ESSAKANE, MUSIC FESTIVAL IN THE DESERT

Burkina Faso-Mali

Departure: Ouagadougou 3/1/2008 • Arrival: Ouagadougou 16/1/2008

Category: Special Trip

• 14 days in Burkina Faso and Mali
• overnights in hotels and camps
 

From savanna to desert, two weeks which highlight is Essakane Festival, this year from 10 to 12 January: an extraordinary experience full of life, color, emotions. It is the more untypical, inaccessible and uncomfortable Festival in the world, two-hour drive from Timbuctu, in the very heart of Sahara.

Léopold Sedar-Senghor wrote that the rhythm is «the architecture of the existence». This veritable connection between music and life is shown every year during a kind of «culte» properly dedicated to this. It is the more untypical, inaccessible and uncomfortable Festival in the world, two-hour drive from Timbuktu.

Mali claims its role in music birt, as Martin Scorsese described in his movie From Mali to Mississippi, and this position is well represented in this trip to the origin.

Ouagadougou, vibrant capital city of Burkina Faso, is located in the Middle West African savannah. His life is in the streets, in a unique fusion of village and town athmospheres: old taxi, bicycles, scooters and donkeys pulling chariots, porters caring loads on the head…

The Kassena people build their house in clay and mud. The most important feature are the walls decorated by the women with natural colours: a religious symbol to protect the family, to tell a story or to underline their social position in the community…

The Dogon people live in brown clay houses at the edge of the rocky slopes of Bandiagara cliff. Just above them, in caves, like in a speculate picture, the “village of the spirits” built in red clay by the mystical Tellem, before the arrival of the Dogon …

In this region at the edge between savannah and desert, the immense water basin of the Niger (called here Joliba) is divided in hundreds of branches, lakes and ponds: a vast “spider web”. Villages are inhabited by Fulani, Bozo and Songhay, some reachable only by pirogue. Beautiful adobe architecture strikes the eyes: the mosques with a “personalized” style in each of the ethnic groups… the homes built along the water courses… the tiny fishermen shelters on small islands… the rangy canoes with an unique shape….

Group of minimum 6 participants, 2.220 euro each person in double room/tent

Supplement single room 330 euro

Full board from the breakfast of the second day till the lunch of the last day.

The prices don't include the international flight from and to the country of origin

For more informations: transafrica@transafrica.biz