Letter from Timbuktu: Timbuktu's reputation as a dreary tourist trap is by now well established. Ever since the French explorer Réné Caillié, lured by tales of fantastic wealth, became the first European to produce a credible account of the mysterious city, a visit to Timbuktu, in Mali, has been marked by disappointment. Nevertheless, steady flows of tourists continue to ignore such predictions.
Timbuktu is home to a Disneyland of aid agencies and NGOs and this mixture of charity and fatalistic curiosity is the only thing keeping hunger at bay in a town once rumoured to be built out of solid gold. It has thus become a sought-after notch on the traveller's belt, an ordeal to be endured rather than a trip to be enjoyed.
There are bars in this world apparently where you will be given a free beer on presentation of the Timbuktu stamp in your passport. The latter is no longer strictly required, but the tourist office will happily oblige.
The Timbuktu experience begins with the effort involved in getting there. You could put your faith in the unreliable service offered by two private airlines operating antiquated Soviet-era jets. Alternately, a journey from Mopti in a 4X4, skidding through the bush, will take 10 hours.
However, both of these options are for wimps. The true Lonely Planet-disdaining, would-be Alex Garland will have to make the journey aboard an overloaded goods barge known as a pinasse. This voyage is guaranteed to be particularly lengthy during the dry season, as the threat of running aground in the shallows of the Niger demands a painfully slow procession and voyages of 10 days' duration are possible. My own pinasse chugged into Timbuktu's port six days after departure from Mopti.
Unless you have developed a working knowledge of Bambara, Mali's most widely spoken native language, opportunities for conversation are likely to be slim. Mali has one of the world's lowest literacy rates and French, although the country's official language, is not widely understood, while the pinasse, as the cheapest means of transport, attracts mainly poor and uneducated passengers.
A day will suffice to explore the town itself, taking in the three mosques built of baked mud, of which only the largest, the Djinguereber, is open to non-Muslims.
These inevitably have difficulty standing up to the rains and have to be partially rebuilt twice a year. To this end, the townspeople are enlisted to gather mud from the riverbed. I observed this mud-gathering in the town of Djenné, 400 km south of Timbuktu, whose mosque is the best-maintained in the region.
The few other sights in Timbuktu include the various houses in which the European explorers of the 19th century stayed. These were all eventually chased out of town or killed once their Arab disguises had been blown. The reception given to visitors is only slightly more hospitable.
Toubabs, as white people are known, are besieged by an army of would-be guides and vendors of nondescript knick-knacks. Moreover, the International Bottled Water Scam is in operation, as is always the case when the price of mineral water surpasses that of petrol.
Despite all this, Timbuktu does provide an entry point into the Sahara. For €30, one can play at being Peter O'Toole and ride a camel into the dunes before passing the night in a community of Touareg nomads. The latter are largely of Berber extraction and have traditionally dominated the region through their control of the salt and livestock trades. Their isolation from the rest of the country and their former enslavement of a portion of the population led to their exclusion from post-independence government institutions. Their reaction was to begin a civil war, involving a blockade of Timbuktu, during the mid-1990s. This was ended in 1996 in one of Africa's rare examples of successful conflict-resolution.
Touaregs have been reintegrated into Malian institutions and the opposing communities now live largely at peace. Touaregs insist on justified resistance to official discrimination while their former slaves, the Bella, emphasise the Touaregs' racism and wish to dominate the state.
It is hard to see what is worth controlling in Timbuktu or anywhere else in Mali. Almost completely devoid of natural resources, it is among the world's five poorest countries. Fertile land is all the time under threat from the encroaching desert.
Generalised squalor is juxtaposed with Islamic puritanism, the influence of which has deprived Malian women of education and rights. The practice of female genital mutilation, euphemistically known as circumcision and condoned by many imams, affects almost all Malian women.
Liberal Africa took a stand against this life-threatening procedure with the recent release of veteran Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene's film Mooladé, starring the Malian anti-circumcision campaigner Fatoumata Coulibaly. However, this story of one woman's struggle to protect a quartet of girls from the knife has had only one screening on the continent - at this year's Fespaco film festival in Burkina Faso. Sadly, it is more likely to be seen in Boston than in Bamako.