Mali Photos Four...

This is freeze frame taken from the beginning of a short video. I am just about ready to jump and slide down the sand dune. It did not work out as well as I may have hoped, but I still felt like a kid playing in a sand box...the worlds biggest sand box. Later, I got to watch the sunset over the Sahara Desert.
This is the first time that I have ever been on a Camel. Camels are dinosaurs that somehow survived until now. They are huge and there is nothing else on earth that I have ever seen that compares to them. On the way out into the Sahara a Tuareg guy led the camel for me, but on the way back I talked him into letting me "drive." 'Abduza' and I got along very well and he did not make any sudden movements and responded like a sportscar, infact he and I (more he) led the caravan the rest of the way back to Tombouctou.

While walking around Tombouctou inthe morning the lighting was perfect for taking pictures. The kid in the background, whose shirt perfectly matchs the tarp on the truck. Walked out towards us, saw us, and promptly turned back around.

Tombouctou has three of the oldest Mosques in all of West Africa. They are all made of mostly mud and are not open to anyone that is not Muslim. At one point all of the Mosques were also universities that studied Islamic texts, namley the Koran. Tombouctou, hundreds of years ago, boasted a student population of more than 25,000 and one of the largest, if not the largest, collection of Islamic texts in the world.