Twenty twenty four felt like a car careening around a bend with two wheels in the air.
For me personally, it was a year of bricolage, cobbling together tattered sources of income, dipping into savings, trying to keep the dream alive. The dream being to wake up without dread each day, to live relatively comfortably, to move freely. To watch the kids flourish and grow. To stay healthy.
It’s a tall order. We did alright this year all things considered.
There was a little dread. The normal amount of dread when you find yourself occasionally staring at your bank account and crossing your eyes to add a few decimal places. And there were a few sacrifices. We couldn’t do our big trip to the states this year and some fall break plans got scuttled.
But I can hardly complain. We live 200 meters from the beach in Senegal, the kids go to a good school, and we still managed to spend nearly 4 months of the year in Mali. The Sleeping Camel continues to poke along, and Matt and I are both optimistic (is that the word?) about Scoot West Africa, despite a slow start to the season.
If we run out of rope, Bintou has a multiple entry visa to the US that is good for another 4 years. It wouldn’t necessarily be a soft landing. I don’t quite understand the economics of living in the United States at the moment. And then there is everything else. Talk about dread. But the point is, we have the option. Many do not.
We really have too much to be grateful for.
Hopes and dreams and can I use the word goals for this year?
1. Get Jason Kottke to notice and mention Postcards from Timbuktu on his blog
I just realized that I’ve been reading Jason’s site, kottke.org, for over twenty years. In the early days, it was more of a personal blog. It is now something of a bottomless well of curiosity, wonder, and human achievement, a one-stop shop for the best things happening online and off.
But what stands out to me these days is not Jason’s prolific curation, but his values – values that I share – and his willingness to champion them. He could easily make his site politically neutral and commercialize the shit out of it. He could get in bed with a particular platform (or all of them). But he hasn’t. He has stayed true to his progressive politics and online ethos at a time when the stakes couldn’t be any higher.
I have been trying to get Postcards from Timbuktu in front of Jason for a while. I am obviously biased, but I do think it is incredibly cool that with a few clicks and keystrokes, you can order a handwritten postcard from a place that many people believe is fictional while also providing a lifeline to a group of guys and their families who have been struggling since the collapse of Mali’s tourism industry.
The project could not exist without the internet, but it is the analog aspect of it that I truly love. On the backend, a physical card travels from Timbuktu by motorbike, bus, sometimes boat, sometimes plane. It changes hands a dozen times. And that’s before it begins its second, international leg. Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir. Many of you reading this already support the project. My feeling is that there are people in Jason’s audience that would also appreciate it.
Years ago, I sent postcards to Jason at the address he had listed on his site. I don’t know if any of them ever arrived. I do know that before I started our current double postage card-in-envelope method, a lot of postcards were lost.
I sent him an email. Maybe more than one. I may have sent some tweets. I may have inadvertently unleashed my email list upon him. That was dumb.
I think what has happened is that I may have deservedly ended up on Jason’s shitlist before he ever got a clear look at the project. Sometimes persistence pays off, and sometimes persistence earns you a sign over your head with blinking lights and bright red lettering, “this mf’er is annoying!”
But I’m not ready to give up. The project could really use a lift, and I think an appearance on Jason’s blog could do more than any of the news articles written about it. Jason has a massive audience and there are many bloggers and newsletter writers with their own audiences that make discoveries on his site.
I feel like I am seeking relationship advice here, but if any of you have thoughts on how to proceed, let me know. We need to have a strategy here. Because I feel like my next move could be my last chance.
2. Send at least 100 postcards
While I’m on the subject, I have become slightly obsessed with sending and receiving postcards. I am active on postcrossing now (this is me), but because my cards take so long to travel from West Africal, I have started doing swaps as well.
If you want to send me a postcard, this is my address:
Phillip Paoletta
B.P. 232
Ngaparou, Mbour
SENEGAL
Any bird related stamps or cards (except for pelicans) and you will have a permanent place in my heart.
Regardless of whether you want to swap, I would love to send you a postcard. Just send me your address to phil.paoletta @ gmail dot com and I will send you a card from Senegal.
3. Learn how to surf (or at least witness my son learn to surf)
I am not an aquatic person by nature. I think that has to do with being ginger. Water fun typically comes with a lot of sun exposure. I already have a few basal cell carcinomas under my belt so now I am one of those guys wearing a broadbrimmed hat and long sleeve UPF shirts, which by the way are apparently riddled with microplastics. Between microplastic cancer and skin cancer, I guess I have to take microplastic cancer and hope that it’s less deadly than melanoma.
Anyway, we live next to the ocean now, and regardless of how I feel about it, the kids absolutely love it. I will say that I do enjoy the occasional dip, and I do like collecting shells and observing tide pools and building hermit crab hotels. And if you give me a patch of shade, I can sit and look at the ocean all day.
But now that I’ve tried surfing, I can see a path forward to even greater ocean appreciation. My son Andre and I did a joint lesson and we were both standing up for stretches by the end of it. It was thrilling. And admittedly much harder than I imagined. After my collapsed lung, Bintou banned me from skateboarding and she has more recently tried to ban me from playing pickup basketball. At least for now, surfing is being perceived as a relatively risk-free activity in our household. I will not be telling Bintou about sea urchins.
We have our next session a few days after we arrive back in Senegal.
4. See 36 new bird species, including an Abysinnian Ground Hornbill
In West Africa, this is a very modest and achievable goal. But the pool of potential lifers shrinks each year. I think I can manage to see 3 new bird species a month with a little bit of effort.
I really want to see an abysinnian ground hornbill. You can only see this bird in a relatively thin band that runs across the African continent. Or in Florida, where they occasionally escape that state’s ridiculous exotic wildlife trade. I imagine there is a “fully nude florida man high on PCP arrested at Wendy’s drivethrough with Abysinninan Hornbill in passenger seat” headline out there somewhere.
I haven’t been to Florida in a long time, but I do happen to spend a good amount of time in this bird’s endemic range.
5. Make a longform video I am proud of
I’ve made a few videos that I’ve published on our Scoot West Africa youtube channel. If I’m being honest, I am more embarassed by them than anything else. Sometimes it’s something the small, a poorly framed shot or bad lighting. Sometimes it’s the entire premise of the video. Sometimes it’s my irritating tendency to overexplain and overnarrate, something I feel like I’m actually doing right now in this post.
case in point.
I have an idea for a video that I am going to film roughly two months from now. Then I will likely spend the next 3 years editing it, which is why I need I this goal.
6. Go camping with Andre
Long overdue. Between official Scoot West Africa gear and the semi-permanent bazaar in Matt’s room at our house, we have everything we need. And it’s not the rainy season anymore. No more excuses.
7. Take a trip to the states (move to the states?)
The latter is not the goal, but if it works out that way then it will cancel out the first bit.
8. Take more family trips in the region
Bintou and the kids have still not been to the Casamance and that is gross negligence on my part. We have been everywhere on the Petite-Côte and up to Dakar often enough. And we have spent a bit of time in The Gambia and the Sine-Saloum. But there is so much more to explore and really an endless supply of family-friendly trips to take.
9. Finish updating the Bradt Guide to Senegal
Provided I finish on time – and the manuscript isn’t rejected – I will be a published author sometime later this year. Ok, a published “updating” author. My name will not be on the cover, but it will theoretically be somewhere in its first pages. Anyway, it’s less about the glory of authorship and more about future opportunities, and an excuse to see more of Senegal.
10. Become conversational in Wolof
I mentioned in a post last year that I finally started to appreciate Wolof as a language. Unfortunately, my language learning efforts have not been commensurate with my appreciation.
11. Write at least one thing every week on this blog or in some other public place
I write at least once a day privately, but my daily commitment to blog posts proved too ambitious. I am aiming to post at least once a week though. I think this is manageable. Good things happen when I write here.
12. Create a base in Senegal
The algorithm – or, my algorithm – is collapsing in on itself. I’m consuming less social media these days and when I do, much of it is encouraging me to get offline.
The story I keep telling myself is that we need social media for our different projects, especially Scoot West Africa. But I’m not so sure anymore. We have actually not found that many clients this way.
Now, we might just be shit at social media. We do neglect and often ignore many so-called best practices.
What I do know is this: social media has produced a disproportionate number of problematic inquiries – prospective clients that really do not sync up with our travel philosophy.
A client on our November trip to Mauritania made a tiktok video that was viewed over 10 million times (!). She tagged our company in the post and throughout the comments. We thought we would be selling out trips to Mauritania for the next two years.
Instead, we ended up with an inbox full of unserious inquiries and long-winded pleas for steep discounts from teenagers. I’m all for teenagers being adventurous, but we are not in a position to offer a 10-day trip in 4x4s for a few hundred dollars.
Amongst the more serious inquiries, 100% of them wanted to do the trip for one reason: to ride the iron ore train, which tourists have since been banned from. This is unsurprising – Francesca’s video was about the train – but what was disturbing was the complete lack of curiosity about Mauritania itself.
It should be said, Francesca was a wonderful client. She is now a friend, and someone that we hope will join us for another trip in the future. And of course, we appreciate her efforts to showcase our company. But if it wasn’t already apparent to us, it’s crystal clear now that “viral content” is not the way forward.
I think it’s still possible to win the right people over on social media. But that’s if our stuff gets in front of people. The kind of content that the algorithm wants – and I suppose that just means what most people want? – is rarely the kind of content that is reflective of who we are and what we appreciate about travel in this region.
When I think about where we have had the greatest success – and what we actually enjoy doing – it’s meeting people in-person. Yes. Like, real life. This is what we’ve been missing the past two years. The Sleeping Camel was once a Mali travel institution. It still is, really. There just aren’t any travelers. The government has quietly done away with tourist visas, and the entire country is painted red on most embassy websites. We get a few stray country counters every now and then, but that’s it.
Senegal has lots of travelers and no sleeping camel. Our scooter trips are based there, but we don’t have a base of operations. Whether it’s a “scoot shack,” a small guesthouse or some kind of speakeasy, I really believe we need to have this physical space where we can meet people and, you know, indoctrinate them. Our brand of maraboutage does not travel well, and it does not work well through screens.
PS I know I said I am spending less time on social media, but I am on bluesky now @philintheblank.net and it seems pretty nice and I may just start using it!
PPS At least one client has joined a trip through this blog and we honestly couldn’t have asked for someone better. That is giving some extra motivation to revive this thing!
13. Witness the Mali turnaround
This might be the most pie in the sky thing on this list. It felt like something had to give last year, and it didn’t. Now it’s the cold season and the power cuts have eased up (to 12 hours a day instead of 20). But we are drifting back into untenable waters. A cratering economy, runaway capital flight, relentless inflation. On the horizon, Ramadan and the hot season.
I don’t know what is going to happen, but I find it hard to believe that Malians will patiently weather the storm once more. Over a decade of crises on multiple fronts, and it now feels like we are in reverse with a lead foot on the accelerator.
If, somehow, things were to break in the right direction, we would move back to Mali in a heartbeat.
But right now, that’s a pipe dream.
Nightmares
Honestly there is enough to be worried about without me articulating my nightmares. A lot can go wrong this year. In my personal life and far beyond it. If there is any truth to the purported ability of our mind to influence future events based on how we target our mental energy, it’s better I keep my mouth shut.
How about you? Hopes and dreams please, no nightmares.
Really enjoyed reading this and wish you luck in accomplishing all or, perhaps at least most of what you set out to do this year.