Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles To Timbuktu By Kira Salak

Relates the tale of the author's journey of more than six hundred dangerous miles on the Niger River from Mali's Old Segou to Timbuktu, enduring tropical storms and the heat of the Sahara to fulfill her goal of buying the freedom of two Bella slave girls. Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles To Timbuktu

Loved this book. A remarkable woman confronts the unknown and her fears as she kayaks alone six hundred miles down the Niger river. The journey a meditation and inquiry into life. Much learning happens, some of it familiar to me:

People don't seem interested in me much beyond what I might be able to give them. They see my white skin and reduce me to an identity I can't shake: Rich White Woman, Bearer of Gifts, nothing more. This is an important lesson--the way people so easily label and dismss each other. I'm dismayed by how simple it is for me to get caught in the same game, to start seeing every passing man in a canoe as a threat or as someone who only wants something from me. In this cordoning off of the people I meet, in this mistrust, I deny them their humanity. Do we ever greet people without wanting something from them? Without hoping they'll give us certain things in return--love, money, approval? Without wanting them to change, or to do what we want, or to see us the way we want to be seen? What's stopping us from simply finding joy in another's presence? Kira Salak Travel books are the perfect antidote against quarantine. I find it refreshing to read one written by a woman, as they are very often macho affairs full of testosterone. It is beautifully written, and manages to convey the sense of existential dread that comes from kayaking though a notoriously dangerous land. That said, l don't really understand the motivation behind the journey. Perhaps I'm not adventurous enough. Kira Salak
About 10 years ago, Kira Salak paddled on her own through the sub-Saharan nation of Mali on the Niger River, heading from a town called Old Segou to the fabled city of Timbuktu, although, truth be told, Timbuktu has been a ramshackle poverty-ridden village for nearly 400 years now, not the onetime cultural and trade center of West Africa.

But this journey wasn't really about seeing the marvels of Timbuktu. It was, first, an homage to an intrepid explorer from the early 19th century named Mungo Park, who eventually lost his life trying to follow the Niger in its giant loop through Africa. But more than that, it was a personal test. Could she persist through hundreds of miles of paddling an inflatable kayak through intense heat, an object of curiosity and sometimes anger to the people she passes along the way.

Some of what she feared most -- crocodiles and hippos -- were hardly a threat, except for one day late in the trip, and even then, the hippos were docile. The real challenge of her trip was the people. Time and time again, all villagers along the river seemed to care about was that she was white and might have money. Nearly every time she landed, villagers would crowd around her, shouting, touching her, demanding money, and it would take a village elder to sometimes physically beat people away so she could go to the chief and pay tribute for food and a place to sleep.

But that was often redeemed by individual encounters with villagers who treated her with kindness or took her under their wings.

As she neared the end of the journey, she encountered particularly hostile Tuaregs -- descendants of Arab Moors who once conquered the region, and who unofficially kept African slaves from a particular tribe. She was struck with dysentery and could hardly eat, and then, barely having recovered, she wanted to negotiate with her remaining money to free two women slaves. Finding out what happens will be one of your rewards for reading this book.

This is not a travelogue that uncovers new wildlife at every turn or delves into the ethnology of each tribe. And yet Salak writes so well that she kept me engaged throughout the trip, even when she was writing about her exhaustion, boredom or frustration.

A fascinating journey. Kira Salak My miracle was Four Corners

Maybe I am a different person when I began to read this book - it took me years to finally finish this because I read it more like a fiction novel one eventually falls asleep to, except I would get so offended at the focus of this book every now and then i'd just not come back to it for months . I came to this book because I needed the inspiration that Four Corners proved to be for me, I looked for that feeling of adventure invoked by curiosity and calling. But in this book, maybe it was the nature of this expedition I didn't understand - I remember feeling struck by every other thought EXCEPT the one that asked but why wouqld you do such a journey when I read Four Corners, I didn't think of it once because it added up the story felt self-explanatory. Maybe I was a person closer to who she was then and someone in the years since, I too have been to the continent and back, had my own journey with my own reasons, built my own version of ethics and what I do for me and what k do for the world and how they are disconnected only in reward, I stopped seeing someone I wanted to be in her journey. It was like the animus I read about, the Park Mungo inspired journey that was traversed for personal triumph but deliberately infused with hints of I am doing this for the world, repeated attempts to be the better person and show the beautiful continent in the depressing light it's always shown in, just broke my heart.

I honestly don't know if this can be even counted as a review, I am just so fucking sad that this book wasn't everything - I am working on my expectation setting but holy shit, I would not recommend reading this one Kira Salak Following in the footsteps of Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who traversed the land and the river in the eighteenth century, Salak sets out to kayak down the Niger River in the west African country of Mali. Unlike Park's ill-fated -and ultimately fatal- journey, Salak makes it to Timbuktu, the ancient city of gold right below the Saharan desert. Her journey was funded by the National Geographic Society, and she often runs into the hired photographer who is documenting her travels at stops along the river. (His photographs of Salak's journey can be seen on her website) She sets out from Old Segou with only a few vocabulary words of local tribal languages and a working knowledge of French. She has her inflatable red canoe, and a backpack of supplies.

Salak's writing style is very engaging - her strength and her fortitude come across in her writing, though never with a tone of arrogance. Each trial or trouble she encounters (and they are many: ripping a bicep muscle on the first day, hostile tribes, hippopatomi, dysentery) is documented clearly and unbiased. Any other person would have called it quits - but Salak finds courage and prevails in all of the circumstances.

Interwoven throughout her own narrative, Salak recounts Park's journey, over two hundred years before her own. Park was taken hostage, many of his crew members died, and he eventually died as well, although the circumstances surrounding his death are unclear. Salak relies on Park's diaries and determines that while they are from centuries ago, many of the stories hold true: other places have changed, but this region of Africa has largely remained the same.

My only criticism of the book is that this incredible journey is condensed into a rather small book. I would have enjoyed more passages about the river itself, describing the geography, the biology, and the life of this body of water. The river is undoubtedly a character in the book, but it is largely unknown to the reader - a looming figure that is left a mystery. Perhaps this was done consciously, showing that the river cannot be understood or predicted. The other complaint comes from the last chapter: when Salak arrives in Timbuktu, she makes it her mission to free two slave women (they work without compensation and are fully abused by their masters, yet the Malian government refuses to call it slavery, despite this whole caste of people - the Bella - being continuously subjugated) from their Tuareg masters. She describes how this has been one of the missions of the whole trip. Then why did she mention it for the first time in the last 10 pages of the book? As a reader, I felt a little cheated for not knowing this earlier... that should have been something talked about at the beginning of the account. Her work is admirable, without a doubt, and she does free two women and gives them gold coins in order to start their own business. This whole encounter is discussed so quickly, that it almost seems like a gloss-over of the whole practice. Salak has to know that giving these women a gold coin is not going to make their life better; that being said, I am not discounting her action. One woman cannot go up against hundreds of years of the peculiar institution in a slowly developing country. I do wonder what happened to those two women after Salak left them in Timbuktu, only minutes after freeing them.

Salak's amazing journey left me hungry for more adventure - luckily she has a few more books on her other travels. She is a strikingly brave and courageous person, and a good writer too. I look forward to more. Kira Salak

Kira Salak Á 2 Characters

Salak is a good writer and a very determined person. Overall, this was an interesting travel/adventure book. But the book's weakness is that Salak wants this to be more than what it really is, a physical challenge with some unpleasant cross-cultural encounters. She seems to want to convince both the reader and herself that this was some great experience of enlightenment, even if she can't offer any evidence that this is the case. Also, she over-emphasizes her lack of preparation or research. She claims to be without contact with the outside world for most of the trip, without any access to medical or physical assistance. Excuse me, but wouldn't that fancy photographer's boat have had access to a satellite phone? And was there any reason you needed to tear off down the river vomiting and with a fever, rather than resting up a couple of days in a friendly village, as the villagers suggested? This was a good read, but it could have been great if Salak had been more forthright. Kira Salak After 37 years of never reading about Mali, I have managed two books about that country in the last month. The previous book (The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts) gave more information about the history of the region, and informed my reading of this book as well. This edition appears to be a 2016 reprint of the original book published in 2004 by National Geographic.

Last year, I read another book by Kira Salak about her solo journey across Papua New Guinea (Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea, so I already knew about the author's fearlessness, her unrelenting pace, and her preference of traveling alone. Actually knowing these things about her made me look forward to reading her only other book-length non-fiction account of her travel. She has written multiple essays on other travel experiences for magazines like National Geographic, even winning the PEN Award for her reporting on the war in Congo.

This 2003 journey, taking Kira 600 miles on the Niger River from Old Ségou to Timbuktu, is modeled after the 18th century explorer Mungo Park. He attempted this journey twice, not surviving the second attempt, despite having over 40 travel companions. His writings (journals, letters) as well as writings about Park are laced throughout this book. Salak clearly looks to him not only to see which parts of the journey they had in common, but to find shared experiences in the emotions along the way. Kira's trip was well documented by a National Geographic photographer, and many of those photos are up on her website.

What the photos can't contain is Salak's writing, which I found engaging, especially descriptions of the landscape and its effect on her as a solo traveler.

One sample:

Where is the river of just this morning, with its whitecaps that would have liked to drown me, with its current flowing backward against the wind? Gone to this: a river of smoothest glass, a placidity unbroken by wave or eddy, with islands of lush greenery awaiting me like distant Xanadus. The Niger is like a mercurial god, meting out punishment and benediction on a whim. And perhaps the god of the river sleeps now, returning matters to the mortals who ply its waters?

She also chronicles how the people along the river change as she gets closer to Timbuktu. The tribes shift, the friendliness shifts, the tension shifts. At times I was a little frustrated because she was not taking the time to understand the culture and gain acceptance into it, and often left quickly due to fear. To me, fear can be a form of racism, so I'm a bit wary of that reaction. But I reminded myself that this was the Mali that housed Al Qaeda training camps and attempted to destroy the original manuscripts of centuries ago, during this same time period. And that this is a travel writer, not an ethnographer. But it really is a distinct difference - about the journey and the faces one might encounter along the way, and the occasional orange soda.

I was kindly approved for a review copy of this book by the publisher in Edelweiss. It was perfect timing for my African reading project, and I appreciate it! Kira Salak Kira Salak just at the cusp of her 30s took time away from an English PhD to paddle a kayak six hundred miles along the Niger to Timbuktu, following the path of the doomed 18th-century explorer Mungo Park. Cruelest Journey matches Park's final expedition with Salak's intention to test herself against the river, to open herself up to the world along its banks. Physical exhaustion and isolation, cultural shock and sickness--- Salak teaches herself to face all those things. This isn't a book about Timbuktu, and the arrival there is an anticlimax. But it is a wonderful meditation on place and what it means to be alone in crowds, and to face the kind of physical ordeals Westerners never see any more.

Kira Salak The astounding memoir of a woman's arduous journey by inflatable kayak down the Niger River through Mali . Kira Salak, brave modern adventurer, decides to retrace Victorian explorer Mungo Park's route from Old Segou to Timbuktu. The people she meets en route run the gamut from caring and hospitable to greedy and aggressive. She rows through 105 degree heat, violent storms and pods of potentially angry hippos; on the last leg of her journey, she runs out of food and gets dysentery.

Why? I kept wondering, as I read on, enthralled. Why would anyone do this? In Salak's words:
I wonder what we look for when we embark on these kinds of trips. There is the pat answer that you tell the people you don't know: that you're interested in seeing a place, learning about its people. But then the trip begins and the hardship comes, and hardship is more honest: it tells us that we don't have enough patience yet, nor humility, nor gratitude. And we thought that we did. Hardship brings us closer to truth, and thus is more difficult to bear, but from it alone comes compassion. And so I've told the world that it can do what it wants with me during this trip if only, by the end, I have learned something more. A bargain then. The journey, my teacher Kira Salak Kira Salak is quite the adventurer, and her two books reflect that. In this book, she becomes the first solo kayaker to travel a distance of 600 miles along the Niger River.

In 1767, it is known that a Scotsman, Mungo Park, attempted the same feat, only to be taken captive.

To say she faced obstacles would be a discredit - what she faced was harrowing at times, nearing death quite a few. She barely escapes with her life when a group of men take after her in canoes. She contracts dysentery. She gets through severe tropical storms, deadly heat, hippos - you name it, she went through it. That takes a single-mindedness and an unwavering spirit to succeed, both of which she has in droves.

It's an amazing journey, an incredible success story, and a great book. Kira Salak