Cruising to Timbuktu: There are few places in the world so evocative and alluring than the legendary African city of Timbuktu.  And cruising the Niger River, one of Africa’s great rivers, to get there is one of the world’s great adventures.  But be warned; if you like your creature comforts, glamorous black tie dinners at the captain’s table and five-star cabins, this trip is probably not for you.  If however, you want to explore a remote piece of West Africa without all the tourist bells and whistles, passing through a landscape that the 21st century (and even the 20th) seems to have passed by, there’s no better way to travel.  Story by Lee Atkinson

Made in Mali: West Africa may not be the first place that springs to mind when you think about great shopping, but the artisans of Mali produce an extraordinary array of hand-crafted leather goods, jewellery and fabrics – at a fraction of the prices you’ll find on the rest of the continent.    Story by Lee Atkinson

24 hours in Timbuktu: Steeped in myth and legend, Timbuktu (Tombouctou to the locals) was once believed to be a city of gold.  In reality it is a city made entirely of mud – squat, dun-coloured flat-roofed mud brick houses and crumbling mud mosques.  You get the feeling that nothing much has changed in Timbuktu since the first European, the intrepid French explorer Rene-Auguste Caillie, made it back alive (many before him did not) to tell the tale of what he had seen in 1828. Story by Lee Atkinson

From here to Timbuktu : It’s one of travel’s great conundrums.  Everybody’s heard of Timbuktu, but few people actually know where it is, even fewer ever get there. But everyone knows that it’s a long way from here to Timbuktu, wherever ‘here’ might happen to be. To get there, we spent two days on a plane. Several more in a 4WD, followed by a bone-jarring trip in the back of a donkey cart.  Four days on foot trekking through remote villages where nothing much has changed in the past 300 years.  Three days up the Niger River aboard a leaky pinasse and one hour too many rocking against a very hard wooden saddle on the back of a camel.
Story by Lee Atkinson

Trekking in the Land of the Long Hello: The Pays Dogon, or Dogon Country, is an isolated area in eastern Mali, not far from the border of Burkina Faso in West Africa.  Cut through by the towering Bandiagara Escarpment, a 500-metre high, 150-km long line of cliffs that cuts thought the Sahel (the edge of the Sahara) the Dogon live in tiny villages of mud-brick houses that cling to the rock faces.  Rugged and remote, the best way to explore it is by foot. 
Story by Lee Atkinson