We made our way from Djenne to Mopti to start our journey to Timbuktu. Mopti is the typical launch point for all those lost souls who think that you have to visit Timbuktu at least once in your life. The options for getting there are numerous. You could fly (not only is this notoriously unreliable, doesn’t this miss the point of Timbuktu??), drive (we’re planning to drive back, but the mystic of Timbuktu demands a more time consuming adventure to get ...

As quiet as Bamako’s streets had been in the middle of the night, they were an extreme of chaos at first light. The whole city was an almost cartoonish representation of every African city you see in the movies- roads shared by vehicles of all descriptions (some defying, by many years, the natural lifespan of any mechanical device), livestock, beasts of burden (including the human variety) , and vendors of all shapes and sizes- anything from a lonely soul s...

Not much to say about Paris- I just wanted to include it on the map because a number of people had asked about how you would get to West Africa from theory confines of Toronto. There is obviously nothing direct from Canada and even connecting through the U.S. offers up very few options. Air France, however, has a extensive schedule serving a number of their former colonies in West Africa so we’re using them via Paris to get to Bamako, Mali, and to return fr...

After a long, sleep-deprived journey to get to West Africa, Bamako hits us like a ton of bricks right in the customs and luggage area. I assume that the scene that played out would be akin to an announcement of the pending end-of-the-world in most places. People running and pushing in all direction, someone in a white lab coat demanding to see our Yellow Fever vaccination but losing interest the minute he sees a yellow piece of paper coming out of my pocket, line...

As with many of our trips, we stocked up on calories at our local (and favourite) restaurant for breakfast, the Cedar Kitchen in Tottenham. Knowing of our trip, the owners, Lois and Nick, bought us our "last meal"- a ominous sign??The countdown had actually started some months previous as we tried to arrange for visas (all 5 countries we're visiting require a visa) but because we had to keep mailing our passports to embassies in Ottawa, we decided to get only...