Category Archives: Travel Tips

Tips For Getting To The Festival Au Desert In Timbuktu, MALI 2007

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6/12/07

Hi everybody

Well in 2007 we decided to go to Mali and make it to the Festival au Desert 2007 in Essakane just outside of Timbuktu.

It would have to be one of the most enjoyable and memorable experiences that we have ever had, and if you have seen this website, then you know that we have certainly had some amazing experiences to compare it to.

However, it was definitely one of the harder countries that we had to research and getting information on doing it ourselves without using a tour group was REALLY hard, so we made sure we took plenty of notes to write up these following tips to help anyone else who wanted to do it independently.

These tips are mainly things that you may not find written about in a guide book, so you still need to go through the book to get a feel for Mali in general.

Information was very difficult to come by, and typical of African bureaucracy, a lot of information wasn’t available because things were left to last minute to make public.

We ended up traveling through Mali independently, but we didn’t do the festival part by ourselves. However, if we ever went back, we would have no problems doing it independently, so we hope these tips might help you guys who want to do the same.

Being intrepid adventurers who normally hate tour groups, we started out trying to do most of it ourselves, and initially we did most of our research on the Lonely Planet Thorntree forums.

Fortunately, we met a bunch of amazing people and found that a UK girl Kirsten Brand had started a yahoo group where other like minded people could get together and make arrangements for the festival.

This was invaluable to have made email contact with other travelers, so I would recommend networking before you get there as it will help starting a group for transport. Continue reading →

New Website and Latest News

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Well, we’ve finally set up our new website before heading off overseas in July. At the moment we’re building up the website, page by page. I’ve brought over all the pages and images from the old site to this one, so if you want to take a close look at the Peruvian mummy again- go ahead :)

This post is just an update to all about our upcoming trip. Ced ‘n I are moving to Ireland for a year or so, to work and to visit as much of Europe and Africa as possible. But before we get to Ireland, we’re taking abit of a detour to South America first. We’ll be visiting some of the places we didn’t get to the first time there back in ’98. The full list of countries stands at – Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Nicuragua, Cuba, USA and then Ireland. (And this is over a 3 month period!)

For those geeks amongst us, we’ve used WordPress 1.5.1 to help blog our travel diary. I’ve found it easy to install and manage, and there has been abit of a learning curve to use some of the plug-ins. But other than that, it’s a breeze to use. I’m hoping that working with it while backpacking will tell us if this is the right blog software to use. But for now it’s pretty good.