No matter where you have been or what you have seen, arriving in Timbuktu is a thrill. It used to take months to get there, across the Sahara or along West Africa’s malarial rivers. Either way, you risked your life. In January, I made it in a couple of days, by plane, by car and by ferry across the great Niger River, on my way to a music festival in the desert. Travelling more slowly would have allowed time for my eyes to adjust: to see the chameleons on the shade trees, to recognise the half-finished building as a plush hotel, to see the bead of condensation on the side of a chilled drink for what it was, a small miracle. But my eyes were still used to seeing Europe, and to them, Timbuktu seemed absolutely remote - dusty, a little drab and extremely exotic.
I stayed in a hotel reached by sandy piste, not road, a place where you might expect to find camels lounging outside your door. At night, I ate capitaine, the fleshy Niger fish, and drank cold beer with my feet in the sand. In the morning, I found the market full of traders from upriver Mali, downriver Nig-eria, from Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso. Mukhtar, a tall, doe-eyed Wodaabe from Niger, asked what I was looking for. "A chech," I said: a turban. He had one on his head, which he was happy to sell for five pounds. I offered four. "I tell you what," he concluded as he piled the metres of blue cotton onto my head, "how about giving me three?" You need time to adjust to the strange ways of Timbuktu.
Like almost everyone in the market, Mukhtar was going to the Festival au Désert, the extraordinary weekend-long musical bonanza being staged far out in the sands. I had ima-gined myself in a 4WD, leaving Timbuktu and heading into empty desert. The reality proved to be a little different: so many people were heading that way, in Jeeps and Land Rovers, big desert trucks and vans, that the journey quickly became a rally that my driver was only too happy to be a part of. For three hours, he spun the wheel and I banged my head, jarred my shoulder and held on for dear life as the world passed quickly by. Then, suddenly, we were near Essakane, the landscape changed and I was faced with another of those moments requiring adjustment: where I saw white sand, he spotted a music festival.
Eat your hearts out, Reading and Glastonbury. Nowhere on earth touches the white dunes of Essakane as a festival site. A makeshift gate had been erected; at it, a man wrapped a band around my wrist to show I hadn’t gatecrashed. In the desert? Somewhere beyond Timbuktu? The site looked just as I imagine a trans-Saharan caravan camp must have looked in the days when people went by camel, with tents stretching as far as I could see. In the middle was something you wouldn’t have seen in a caravan camp: two concrete stages and a block of latrines. These were the only permanent structures, built after the last festival. Since then, the wind had done its work and carved a natural arena in front of them. Everything else had been brought from Timbuktu and beyond: every open-sided goatskin tent, woven mat and sleeping bag; each microphone, cable, speaker and the many lights that flooded the stage at night, and the technicians to work it all; the charcoal burnt in braziers across the dunes to keep us warm; the copious meals of pasta and rice, mutton and vegetables, the water, and the tea, as dark as the Tuareg who brewed it for us, as sweet as his smile. The warm beer, the necessities and souvenirs laid out in the shopping area - everything had been loaded into vehicles or onto camels and brought out for the festival. It was a unique meeting of people and place, and everyone had come to hear sweet music drifting off into the heart of the desert.
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