To Timbuktu for a Haircut: A Journey Through West Africa

Historically rich, remote, and once unimaginably dangerous for travellers, Timbuktu still teases with “Find me if you can.” Rick Antonson’s encounters with entertaining train companions Ebou and Ussegnou, a mysterious cook called Nema, and intrepid guide Zak all make you want to pack up and leave for Timbuktu tomorrow.

As Antonson travels in Senegal and Mali by train, four-wheel drive, river pinasse, camel, and foot, he tells of fourteenth-century legends, eighteenth-century explorers, and today’s endangered existence of Timbuktu’s 700,000 ancient manuscripts in what scholars have described as the most important archaeological discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Think Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush or Redmond O’Hanlon’s Into the Heart of Borneo and you begin to see what kind of writer Rick Antonson is. To Timbuktu for a Haircut combines wry humour with shrewd observation to deliver an armchair experience that will linger in the mind long after the last page is read.