From Igloolik to Timbuktu
Travel Blog • Eva Holland • 01.17.08 | 1:20 PM ET
Photo by Jean and Nathalie via Flickr (Creative Commons)
I always look forward to Stephanie Nolen‘s latest dispatch from Africa in The Globe and Mail—and not just because she’s probably the biggest name ever to come out of the journalism school at my alma mater. She is a master at finding unexpected stories that go well beyond the usual “Troubled Africa” fare, and this week, a story from Mali is no exception.
Nolen talks with a troupe of Inuit acrobats and throat singers who’ve made their way from the Canadian Arctic to the Festival au Desert, near Timbuktu, and finds that they see more similarities than differences between themselves and their Tuareg hosts.
“The people are very calm, that’s one thing,” one acrobat says in the story. “And the nuna, the land—the sand is shaped in the ways that snow shapes when there is a strong wind.”