Epilogue


TWO DAYS IN PARIS.  After two weeks in Mali, I’d have two transitional days in a Western metropolis before heading home.  It would be my third time in France’s capital city and this time I’d go not as a tourist, but just a tired guy on a layover from Bamako to New York.  I’d heard that flights to JFK were overbooked for four days and so there was no way around chilling out in the so-called “City of Lights” for a couple of days—but I welcomed the time to think and reflect about my journey through Mali to Timbuktu.

I didn’t do much in terms of sightseeing in Paris.  After a hectic time in Mali, I just wanted to detox, take a break from touring, and above all, blogging—it really is a full-time job.  My first afternoon in town, instead of being like the many other Americans touring around on their “big trip to Paris,” I just took a nap in my hotel room.  When I was awake, I just wandered around town with no agenda, not taking notes or jotting down quotes.

So this is what it’s like to be on a vacation, huh?

I stayed at a small loft in a hotel on the Rue Mouffetard in Ernest Hemingway’s old neighborhood, walking distance to a metro stop and many points of interest in the Latin Quarter.  I used the loft as my base of operations as I did as the Parisiens:  people watching at the Cafe Delmas (inspiration for E.H.’s A Movable Feast), drinking trappiste ales over a platter of moule frites near the Seine, sitting on the steps of Sacre Coeur in the Montmartre with the street musicians as the nighttime lights lit up, and wandering the modern art galleries of the Centre Pompidou.  I got a little antsy wandering around with no real purpose, and for my second day I gave myself a short self-guided Da Vinci Code tour before the movie comes out:  the Hotel Ritz, the inverted pyramids at the Carousel du Louvre, St. Germain-du-Près, and the roseline at St. Sulpice.

Just two days in Paris and I almost forgot that I’d spent two weeks in Mali.  It’s funny how experiences with me lately come in one ear and out the other—quite possibly I’d been ruined from being over-saturated on my big 16-month RTW trip.  I did however reminisce about Mali when I came across one exhibit at the Centre Pompidou that had a couple of Malian statues from Dogon country (picture above), similar to ones I’d seen at the woodcarving shops.  I couldn’t help but smile.

PEOPLE ASK ME if recommend Mali, and I have to say that I despite everything that had happened to me, I still do.  (I actually got off pretty easy; in my other travels, I’d met people who’d been drugged by their “guides” or caught and extorted for drug possession after people had planted drugs on them.) My experience in Mali was just one experience, and everyone’s is different—different people notice different things, other people cross your path, etc.  If I could give any advice on traveling to Mali, I’d just suggest not to go backpacking alone during the dry season at the hottest time of the year.

As for final thoughts on Van, I’ll just leave it at a stalemate in the mind games; there is always the possibility he was honest the whole time and was just mixed up with the wrong crowd.  He’d shown me business cards and emails of another American he’d guided once, an outreach education guy who saw value in Van and thought perhaps he just needed guidance towards right direction.

As for “Timbuktu,” well, I’m happy that I got there after all the trouble (major bragging rights) and I’m happy that I saw with my own eyes and confirmed that it is just a city with a mythical reputation that it doesn’t necessarily live up to.  But I know that as long as the eternal myth of “Timbuktu” exists, travelers will do whatever it takes to get there, just like the explorers of the 19th century—just not perhaps, travelers who have read this blog.


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This blog entry was originally posted on April 07, 2006 on the blog, "The Global Trip: Trippin' To Timbuktu," hosted by Blogger.com. It is one of eighteen entries that chronicled a trip through the West African nation of Mali in March/April 2006.




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