Read while in Chile...

I love the sense of adventure I feel when I read Kira Salak's book. This is one brave woman. It inspires me to move outside of my own comfort zone just a little bit more often.

Good story and incredible journey. I wonder how the freed slaves are doing now.

My rating is ***** for all Kira Salak books. It is an astounding and difficult journey by a very courageous woman. She is an excellent writer who delves into both the outer and the inner journey of her's.

Following in the footsteps of Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who traversed the land and the river in the eighteenth century, Salak sets out to kayak down the Niger River in the west African country of Mali. Unlike Park's ill-fated -and ultimately fatal- journey, Salak makes it to Timbuktu, the ancient "city of gold" right below the Saharan desert. Her journey was funded by the National Geographic Society, and she often runs into the hired photographer who is documenting her travels at stops along the river. (His photographs of Salak's journey can be seen on her website) She sets out from Old Segou with only a few vocabulary words of local tribal languages and a working knowledge of French. She has her inflatable red canoe, and a backpack of supplies.

Salak's writing style is very engaging - her strength and her fortitude come across in her writing, though never with a tone of arrogance. Each trial or trouble she encounters (and they are many: ripping a bicep muscle on the first day, hostile tribes, hippopatomi, dysentery) is documented clearly and unbiased. Any other person would have called it quits - but Salak finds courage and prevails in all of the circumstances.

Interwoven throughout her own narrative, Salak recounts Park's journey, over two hundred years before her own. Park was taken hostage, many of his crew members died, and he eventually died as well, although the circumstances surrounding his death are unclear. Salak relies on Park's diaries and determines that while they are from centuries ago, many of the stories hold true: other places have changed, but this region of Africa has largely remained the same.

My only criticism of the book is that this incredible journey is condensed into a rather small book. I would have enjoyed more passages about the river itself, describing the geography, the biology, and the life of this body of water. The river is undoubtedly a character in the book, but it is largely unknown to the reader - a looming figure that is left a mystery. Perhaps this was done consciously, showing that the river cannot be understood or predicted. The other complaint comes from the last chapter: when Salak arrives in Timbuktu, she makes it her mission to free two "slave" women (they work without compensation and are fully abused by their masters, yet the Malian government refuses to call it "slavery", despite this whole caste of people - the Bella - being continuously subjugated) from their Tuareg masters. She describes how this has been one of the missions of the whole trip. Then why did she mention it for the first time in the last 10 pages of the book? As a reader, I felt a little cheated for not knowing this earlier... that should have been something talked about at the beginning of the account. Her work is admirable, without a doubt, and she does "free" two women and gives them gold coins in order to start their own business. This whole encounter is discussed so quickly, that it almost seems like a gloss-over of the whole practice. Salak has to know that giving these women a gold coin is not going to make their life better; that being said, I am not discounting her action. One woman cannot go up against hundreds of years of the "peculiar institution" in a slowly developing country. I do wonder what happened to those two women after Salak left them in Timbuktu, only minutes after "freeing" them.

Salak's amazing journey left me hungry for more adventure - luckily she has a few more books on her other travels. She is a strikingly brave and courageous person, and a good writer too. I look forward to more.

I've never been one for non-fiction, but this was something truly wonderful. So many things happen. Wonderful, horrible, tragic things. She goes through a real-life hero's journey while traveling on the Niger River.

Only other thing I'll write is this quote: "It is such a kind yet cruel world. Such a vulnerable world. I'm astonished by it all."

Kira Salak is quite the adventurer, and her two books reflect that. In this book, she becomes the first solo kayaker to travel a distance of 600 miles along the Niger River.

In 1767, it is known that a Scotsman, Mungo Park, attempted the same feat, only to be taken captive.

To say she faced obstacles would be a discredit - what she faced was harrowing at times, nearing death quite a few. She barely escapes with her life when a group of men take after her in canoes. She contracts dysentery. She gets through severe tropical storms, deadly heat, hippos - you name it, she went through it. That takes a single-mindedness and an unwavering spirit to succeed, both of which she has in droves.

It's an amazing journey, an incredible success story, and a great book.

The author followed the river route taken by the Victorian explorer Mungo Park on his last voyage. I found it very difficult to credit that she paddled her kayak 600 miles alone through a remote part of Africa, camping alone at night, with no back-up on shore and only occasional meetings with her photographer colleague's barge - especially when she describes the aggressive begging she encountered in every town and village. Vivid descriptions of scenery, markets and the discomforts of travel in Africa. However, I wanted to read more about the lives of the Africans she met and less about her own thoughts on the journey.

A must read for every adventurer!

My miracle was Four Corners

Maybe I am a different person when I began to read this book - it took me years to finally finish this because I read it more like a fiction novel one eventually falls asleep to, except I would get so offended at the focus of this book every now and then i'd just not come back to it for months . I came to this book because I needed the inspiration that Four Corners proved to be for me, I looked for that feeling of adventure invoked by curiosity and calling. But in this book, maybe it was the nature of this expedition I didn't understand - I remember feeling struck by every other thought EXCEPT the one that asked but why wouqld you do such a journey when I read Four Corners, I didn't think of it once because it added up the story felt self-explanatory. Maybe I was a person closer to who she was then and someone in the years since, I too have been to the continent and back, had my own journey with my own reasons, built my own version of ethics and what I do for me and what k do for the world and how they are disconnected only in reward, I stopped seeing someone I wanted to be in her journey. It was like the animus I read about, the Park Mungo inspired journey that was traversed for personal triumph but deliberately infused with hints of I am doing this for the world, repeated attempts to be the better person and show the beautiful continent in the depressing light it's always shown in, just broke my heart.

I honestly don't know if this can be even counted as a review, I am just so fucking sad that this book wasn't everything - I am working on my expectation setting but holy shit, I would not recommend reading this one

A compelling book but I couldn't get through it. It's basically a diary of how Kira Salak kayaked up the Niger River to Timbuktu just like Mungo, an explorer.

I felt the writing was as slow as the Niger River was at getting Salak to Timbuktu.

Loved this book. A remarkable woman confronts the unknown and her fears as she kayaks alone six hundred miles down the Niger river. The journey a meditation and inquiry into life. Much learning happens, some of it familiar to me:

"People don't seem interested in me much beyond what I might be able to give them. They see my white skin and reduce me to an identity I can't shake: Rich White Woman, Bearer of Gifts, nothing more. This is an important lesson--the way people so easily label and dismss each other. I'm dismayed by how simple it is for me to get caught in the same game, to start seeing every passing man in a canoe as a threat or as someone who only wants something from me. In this cordoning off of the people I meet, in this mistrust, I deny them their humanity. Do we ever greet people without wanting something from them? Without hoping they'll give us certain things in return--love, money, approval? Without wanting them to change, or to do what we want, or to see us the way we want to be seen? What's stopping us from simply finding joy in another's presence?"