Salak's trip is deeply personal, and she shares her fears, her triumphs, and her thoughts along the way with the reader, making it an accessible, involving journey for her audience."
Salak decides to take the journey alone on a kayak, hoping to recapture Park's sense of wonder and determination. "Salak's second travel memoir takes her down the Niger River to Timbuktu, following the trail of Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who more than 200 years before he attempted the same journey. She sets off in ominously stormy weather 206 years to the day after Park did, and shares in cutting detail the encounters of the Niger 'like a mercurial god, meting out punishment and benediction on a whim.' Salak seduces us with an honest audacious story of the splendour and austerity of a journey through a far-off land." "A deeply personal travel memoir, Salak is not merely a traveller, she is an explorer, and her voyage is an expedition of self-discovery. Unputdownable and breathtakingly suspenseful, The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu is a beautifully rendered meditation on courage and self-mastery by an audacious and inspiring young traveler and wordsmith. Surviving dysentery and rapacious pursuers, Salak arrives at her destination weak but triumphant, and achieves her ultimate goal of buying the freedom of two Bella slave women. When she comes ashore each night to find food and shelter among locals in mud-hut villages, tribes alternatively revere and revile her, and Salak, in turn, is equally fascinated and infuriated by the traditions she encounters. Enduring tropical storms, hippos, rapids, the unrelenting heat of the Sahara, and the mercurial moods of the river, Salak learns that little has changed since Park’s time.
While Salak ventures into one of the most desolate regions in Africa, looming as a reminder of the danger she faces is the fate of great Scottish explorer Mungo Park, killed on the same route in 1797.
A young adventurer with a history of seeking impossible challenges, Kira Salak became the first person in the world to kayak alone the six hundred miles on the Niger River to Timbuktu-“the golden city of the Middle Ages” and fabled “doorway to the end of the world.”
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