Although sprawling and bustling, Bamako remains a human-size city. Few modern buildings see the light, keeping the traditional quarters and their friendly social life intact. That same friendliness can be found in the beating heart of the city, the markets where you can buy or sell anything and everything you want.

Splitting the city in two the Niger –the country's nourishing river- swarms with life at any time of the day. Two ever-crowded bridges keep the link between both banks, uniting the city. On the fertile riverside fishermen bustle about, people grow improbable kitchen gardens, whilst the young play an improvised football match…

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Once the centre of the prosperous kingdom founded by the Coulibaly, Segou, (Mali's second city) seems to have fallen asleep. It now lives to the lazy rhythm of the Niger, along which it is established and which made its wealth.

Even though dozens of pirogues and pinasses –freighters, shuttles between both banks, fishing boats permanently cut across its waters, it is much more than just a communication route. It is a space of encounters, a place of socialisation, where women wash the laundry and the dishes and the latest gossip, by the side of which men tirelessly converse.

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Daughter of the Bani, the river it emerged from and which bathes it, Djenné has its matter and its colour. It nonchalantly lives in the shadow of its majestic mosque. A dog is resting at the corner of a lane, barely disturbed by a group of children playing hoop. In its maze of streets you exchange smiles with passers-by, linger to discuss with inhabitants sitting on their house's threshold, indulge in sharing a cup of tea with one of them…

Mondays are market days. Stallholders flock from all over the region. By pirogue or by cart, on foot for some, they converge to the mosque's esplanade and present various goods to the shoppers: some sell fruits, some sell fish. Once their business is done they return to their village, to their family, to their quiet everyday life, following the farm work or the fishing rhythm.

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Located at the confluence of the Niger and Bani, its main tributary, the Malian Venice bewitches with its bustle. From dawn its harbour resounds with the shouts of merchants unloading various goods and fishermen selling fish from their pirogues. The nearby shipyards are full of the clicking of the tools from the forges, where all sorts of harpoon tips and hooks are manufactured. The salt slabs coming from the Sahara mines arrive here, while pinasses headed to Timbuktu and Bamako come and go.

A stone's throw away from Mopti, in a moonlike landscape, the Bandiagara cliff rises a few hundred meters above the Dogon country, contrasting sharply with the comforting flatness of the Niger valley. Heirs and guardians of an original and impenetrable culture, the Dogons make up a people of animistic farmers, seeking harmony and balance with their natural environment. Unfortunately the soaring tourism generated by the fascination they exert leads to harmful consequences: merchandisation of rites, acculturation of the Dogons.

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"The pinasse left Mopti nearly three days ago. Three days downstream, watching the pirogues' ballet on the river, sometimes lost in the middle of the blue immensity like on some inner sea. Three days spent with the crew and the passengers, uncomfortably settled on grain or charcoal bags. Three days punctuated with the many tea and prayer breaks. A few stops to disembark passengers or to load some cargo. Three long days, but sadly such a short journey. The sky is turning purple and at the bend of a meander of the river, Timbuktu appears in the distance.

Timbuktu. The legendary city and a fantasised edge of the world. What is there left of your prosperity and of your lustre, when you dazzled the Muslim world with your splendour and made the west dream? Progressively eaten into by the desert which made you rich, inexorably shrouded by the sands, you keep the fascination you once exerted intact."

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Off the tourist track, poor and arid Eastern Mali was formerly the centre of a vast and powerful empire. Known as the Songhai Empire, it stretched from current Niger to the Gambia, covering all of the present day Mali. Very little remains of this past splendour.

Nomad counterpart of the Songhai, the Tuareg, do their best to perpetuate their culture, apparently doomed to alienation, or even to pure and simple extinction. Proud of their identity and aware of the value of their image, they launch out into sustainable tourism, an expected source of funding for their development projects.

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From West to East, along the Niger river, from the capital to the Songhai and Tuareg lands, in search of the various facets which make up the Malian daily life.

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