reach the northern parts of the desert in Mali in search of a Tuareg husband. If she doesn't find one, we'll meet in Niger, buy a couple of camels, or motorcycles and see what's next...

It is a rare and precious moment in life when a metaphorical  destination  becomes undeniably literal.
When I grow up....
When I win the lottery....
When I am famous....  
For me (traveler girl that I am) this metaphor was "When I hitchhike to  Timbuktu...."
Months ago as I punched my timecard in a soulless summer job, I  concocted an  adventure that was sufficiently loony sounding enough to get me thru  the  grey days.  It made me (in my itchy polyester work uniform) feel so  gratified to say, when one enquired of my plans, "oh, I don't know.  I  think  I might hitchhike to Timbuktu."  I was in love with the lyricalness of  it,  and little acquainted with the logistics.  But it sounded so stupid  that I  repeated it often, and somewhere along the line lost sight of the fact  that  I was mostly joking.
 Fast forward some months, a lot of dust, 65,345 new friends named  Mohammed......and just up ahead we see the first sign that counts down  the  actual kilometers to Timbuktu. It is rather dizzying really.   I can  now  complete the trifecta of ridiculous destinations - Kathmandu,  Kalamazoo, and  the crown Jewel of passport stamps - Timbuktu! It is a funny  accomplishment,  but that is okay.  I am a funny girl
 But wow, what a long road to get there! Way back in Morocco I was  beginning  to prepare little excuses in case I didn't quite make it.  And then I  met  Kinga, and my doubt evaporated.  From the moment we started traveling  together I have been tempted to overuse the word "magic".  I have  pulled at  various threads of our story, and tried to weave them into some sort of  tapestry to share.  It never comes close to the palest shade of  adequate  though.  There is no way to fit a sky that big into words so little.   So I  am resigned to just tug at one more little thread with my dirty  fingers.  It  is a thread from a magic carpet…..
***
"We are all dirty", said a man with a deep, deep voice. But you. You  are the  "dirtiest."  He was talking to me. And he was right.  I was  spectacularly  dirty. I earned that dirt along the long blur of roads after Bamako. I  can  scarcely keep them straight in my head.  We went thru a town called  Bla. We  ate some mayonnaise sandwiches. We held hands with children, sang and  played  patty-cake. We saw many awesome women in flowing robes milling their  grain  by the roadside.  Rythmically they pounded their mortars, like pistons  of a  fine tuned human machine. Hard work rarely looks so elegant.   We met  waves  of kind people who took us into their homes and humbled us with  generosity  time and time again. We were so saturated with angels that we began to  lose  track of them.  And then,after several days of tiny rides we finally  ended  up in a truck that was going almost all the way to Timbuktu.
 The last hundred kilometers to the fabled city are thru the bush.   Rebekah  sat in the front seat with her window down, and I, in the back, didn't  quite  realize that I was getting absolutely COVERED with dust.  Now, anyone  who  travels thru the desert must just accept the dust in their life.  
Embrace  it.  I got used to the crunchiness it lends to my food.  Dust paved the  way  for my fingers and my nostrils to rekindle a friendship that they left  off  in childhood.  I was very hospitable towards dust.  Yet in the final  moments  leading up to Timbuktu, I think that the dust really took advantage of  me.   I turned orange.  ORANGE. More than one person asked me what part of  Africa  I was from. I got a lot of perplexed looks, and even a sneer or two.
 While taking a ferry across the river just before Timbuktu we met a  group of  elderly Israeli tourist women.  I have no idea why people like this  travel.   They were terrified of everything, convinced that every African was a  disease vector. They warned us that 60% of the population has AIDS, and  we  shouldn't shake hands with them because it can be spread from just a  tiny  cut. And  we shouldn't touch the children because we will contract  conjunctivitis and we could go blind.  And the water was teeming with  parasites that make worms grow under our skin.  These women were  actually  wearing surgical masks! And here I was beside them, bright orange and  hacking up dusty green phlegm. I licked my dirty finger and wrote my  name in  the dust on my vest. I can't believe they didn't offer us a ride!
 Our final ride into Timbuktu was in the back of a truck.  I thought it  was  very poetic that we entered the mythical town facing backwards.  I was  feeling giddy about it. Rebekah, with her Germanic composure, seems  less  enthused.  She declared that the ambition to go to Timbuktu was "So  American", in a tone of voice that I can tell she meant "American" as  an  insult. Though I am usually eager to critique my country and flash my  Irish  passport, this made a little bit of hidden patriotism rear up inside  me.  I  threw some dust at her and called her a Nazi.  But I don't think she  heard,  which is just as well.
 So what if I am "American."  I am glad, if that allows me to find joy  in  accomplishing something ridiculous.  It is curious how, in a long  journey  thru many lands, you have so many occasions to contemplate and redefine  your  own identity.  Within the parameters of a single day I can feel so  proud and  then so humble.  Extraordinarily wealthy, and then so poor.  So light  and  then so burdened. So young, so old.  So inspired, so bored. So  thankful, so  jaded. So far away, so at home.(I can abuse your goodwill with several  dozen  more couplets, but you get my point.)   Somehow, the ridiculousness of  having gone to SUCH extremes just to arrive at a place with a funny  name….it  provides a perfect context to embrace all my paradoxes and toss them in  the  air like confetti.
 So, as underwhelming as it may be in reality, I love Timbuktu.  I love  that  We arrived there backwards, covered with dust, laughing. I took a  shower  with all my clothes on, and when the water turned dark orange I felt  pleased. Maybe society doesn't really reward these types of  accomplishments,  but hell, I am proud.  I hitchhiked to Timbuktu, and no one can take  that  away from me for the rest of my life.

Here is Rebekah sharing her impressions of the boat ride we hitched from Timbuktu down the Niger river.
And you can read more about her African expieriences on her site: http://www.about-africa.tk/


I'll never accuse the Malians of being a lazy people again after I have  witnessed these boys stay up all night and shuffle water out of their  boat,  red-eyed but with steady movements the whole night through till the  morning  shift takes the queue. We spent the night sleeping on the stacked  merchandise -our sleep rhythmed by the bucket's dark slurp cutting  through  the dark as it sucks up the water, then the river's short cough, clash,  splash, as it receives the sparkling element- and  in the morning we  are all  ready to leave at eight in the morning as we were told. Of course -I am tempted to say- the eight in the morning are an African  eight in the morning, and resemble more a two or three in the afternoon  than  anything else and there is much idle time to be dawdled away till  departure,  lounging comfortably in the shade, eying the reflected light of the  waves  playing so beautifully like dancing white flames on the inside of the  bamboo  roof. We dilly-dally the morning away peeling oranges, reading our  books,  playing with the kids visiting us and I am even having my hair woven by  a  beautifully singing girl who has long monologue conversations in her
language, Bobo, with me as she does it. When after these long, short-whiled hours we finally set off, we are  not  disappointed. Our eyes bulge over (?) from taking in the green scenery  and  pretty villages and on the river itself we pass fishing boats,  merchandise  barges with sails sown together out of emptied rice sacks, totally  overloaded passenger ferrys with people's baggage topped onto the roof  reaching comical heights, and we are even pointed out some hippos,  although  all we can recognize are nondescript dark flaps, presumably of hippo  skin,  emerging unspectacularly shortly from the riversurface.
When the evening descends we stop to pass the night near a village  whose  presence we can assume only by the faint distant flicker of a couple of  lights, otherwise the moonless night's obscurity around us is flawless.  So  flawless indeed that putting your head in your neck and looking up,  those  timid lights that are puncturing the concave immensity of the sky come  as  such a surprise that their sheer number alone is doubly-awe-inspiring.
Stars, more stars, and layers of more stars till the night is all  light. "Look, the water is still enough to reflect individual stars", remarks  Kati.
The early morning is gorgeous. Woken by the roaring of the engine put back on and everyone scrambling  over  our sleeping stretched out bodies, I squint out into the breaking dawn  from  under my warming sleeping bag without even bothering to rub my eyes.  The  Fahrtmann's stark silhouette handling his long bamboo utensil to guide  our  way into navigable waters against the caramel and strawberry coloured  backdrop of the morning twilight sky is a memorable sight. Magic seems  to  stick to his every slow, sure gesture heaving up the long tool, then  plunging it back into the depths, alternatively to his left, then his  right.  The bamboo's clicking sound against the flancs of the barge as he  withdraws  it and the river water raining off the length of the stick, glistening  silverish – our slow advance seems ghostlike across this grey expanse  of  water. On land silhouettes of people and goats wander dreamlike between  their huts and shacks. Then, sunrise. As if by some invisible lever beyond that molten fine  line of  the horizon, the sun pops up - one immanently illumined mass of  blood-coloured jelly wobbling so insecurely you're afraid its skin may  break  and spill the whole glorious mess over the entire landscape, even  though for  the moment it is only leaking - so typically cliché laden beautifully it  may  sicken the reader- and swimming in the sea of colours that is exuded by  it  like puss is from a perfectly rounded blister. Such, it briefly dyes  the  flat mirror surface at it's feet into an illusionary continuation of  this  vermillion sky whose main vault in our back has already turned the soft  colour of day. And with the last splash of blush disappearing into  blue, a  corde climbing along the roof of our barge is pulled by the Fahrtmann,  which  agitates a bell in the back, indicating to the boy at the engine to  change  gears - it's safe now to send our barge off at normal velocity. So we move forward over the blindingly golden carpet the sun has now  rolled  out for us. And with the mesmerizing shadowplay at the stern of the  boat  having ceased to nothing but a boy in a worn out red jacket sat down  with   his arms crossed over his bamboo stick, yawning, my eyes wander off  taking  in the life that has begun on the river itself and along its shores: A flock of birds rising off the water and circling like the fluid  shadow  presence of a massive UFO over it - then splitting up, one half becoming  one  long, airborne, slowly forward moving shadow of a snake, before  amorphously  disaggregating totally and settling down. Horses drinking, one forefoot  inclined to bow down to the river, with cows browsing above them on the  top  of the slope. Herons plummeting in their flight to fish - there is  really no  excuse to get back to bed, the day has begun.