Adventurer John Pilkington has certainly seen more than his fair share of
the world. Often with a pair a brashers on his feet. Here's his story of
an epic journey across the Sahara.

His interest in the trip was stimulated by the fact that every week
throughout the winter, caravans of up to fifty camels arrive bellowing and
snorting in Timbuktu. They are at the end of a three-week, 450-mile trek
and each carries four huge slabs of Taoudenni salt, the ‘white gold’ of
the Sahara.

To find out more, John procured three camels and a Moorish guide,
put on his brashers and set off from Timbuktu to find stunning desert
landscapes and a life lived as it was a millennium ago, when salt was,
literally, worth its weight in gold. This is his story:

A Tale of Three Humps.

"Our days soon settled into a rhythm. At 5am I would awake to find my guide
U Batna kneeling towards Mecca, deep in prayer. Three glasses of
ridiculously sweet tea, then we’d saddle up the camels and be on our way
by six. U Batna spoke only Arabic, of which I knew nothing, but as the
trip progressed he taught me the words he needed to say to me, like
‘camel’, ‘sand’, ‘rice’, ‘tea’ and ‘keep walking’. The going was
exhausting, but by a combination of walking and riding we kept up a good
pace. At midday we would stop for rice and more tea; then carry on until
sunset. There was no road – travellers to Taoudenni take routes of their
own choosing.
After three weeks we reached the salt mines and I was utterly shocked by
the conditions there. There were no streets, no houses, no electricity, no
fresh water; not even any cooking fuel apart from camel dung. Daytime
temperatures reach 30°C in winter and more than 50°C in summer – a
footwear challenge that even Brasher might find difficult to meet. The 100
or so miners survive on a diet of rice and millet, supplemented by camel
meat when a caravan offers them a sick or weak animal for slaughter. To
slake their thirst they can choose between drinking the brackish contents
of local wells or paying a premium price for decent water to be brought
in. It’s truly a posting from Hell.
Salt has been mined in the Sahara since at least the 4th Century, but the
deposits at Taoudenni were only discovered in the 1500s. They come from an
ancient time of higher rainfall when there was a lake in the Taoudenni
basin, and having no outlet its water became steadily saltier until after
many centuries it turned into a pan of solid salt. Later this was overlain
by mud and gravel, so the salt seams today lie some 15 feet below the flat
surface of the basin. Working in teams of three or four, the miners dig
pits down to this level, then cut horizontal galleries in which they hack
out the salt using crude hand-made axes.
On the return journey I fell in with a salt caravan and found out just how
tough desert life can be. The two camel-drivers and thirty camels were up
before dawn and carried on well after dark, covering up to 35 miles a day
compared with perhaps 20 when I had been with U Batna. Once under way the
caravan didn’t stop. We even brewed tea on the hoof, using portable
braziers which the camel-drivers swung in the breeze as they strode along.
At night we cooked rice together on camel-dung campfires, and slept under
the stars.
From Timbuktu the salt is shipped up the River Niger to the port of Mopti,
where Moorish traders sell it on to people from a wide swathe of West
Africa. I joined one of the longboats, known as pinasses, and as we tied
up on the crowded Mopti waterfront I wondered about the future of the salt
caravans. Lorries are making an appearance in the desert, but camels have
the edge in that they don’t consume expensive diesel fuel, and as long as
there’s a demand for salt there’ll always be a role for the camels. But
will U Batna’s sons and grandsons want to spend their lives coaxing these
cantankerous creatures across one of the most gruelling deserts on Earth ? Somehow, I doubt it."

(Footnote:The boots John wore on his epic journey were originally called 'Kubes', and now are no longer in production. However the current evolution of that boot is the new Danso XCR. For details of John’s books and multimedia talks visit www.pilk.net)