Gone forever are these 12th-century manuscripts from the Centre de Recherches Historiques Ahmed Baba in Timbuktu / Photo by Laura Watilo Blake These delicate pages of text survived for centuries in the dry desert air in Timbuktu, a remote outpost of the Sahara Desert in Mali, which was once a wealthy trading center. Today, theRead more
My photo of a Tuareg man in Timbuktu, Mali, has been chosen as a finalist in a Travel & Leisure magazine photo contest and I would appreciate your vote by December 31. The magazine leaves it up to the world at large to vote on the finalists. Unfortunately, that means the photos with the mostRead more
We have arrived in Timbuktu, the city in the sand. To get there, we boarded a 19-seater prop plane in Mopti, along with a group of travel agents from Europe on a fam trip, and we instantly felt like we were back in the American Midwest. There was some Jimmy Buffet being piped into theRead more
I am sitting in a room watching a Dogon funeral celebration taking place in the village of Banani on national television. The hunters of the village are running around in the fields shooting off their guns, while people sing. The Dogon staff at Mac’s Refuge, where I’ve been staying, are commenting that they recognize theRead more