Mopti, Mali - circa 1975

Mopti, Mali - circa 1975, originally uploaded by rdpaul.

Mopti, Mali is on the way to Tombouktou. It was built by the French. Djenne is close-by, but was built by the Moors and had a famous university hundreds of years ago. The wells in Djenne were built by the Moors, and no one knows how they managed to build them so deep and so narrow.

Arriving in Mopti at sun up was like taking a step back in time. A hundred years ago? Five hundred years ago? The rest of the world is very far away from this place.