Book: To the Moon and Timbuktu by Nina Sovich

A Trek Through the Heart of Africa

Well, not really a trek and mostly West Africa but still, this was quite an adventure.

Nina was raised an only child in relative affluence on the East Coast. Her Swedish mother had a wanderlust and would often take trips to faraway places. Nina writes that these trips of her mother's were "magical and infectious and divine, but…[it] never lasted, in part because she never went away for long enough." Nina obviously inherited the restlessness...

She grew up and worked as a journalist traveling and living abroad. Then one day, she meets Florent, eventually marries him and they settle in Paris. I doubt I've ever read of someone who doesn't adore living in Paris, but Nina didn't. She gets more and more uneasy, fidgety and unhappy, and then one day decides to go to Africa, by herself, for several weeks. She starts from Morocco and travels south through Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal and then east to Mali and Niger.

She is not with a group, and generally makes day-to-day transportation and sleeping arrangements. It's hot, not particularly safe; she's a single white female, and at one point, she goes back to Paris but then returns to Africa, as her goal is to visit Timbuktu, for the romance of the name, for the sake of her soul. She is pregnant on her second trip which adds to the complicated way she travels.

"There are two taxis leaving for Mauritania that day. One is a white van that usually transports bottled water and cigarettes but has been co-opted for human transport. Someone has laid a carpet on the floor and thrown in a flashlight, but the interior is basically a dark, empty box with a rear sliding door that opens from the outside. It has no windows, no air conditioning, and no way for passengers to get out if the driver has a heart attack or abandons the van before the border. I poke my head inside and two small, very round Sahrawi women blink back at me like badgers in a hole."

"I've never been alone in a desert before. Not like this. I always went with people, afraid that the heat, dirt and dust, the sheer emptiness could somehow swallow me. I had spent so much of the past years in cities, running around, dodging rainstorms, ducking into cafes, that I forgot the leveling aspect of nature...Here toughness, wit and luck mattered more than birth or money…Strip away the comfort of Paris or New York, and there was just desert, where everything could change faster than we imagined and in ways for which we had not prepared. This notion was a little scary, but not, by definition, bad. The essential message was one of liberation."

She does get a little crazy though:
"At a certain point, traveling loses all of its appeal and the traveler who dreamed of discovery and escape becomes a little demented…I'm aware of how far gone I am. I live in dirty clothes that I have all but stopped trying to wash. When I bathe at all it is under a tap of either stale hot water or sludge that smells often of sulfur. I have eaten so many mango I always have light diarrhea…And I have pretty much stopped trying to talk to the people around me. My mission is to keep moving, keep ahead of the rains and cross the border into Niger before they come… I look like hell. I feel like hell. I am in hell…My world has been pared down to the smallest concerns--decent water, a safe place to sleep, the occasional kind word from a passerby--and I am free in the way I have  ever been before."

This is how she writes. There is a lot of introspection. She loves her good and kind husband; it's not that exactly.

And along with trying to answer the eternal questions, Nina tells of the people and geography she encounters, vividly, descriptively:

"The sun rises huge, soft and cool. My taxi driver prays while I lean out of the side of the car and eat a block of cheddar cheese like a candy bar. Nearby a tree with gnarled branches reaching to the sky has been carved out as a cistern for collecting water. I slip off my sandals and run red dust through my toes, considering the scrubland before me. Flecks of straw glitter in the morning haze like gold thread woven into a dress…I'm exhausted and spacey and on my way back to Niamey after three weeks of terrifying travel across the savanna…As people filter in for the bus, they pull out loaves of yellow bread and cans of condensed milk. Green lizards crawl up the walls."

Much of her inspiration was Mary Kingsley who "explored Gabon's jungle in the 1890s" and of course, Karen Blixen. Nina, too, loves Africa, dreams of Africa and this book is that love story.