The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles To Timbuktu

by Kira Salak

Kira Salak became the first person in the world to kayak alone 600 miles on the Niger River of Mali to Timbuktu, retracing the fatal journey of the great Scottish explorer Mungo Park. Enduring tropical storms, hippos, rapids, the unrelenting heat of the Sahara desert, and the mercurial moods of this notorious river, Kira Salak traveled solo through one of the most desolate and dangerous regions in Africa, where little had changed since Mungo Park was taken captive by Moors in 1797.

Dependent on locals for food and shelter each night, Salak stayed in remote mud-hut villages on the banks of the Niger, meeting Dogan sorceresses and tribes who alternately revered and reviled her--so remarkable was the sight of an unaccompanied white woman paddling all the way to Timbuktu. Indeed, on one harrowing stretch she barely escaped with her life from men chasing after her in canoes. Finally, weak with dysentery but triumphant, she arrived in the fabled city of Timbuktu and fulfilled her ultimate goal: buying the freedom of two Bella slave women. The Cruelest Journey is both an unputdownable story and a meditation on courage and self-mastery by a young adventuress without equal, whose writing is as thrilling as her life.

About the Author

Kira Salak won the PEN Award for journalism for her reporting on the war in Congo, and she has appeared five times in Best American Travel Writing. A National Geographic Emerging Explorer and contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure magazine, she was the first woman to traverse Papua New Guinea and the first person to kayak solo 600 miles to Timbuktu. She is the author of three books—the critically acclaimed work of fiction, The White Mary, and two works of nonfiction: Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea (a New York Times Notable Travel Book) and The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu. She has a Ph.D. in English, her fiction appearing in Best New American Voices and other anthologies. Her nonfiction has been published in National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, Travel & Leisure, The Week, Best Women's Travel Writing, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Salak has appeared on TV programs like CBS Evening News, ABC's Good Morning America, and CBC's The Hour. She lives with her husband and daughter in Germany.

Genres: Travel, Africa, Nonfiction, Adventure, Memoir, Mali, History

227 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2004

About the author

Kira Salak won the PEN Award for journalism for her reporting on the war in Congo, and she has appeared five times in Best American Travel Writing. A National Geographic Emerging Explorer and contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure magazine, she was the first woman to traverse Papua New Guinea and the first person to kayak solo 600 miles to Timbuktu. She is the author of three books—the critically acclaimed work of fiction, The White Mary, and two works of nonfiction: Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea (a New York Times Notable Travel Book) and The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu. She has a Ph.D. in English, her fiction appearing in Best New American Voices and other anthologies. Her nonfiction has been published in National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, Travel & Leisure, The Week, Best Women's Travel Writing, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and daughter in Germany.

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

After 37 years of never reading about Mali, I have managed two books about that country in the last month. The previous book (The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts) gave more information about the history of the region, and informed my reading of this book as well. This edition appears to be a 2016 reprint of the original book published in 2004 by National Geographic.

Last year, I read another book by Kira Salak about her solo journey across Papua New Guinea (Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea, so I already knew about the author's fearlessness, her unrelenting pace, and her preference of traveling alone. Actually knowing these things about her made me look forward to reading her only other book-length non-fiction account of her travel. She has written multiple essays on other travel experiences for magazines like National Geographic, even winning the PEN Award for her reporting on the war in Congo.

This 2003 journey, taking Kira 600 miles on the Niger River from Old Ségou to Timbuktu, is modeled after the 18th century explorer Mungo Park. He attempted this journey twice, not surviving the second attempt, despite having over 40 travel companions. His writings (journals, letters) as well as writings about Park are laced throughout this book. Salak clearly looks to him not only to see which parts of the journey they had in common, but to find shared experiences in the emotions along the way. Kira's trip was well documented by a National Geographic photographer, and many of those photos are up on her website.

What the photos can't contain is Salak's writing, which I found engaging, especially descriptions of the landscape and its effect on her as a solo traveler.

One sample:

"Where is the river of just this morning, with its whitecaps that would have liked to drown me, with its current flowing backward against the wind? Gone to this: a river of smoothest glass, a placidity unbroken by wave or eddy, with islands of lush greenery awaiting me like distant Xanadus. The Niger is like a mercurial god, meting out punishment and benediction on a whim. And perhaps the god of the river sleeps now, returning matters to the mortals who ply its waters?"

She also chronicles how the people along the river change as she gets closer to Timbuktu. The tribes shift, the friendliness shifts, the tension shifts. At times I was a little frustrated because she was not taking the time to understand the culture and gain acceptance into it, and often left quickly due to fear. To me, fear can be a form of racism, so I'm a bit wary of that reaction. But I reminded myself that this was the Mali that housed Al Qaeda training camps and attempted to destroy the original manuscripts of centuries ago, during this same time period. And that this is a travel writer, not an ethnographer. But it really is a distinct difference - about the journey and the faces one might encounter along the way, and the occasional orange soda.

I was kindly approved for a review copy of this book by the publisher in Edelweiss. It was perfect timing for my African reading project, and I appreciate it!

[♏ Gina☽ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kira Salak is quite the adventurer, and her two books reflect that. In this book, she becomes the first solo kayaker to travel a distance of 600 miles along the Niger River.

In 1767, it is known that a Scotsman, Mungo Park, attempted the same feat, only to be taken captive.

To say she faced obstacles would be a discredit - what she faced was harrowing at times, nearing death quite a few. She barely escapes with her life when a group of men take after her in canoes. She contracts dysentery. She gets through severe tropical storms, deadly heat, hippos - you name it, she went through it. That takes a single-mindedness and an unwavering spirit to succeed, both of which she has in droves.

It's an amazing journey, an incredible success story, and a great book.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kira Salak just at the cusp of her 30s took time away from an English PhD to paddle a kayak six hundred miles along the Niger to Timbuktu, following the path of the doomed 18th-century explorer Mungo Park. "Cruelest Journey" matches Park's final expedition with Salak's intention to test herself against the river, to open herself up to the world along its banks. Physical exhaustion and isolation, cultural shock and sickness--- Salak teaches herself to face all those things. This isn't a book about Timbuktu, and the arrival there is an anticlimax. But it is a wonderful meditation on place and what it means to be alone in crowds, and to face the kind of physical ordeals Westerners never see any more.

[Daren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book this. In Mali, from Bamako to Timbuktu, Kira Salak canoes solo, a physical and mental challenge following the route of Mungo Park down the Niger River.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Following in the footsteps of Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who traversed the land and the river in the eighteenth century, Salak sets out to kayak down the Niger River in the west African country of Mali. Unlike Park's ill-fated -and ultimately fatal- journey, Salak makes it to Timbuktu, the ancient "city of gold" right below the Saharan desert. Her journey was funded by the National Geographic Society, and she often runs into the hired photographer who is documenting her travels at stops along the river. (His photographs of Salak's journey can be seen on her website) She sets out from Old Segou with only a few vocabulary words of local tribal languages and a working knowledge of French. She has her inflatable red canoe, and a backpack of supplies.

Salak's writing style is very engaging - her strength and her fortitude come across in her writing, though never with a tone of arrogance. Each trial or trouble she encounters (and they are many: ripping a bicep muscle on the first day, hostile tribes, hippopatomi, dysentery) is documented clearly and unbiased. Any other person would have called it quits - but Salak finds courage and prevails in all of the circumstances.

Interwoven throughout her own narrative, Salak recounts Park's journey, over two hundred years before her own. Park was taken hostage, many of his crew members died, and he eventually died as well, although the circumstances surrounding his death are unclear. Salak relies on Park's diaries and determines that while they are from centuries ago, many of the stories hold true: other places have changed, but this region of Africa has largely remained the same.

My only criticism of the book is that this incredible journey is condensed into a rather small book. I would have enjoyed more passages about the river itself, describing the geography, the biology, and the life of this body of water. The river is undoubtedly a character in the book, but it is largely unknown to the reader - a looming figure that is left a mystery. Perhaps this was done consciously, showing that the river cannot be understood or predicted. The other complaint comes from the last chapter: when Salak arrives in Timbuktu, she makes it her mission to free two "slave" women (they work without compensation and are fully abused by their masters, yet the Malian government refuses to call it "slavery", despite this whole caste of people - the Bella - being continuously subjugated) from their Tuareg masters. She describes how this has been one of the missions of the whole trip. Then why did she mention it for the first time in the last 10 pages of the book? As a reader, I felt a little cheated for not knowing this earlier... that should have been something talked about at the beginning of the account. Her work is admirable, without a doubt, and she does "free" two women and gives them gold coins in order to start their own business. This whole encounter is discussed so quickly, that it almost seems like a gloss-over of the whole practice. Salak has to know that giving these women a gold coin is not going to make their life better; that being said, I am not discounting her action. One woman cannot go up against hundreds of years of the "peculiar institution" in a slowly developing country. I do wonder what happened to those two women after Salak left them in Timbuktu, only minutes after "freeing" them.

Salak's amazing journey left me hungry for more adventure - luckily she has a few more books on her other travels. She is a strikingly brave and courageous person, and a good writer too. I look forward to more.

[Story · Rating 4 out of 5]

The astounding memoir of a woman's arduous journey by inflatable kayak down the Niger River through Mali . Kira Salak, brave modern adventurer, decides to retrace Victorian explorer Mungo Park's route from Old Segou to Timbuktu. The people she meets en route run the gamut from caring and hospitable to greedy and aggressive. She rows through 105 degree heat, violent storms and pods of potentially angry hippos; on the last leg of her journey, she runs out of food and gets dysentery.

Why? I kept wondering, as I read on, enthralled. Why would anyone do this? In Salak's words:
"I wonder what we look for when we embark on these kinds of trips. There is the pat answer that you tell the people you don't know: that you're interested in seeing a place, learning about its people. But then the trip begins and the hardship comes, and hardship is more honest: it tells us that we don't have enough patience yet, nor humility, nor gratitude. And we thought that we did. Hardship brings us closer to truth, and thus is more difficult to bear, but from it alone comes compassion. And so I've told the world that it can do what it wants with me during this trip if only, by the end, I have learned something more. A bargain then. The journey, my teacher

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Salak is a good writer and a very determined person. Overall, this was an interesting travel/adventure book. But the book's weakness is that Salak wants this to be more than what it really is, a physical challenge with some unpleasant cross-cultural encounters. She seems to want to convince both the reader and herself that this was some great experience of enlightenment, even if she can't offer any evidence that this is the case. Also, she over-emphasizes her lack of preparation or research. She claims to be without contact with the outside world for most of the trip, without any access to medical or physical assistance. Excuse me, but wouldn't that fancy photographer's boat have had access to a satellite phone? And was there any reason you needed to tear off down the river vomiting and with a fever, rather than resting up a couple of days in a friendly village, as the villagers suggested? This was a good read, but it could have been great if Salak had been more forthright.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Travel books are the perfect antidote against quarantine. I find it refreshing to read one written by a woman, as they are very often macho affairs full of testosterone. It is beautifully written, and manages to convey the sense of existential dread that comes from kayaking though a notoriously dangerous land. That said, l don't really understand the motivation behind the journey. Perhaps I'm not adventurous enough.

[Roberta Collyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

good but doesn’t come close to how mental her other book is (3.5)

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 10 years ago, Kira Salak paddled on her own through the sub-Saharan nation of Mali on the Niger River, heading from a town called Old Segou to the fabled city of Timbuktu, although, truth be told, Timbuktu has been a ramshackle poverty-ridden village for nearly 400 years now, not the onetime cultural and trade center of West Africa.

But this journey wasn't really about seeing the marvels of Timbuktu. It was, first, an homage to an intrepid explorer from the early 19th century named Mungo Park, who eventually lost his life trying to follow the Niger in its giant loop through Africa. But more than that, it was a personal test. Could she persist through hundreds of miles of paddling an inflatable kayak through intense heat, an object of curiosity and sometimes anger to the people she passes along the way.

Some of what she feared most -- crocodiles and hippos -- were hardly a threat, except for one day late in the trip, and even then, the hippos were docile. The real challenge of her trip was the people. Time and time again, all villagers along the river seemed to care about was that she was white and might have money. Nearly every time she landed, villagers would crowd around her, shouting, touching her, demanding money, and it would take a village elder to sometimes physically beat people away so she could go to the chief and pay tribute for food and a place to sleep.

But that was often redeemed by individual encounters with villagers who treated her with kindness or took her under their wings.

As she neared the end of the journey, she encountered particularly hostile Tuaregs -- descendants of Arab Moors who once conquered the region, and who unofficially kept African slaves from a particular tribe. She was struck with dysentery and could hardly eat, and then, barely having recovered, she wanted to negotiate with her remaining money to free two women slaves. Finding out what happens will be one of your rewards for reading this book.

This is not a travelogue that uncovers new wildlife at every turn or delves into the ethnology of each tribe. And yet Salak writes so well that she kept me engaged throughout the trip, even when she was writing about her exhaustion, boredom or frustration.

A fascinating journey.

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is really two stories - the story of the country of Mali along the Niger River as seen by Salak as she retraces the route of Mungo Park (the first Western Explorer to explore the interior of Mali and to reach Timbuktu), and the personal journey of the author, Kira Salak.
The incredible descriptions of life on the Niger River brought me along with Salak on her grueling journey and allowed me to experience scenes that few Westerners have ever seen. Salak's descriptions of the culture, beliefs and lifestyles of the tribes living in Mali along the Niger River were informative and educational. Her story of slavery in Timbuktu is one of the most detailed I have seen. If you want an accurate view of life in Africa, this is a must read book.
The second story, the personal journey of the author, was one of the most inspiring I have read. As you journey with Salak you will find yourself joining her as she overcomes extreme obstacles such as ignoring the pain of a sprained wrist as she kayaked, dealing with Muslim extremists and occasionally escaping from them, finding food and a safe place to rest each night, kayaking through storms, etc. How often in life do we find small obstacles stopping us? Salak teaches us that we have the power to overcome even the most difficult obstacles in life.
Of course, if you love kayaking, this is a book that will inspire you from the first stroke of her paddle to the very last stroke.
What makes this book really great is Salak's writing style that draws you in, pulls you along and puts you right there in the kayak with her. A great work of non-fiction that I highly recommend for anyone who wants a good book to read.

[nalubalu · Rating 3 out of 5]

My miracle was Four Corners

Maybe I am a different person when I began to read this book - it took me years to finally finish this because I read it more like a fiction novel one eventually falls asleep to, except I would get so offended at the focus of this book every now and then i'd just not come back to it for months . I came to this book because I needed the inspiration that Four Corners proved to be for me, I looked for that feeling of adventure invoked by curiosity and calling. But in this book, maybe it was the nature of this expedition I didn't understand - I remember feeling struck by every other thought EXCEPT the one that asked but why wouqld you do such a journey when I read Four Corners, I didn't think of it once because it added up the story felt self-explanatory. Maybe I was a person closer to who she was then and someone in the years since, I too have been to the continent and back, had my own journey with my own reasons, built my own version of ethics and what I do for me and what k do for the world and how they are disconnected only in reward, I stopped seeing someone I wanted to be in her journey. It was like the animus I read about, the Park Mungo inspired journey that was traversed for personal triumph but deliberately infused with hints of I am doing this for the world, repeated attempts to be the better person and show the beautiful continent in the depressing light it's always shown in, just broke my heart.

I honestly don't know if this can be even counted as a review, I am just so fucking sad that this book wasn't everything - I am working on my expectation setting but holy shit, I would not recommend reading this one

[Laura Bourassa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book. A remarkable woman confronts the unknown and her fears as she kayaks alone six hundred miles down the Niger river. The journey a meditation and inquiry into life. Much learning happens, some of it familiar to me:

"People don't seem interested in me much beyond what I might be able to give them. They see my white skin and reduce me to an identity I can't shake: Rich White Woman, Bearer of Gifts, nothing more. This is an important lesson--the way people so easily label and dismss each other. I'm dismayed by how simple it is for me to get caught in the same game, to start seeing every passing man in a canoe as a threat or as someone who only wants something from me. In this cordoning off of the people I meet, in this mistrust, I deny them their humanity. Do we ever greet people without wanting something from them? Without hoping they'll give us certain things in return--love, money, approval? Without wanting them to change, or to do what we want, or to see us the way we want to be seen? What's stopping us from simply finding joy in another's presence?"

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

I obsessed with Mali, so I thought this book might be good tour of the country down the Niger river. Instead it's another lame explorer veneration, this time Scottish explorer Mungo Park. The best travel advice I ever got, also traveling as a woman alone in a nearby area, was that a country is more than its landmarks, and that you should try to get to know as many people as you can if you really want to know what a place is like. I feel like she barely makes an effort to engage with people, nor does she even do a great job describing the landmarks. She mostly just talks about herself, her physical condition and her fear of villagers. The book is way too self-absorbed and self-congratulatory but not in the way where you can draw out any universal themes about humanity. Not highly recommended.

[Anja · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like these kinds of travels where people really put theirselves on the test. and then this author compares her experiences with the experiences of a historical travel of the same route and this meeats my interest in history. So I really liked this book, but it made me sad too: I have no plans to travel to this part of Africa any more after reading this.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was very hard to put down. At first I was afraid this was going to be a self-obsessed "Eat, Pray, Love" sort of memoir, but Salak knows how to balance introspection with awareness of a the beautiful, but cruel world she is kayaking through.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great travel adventure from Kira Salak following Mungo Park along the Niger. Surely only those who haven't read Four Corners could doubt she made this journey herself. It has left me wondering what on earth she'll do next.

[Karen Ferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could hardly believe she survived this journey. I was afraid for her life in several places, though I knew she must be alive since I was reading the book. The writing was such I was able to imagine being there with her.

[Laurie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Salak undertook this crazy, huge adventure and wrote such a thin account of it.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although the nation of Mali does not often cross my radar as an interesting place to read about, is a desperately poor country to boot [1], as someone who likes reading books about interesting travels [2], this book caught my attention, as cruel journeys are something that sounds very Nathanish to me at least.  And although the author's religious beliefs and her openness to witchcraft were not something I greatly appreciated reading about, and her feminism was certainly off-putting, there was still much in this book to appreciate concerning the author's concern for humanity and inhumanity and her clear-eyed look at what made Mali so poor and what kept it from making strides towards development.  The book comes from a National Geographic grant, and that is not an organization I have a great deal of fondness for despite my own great love of maps and geography, but the author herself has an impressive gift of eloquence and an interest in history and quirky people in history as she attempts to recreate one of the most notable journeys in history, that of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, to whom she is a worthy successor in her own right.

This book is not an obvious contender for the most exciting travel book one could read, with about two hundred pages taking up numbered chapters of the author's trip from Bamako to Old Sègou as staging for her trip and then the 600 miles north and east along the Niger River to Timbuktu through some of the most desolate and impoverished country in the entire world.  The author struggles through an injured hand as she kayaks by herself beside villages and adopts a certain pattern:  Canoe all day, find a friendly village and bribe its elder, and stay with a family overnight before repeating the cycle.  As the trip goes on the author runs short of food and has to deal with increasingly unfriendly people, as it is clear that some of the tribes of Mali are far friendlier than others.  She has intermittent meetings with a French photographer and his ginger girlfriend, but for the most part she is alone to observe the countryside and its people, animals, and plants, to feel the heat of the Sahara sun, and to muse upon the way that the country still very closely resembles how it was more than two hundred years ago when Mungo Park took his groundbreaking journey to explore the Niger all the way to the sea, though he died along the way.  Through the trip the author deals with violence and harassment, suffers some mishaps, explores Malian witchcraft and animist beliefs and charms, and buys the freedom of a couple of slaves at the conclusion before leaving the country.

What is it that makes this journey so cruel?  A great deal of Mali's poverty appears to be its own fault, with horrific violence against women, blind hatred towards the United States, enduring slavery, and an endemic culture of bribery and corruption that actively punishes those who try to get ahead through entrepreneurial spirit.  The author is certainly strong-willed and clever, but one appears convinced that this author's drive to travel in such dangerous and desolate territory springs from her own deeply painful personal experiences, and possibly even traumatic ones.  The author's insight appears to come from a place of deep compassion with those who suffer injustice and if she can come off as a bit strident sometimes, she also shows herself to be a person who needs plenty of solitary time to read and reflect and loves the solitary nature of her slow journey by boat in one of the world's longest rivers through one of the world's most obscure and forgotten regions.  This book is not colored with nostalgia, but nor is it a screed against the people of Mali, but rather it is the observations and reflections of a clear-eyed and both friendly and wary world traveler who is driven by a rather intense desire to put the world at least a little bit more aright as it is within her power to do so.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminds me of two things: Aguirre, the Wrath of God and the Camino. In the case of the former, it's not so much Salak's experience as that of Mungo Park, whose own journey down the Niger she uses to inform her own; in the latter, it's the reminder that in the present day one's far flung adventures are often one-way trips (that is, Salak paddled to Timbuktu but flew home afterwards), while for much of history they were by necessity two-way trips. This was something I thought about on the Camino, sometimes; once I reached Santiago, I could hop on a plane anywhere in the world (and, for that matter, could have quit at any point and hopped on a plane—or a train, or a bus), but pilgrims in the Middle Ages (and until comparatively recently) would have had to make their own way home.

Money is a recurring theme here: Salak notes that while she's not particularly affluent herself, she had the backing of National Geographic on this trip (and in any case 'affluence' in the west is very different from 'affluence' in Mali). But I'm also intrigued by observations like this: ...photographers’ rates tend to be quite expensive—anywhere from $400 to $600 a day (writers, on the other hand, are paid only for the finished article, regardless of how many days they spend in the field) (68). This doesn't indicate how much writer vs. photographer earned for this trip (she does say that the photographer offered a very good deal for National Geographic), but, gosh. It says something about what we prioritise, doesn't it?

And money again: probably the thing that is mentioned most—more than the actual physical act of paddling, more than even Mungo Park—is money. Money, and giving it to village chiefs or locals who provide services or food, and so on and so forth. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this; I suspect it's partly Salak's discomfort with being a highly visible white woman, because in a different context (i.e., a wealthier culture) one would not likely mention passing money to someone every time a transaction was made. (There's probably an academic paper to be written on this. Perhaps in an anthro class? A hybrid lit-anthro class?)

I doubt I'll ever make it to Mali, let alone Timbuktu, but—it is quite the storied city, isn't it? And I can definitely see the appeal of making the trip into an adventure.

[Fayette · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I am going to ask the question that seemingly every person who encountered Salak during her journey asked--indeed, even she herself keeps asking: WHY?? Why would a lone American woman choose to paddle 600 miles on the Niger river in a blow up kayak to reach Timbuktu?

The closest answer I found was "I want to avoid that stagnant life. I want the world to always be offering me the new, the grace of the unfamiliar." Well, Ok. I want that, too...but I'm not going to be putting myself into extreme and real danger to get it! Plus I hate bugs too much.

But this part did make me laugh out loud: "Timbuktu. It is the world's greatest anticlimax. After having had such a long and difficult journey to get here, I feel as if I'm the butt of a great joke."

Having spent some time in Africa I was able to picture the river villages and people. I wish some of the photos from the National Geo photographer had been included with the book.

[Faye Hollidaye · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificent blend of crazy, history, common sense, and superb descriptions! Salak’s consistent, vivid imagery takes the reader along as she powers through on this kayaking journey 600 miles up the Niger River from Old Segou to Timbuktu. The story comes to life only because our adventurer narrator has such an open mind that she acts as just as much an anthropologist as adventure writer (no spoilers here!). (It did remind me of books I read for Anthropology class in college.)

Do you love learning about other cultures and parts of the world but you’re not so much of an adventurous soul to take the risks associated with going there yourself? This book is for you! I loved the trip, and she really took me along on it (and I’m glad I didn’t suffer for it like she did).

[David Becker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A curious adventure book in that the trip wasn’t really a kayaking challenge — no major rapids, navigation challenges, supply emergencies. Instead, the author is mainly vexed by the climate and the people she encounters (usually at a distance.) Not much in the way of motivation, either, aside from a fascination with 19th century explorer Mungo Park and an assignment for National Geographic. She’s a good enough writer to give you a solid sense of the place, but the overall impression is less one of discovery than a constant sense of low-grade irritation and xenophobia.

BTW, if anyone is interested in Mungo Park, I highly recommend T.C. Boyle’s novel “Water Music,” a rip-roaring read.

[Sarahndipity · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this book, I am completely convinced Kira Salak is the reincarnation of Mungo Park--back to finish his mission of reaching Timbuktu by way of the Niger River and living to tell about it. I suspected this early on, but it wasn't until toward the end of her journey that it became clear--that moment when she finds herself in a riverside village during a fierce storm wandering the roads shouting "Hey Mungo...Mungo Park!" into the harsh wind and rain as villagers watched from their huts.

[Ruairi Reser · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never been one for non-fiction, but this was something truly wonderful. So many things happen. Wonderful, horrible, tragic things. She goes through a real-life hero's journey while traveling on the Niger River.

Only other thing I'll write is this quote: "It is such a kind yet cruel world. Such a vulnerable world. I'm astonished by it all."

[Han · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing and exciting read, just like Kira’s other book, but I found this one easier to follow. Full of her adventorous journey that few would ever emulate, filled with details of her interactions with the villages and locals and history and anthropology and politics. It gives us a glimpse into an area of the world many of us would not venture to, and few of us understand much of.

[Ian Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a ton of travel books, usually of people traveling and doing the unthinkable.

Kira is such a badass and her books feel so real. I truly hope she writes a few more, I've read everything she has written now.

[Thomas J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Great Read

A great story of a true adventure. I would hav like to on her adventures. Read the fucking
damned book!

[gnarlyhiker · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

good luck