Fiona Dunlop

If you’re after spa treatments, luxury safari lodges and chocolates on your pillow, then Mali is not for you. Even wildlife is not really on the agenda, bar a few hippos and crocodiles lurking in the boundless Niger river. But if you fancy a mind-boggling ethnic mosaic, seeing mud architecture that could have been designed by Gaudí and immersing yourself in the passions of an ancient cosmology — then this is your kind of place.