19. THE POOL OF TIMBUKTU

Timbuktu’s swimming pool

It is really hot in Timbuktu in March. My job healing people is psychologically exhausting. I have no respite from the morning when I start until the afternoon when I stop.

I couldn’t have lasted so long if I hadn’t had the swimming pool at La Palmeraie hotel.

As soon as I have finished treating people, I go to the Tahara’s hotel where the warm smiles of my friends make me forget the stress of the hospital, and then I get on my bike and go to La Palmeraie.

I swim in it for at least an hour. It is paradise. A pool overlooking the Sahara Desert.

When I come out, I am cleansed of all the energy I have absorbed from the sick. The pool is chlorine-free, purified with salt.

Hervé, the owner, throws in whole slabs from the mythical Taudani mines, which still arrive on the backs of camels.

I have wondered every time I have met one of these Frenchmen installed in Timbuktu, what had driven him to live in this dusty desert village and build his fortune there.

My personal attraction is mystical, Timbuktu is the city of 333 saints. Its glorious past has been lost in the sands of time, but something of the life and light of its saints is still present.

Maybe, after all, it could be the same thing that attracted these adventurers, even if they do not know it.

Hervé is a southern Frenchman with a ringing accent, a retired former police officer, now a teacher and consultant at police academies in Africa. As the Italians say, a leopard doesn’t change its spots.

He has so many stories to tell about his life as a policeman in the diplomatic services that he should make a book out of them. I even suggested the title “A policeman like no other.”

Hervé is generous with his swimming pool, it is always open, and his hotel is in my opinion the best in town, far from being the most expensive. If you go to Timbuktu on a tourist budget, stay with him

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