How I made it to far-off Timbuktu--Almost!
BY Richard Stiehm
Located on the legendary camel caravan route of the Sahara, Timbuktu is historically famous for being distant and inaccessible. A weekend safari I recently undertook proved that, even in the era of air travel, Timbuktu is much more unreachable than my boyhood readings about the place had led me to believe.
The idea to go to Timbuktu arose while I was part of a UCLA medical team in Ghana, studying the immunology of malnutrition. Six of us, including my wife, Judith, decided to take a weekend flight from Accra, Ghana’s capital, to Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, and then drive to Timbuktu. But our airplane developed mechanical problems in Bolgatanga, near the Burkina Faso border.
Bolgatanga has three bars, a bus station, a sprinkling of shops, a single hotel — the Hotel de Bull — and a cemetery where village boys were playing soccer among gravestones. Two young men offered to drive us to Ouagadougou, en route to Timbuktu, in their battered Volkswagen bus. Emblazoned in large letters on both sides of the vehicle as well as its front and back was the bus’ puzzling name: SKIN PAIN.
We settled on a price and were on our way. The three-hour drive to Ouagadougou was hot, dusty and bumpy, but, hey, we encountered no Los Angeles traffic! Ouagadougou, reeling under 100-degree-plus heat, resembled an empty movie set: no people, no traffic, no open stores — only scrawny dogs sleeping in the middle of the street. We made our way to the town’s only hotel, but it was closed for the summer.
So we reluctantly returned to Bolgatanga. The Hotel de Bull had only one vacancy, the honeymoon suite, where Judith and the only other lady in our group spent a fitful night. The men retired to the local boys’ school, run by a friend of the driver, outside the town.
We had told our driver to pick us up at 8 a.m. sharp to bring us back to town for breakfast and then to the airport. By 10 a.m. SKIN PAIN had not appeared. We hitched a ride to town and were enjoying brunch at the market when we heard sirens — the local police were looking for six Americans who, we were told, had cheated the SKIN PAIN
driver out of a negotiated fare.
The policemen arrested us and the matter ended up in a packed courtroom — clearly the most exciting Sunday afternoon in Bolgatanga in years. A bewigged judge in a black robe decreed that the Americans must pay the SKIN PAIN driver full fare, but that he must take us to the airport.
We flew to Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti, a region in Ghana, where we ran into yet more airplane trouble. The only other way back to Accra was by a “tro-tro” lorry, an open-sided pickup truck fitted with five rows of wooden benches for passengers as well as luggage and livestock roped to the roof.
By the time we got home at midnight, we didn’t even care we had missed Timbuktu.
Stiehm is a professor in the Department of Pediatrics.
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