Photos

Coming back from the Festival in the Desert in Essakane, outside Timbuktu, we decided to take a boat to Mopti. We rode up the Niger in a slow pace for three and a half days and saw hundreds of fishing villages and fishermen like these. At night we camped on the shore. The perfect setting for a really pleasant trip. Unfortunately our captain was drunk and high most of the time. Luckily he had hired two kids who knew the river really well and drove the boat. There were a lot of arguments between him and some of the tourists on the boat making the situation worse, but after a while everybody basically decided to make the best of the situation and to try enjoy the trip as much as possible. The situation also improved a lot when he ran out of booze :)

I really had to restrict myself not to waste all the film I had brought for this trip on taking pictures of the river, there were so many wonderful photo opportunities. I can really recommend anyone taking this trip, one must be careful when chosing a boat, but I bet 9 out of 10 boat owners are great people.

The title is inspired by the novel "Adrift on the Nile" by Naguib Mahfouz, it's about a group of people who meet every night on a boat in Cairo to discuss whatever comes up under the influence of whatever happens to "consumed".

Technicalities:
I didn't manage to get rid of the red cast without turning the picture green instead, if someone has a good technique a workshop would be nice. A lot of the photos I scanned from this trip turned out a little red/magenta-ish - and others were perfect, right out of the scanner. It seems like there's some strange dependence on the angle to the sun. The effect is not at all as pronounced when you project the slides.