Shaping the salt slabs
A sandstorm raged the night I was at the notorious Taodenni salt mines. Fine particles of sand blew through the tent my husband and I slept in. When we awoke we were covered in sand. I couldn’t put my contacts in because there was no way I could get my hands clean.
Rumpled and disgruntled, hair uncombed, I stumbled to breakfast which was served in the blowing wind on a picnic table. I got my sandy slice of bread and cup of tea and huddled in the leeward side of the old French Foreign Legion fort. I looked in vain for a sign that the storm would soon abate. Then I heard our guide, Alberto Nicheli, respond to a question about how long the storm would last and his answer was not cheery. “It could last one day or it could last two weeks,” he replied with matter-of-factness.
I’d been looking forward to Taodenni. It was my photographing highlight for this trip. . The thing that really bothered me was that that with the sandstorm raging, I had to use my point and shoot camera. I didn’t want sand to get into the crevices of my Nikon D5. (It had happened before.)
I wanted to whine and complain, but that is not done on a tour like this one. I must say the Italians (all of our fellow tourists were Italian) were quite sanguine but maybe they were pretending to be in good spirits as I was.
After breakfast we drove the short distance from the ruins of the fort, where we had camped, to the salt mining area. The ‘mines’ are really pits. Each miner pays for a claim and works it himself or his family helps. We saw many young boys in Taodenni. They helped their father, but they had fun, too. They carved pistols and machine guns from the salt and played the Malian equivalent of cowboys and indians.
The claims are priced according to the quality of salt they produce. It is best to buy the best claim as then you will get top price for your labor. I don’t remember the wholesale price for a top quality slab of salt, but I do remember that a salt miner with a good claim and who was a good worker could earn the equivalent of $12.00 USD per day. This was before the dollar became so weak, so now maybe it is more. The miners mostly came fromTimbuktu and worked only in winter time. Summer temperatures would be unbearable.
We were fortunate that the storm died down as we explored the mines and, even without my contacts, my digital point and shoot got me some good photos. It was an early version of a digital point and shoot and had a terrible shutter lag. I remember thinking that I’d never switch to digital! How I’ve changed.