“There are two Timbuktus. One is the administrative centre of the Sixth Region of the Republic of Mali… And then there is the Timbuktu of the mind —  a mythical city in a Never-Never Land, an antipodean mirage, a symbol for the back of beyond or a flat joke. ‘He has gone to Timbuktu,’ they say, meaning ‘He is out of his mind’.”

— Bruce Chatwin, Anatomy of Restlessness