THE GAMBIA

The length of time it takes to cross a land border with a vehicle is a bit of an unknown. There’s a familiar checklist: on exit, get the passports stamped out; get the vehicle stamped out; if necessary, change leftover cash into the next currency; then cross no-man’s land. On entry to the new country: try to ignore yabbering ‘fixers’ and money-changers determined to get your attention; get the passports stamped in by the police (the visa situations vary and can have a habit of changing at short notice – some must be arranged in person or online in advance, some are free on entry, some are paid for on entry); get the vehicle stamped in by the customs officers; where relevant, buy an almost useless yet mandatory vehicle insurance policy; haggle with the man holding a huge wad of cash to change money; then search for somewhere selling SIM cards for the phones.

Often it’s a bewildering tour of illogically-ordered little kiosk windows designed to ensure the visitor cannot hear anything being said nor see the official asking the questions. A mouth is moving in the dark behind the foggy scratched glass and a hand appears in search of X or Y document. Paper logbooks are filled in, documents are stamped, fingerprints given, questions answered, searches carried out. Not 100 metres after completing all of this, someone invariably pulls us over and asks to see the documents again! Really?

When we crossed from Senegal to The Gambia we added a little frisson to the uncertainty by trying to complete everything and get a Gambian SIM card installed in the phones in time for Jeremy to join a 10am work meeting.

Paperwork all done, go! We drove into Farafenni town and at 0959 we were parked outside the Africell office while I was inside hurriedly paying for the data, switching SIMs and flinging phones through the window at Jeremy. I must have looked like a crazed drug dealer juggling burners. Hopefully his colleagues couldn’t detect the sweat on his brow.

Meanwhile I browsed in the market and bought us a spiced coffee, ladled from the pot. There was so much to see and everyone was speaking English! I enjoyed the novelty of that; it does make a big difference to be able to ask more questions and have genuine banter. In search of a late breakfast we honed in on one of the ubiquitous coffee and egg stalls at the market and over-ordered on potato and onion omelettes with bread and a big glass mug of Nescafe. Equilibrium was restored.

In the UK at least, The Gambia is mostly known as a winter beach holiday destination and its reputation is quite mixed. We passed through briefly years ago and after a flight cancellation we ended up in a tacky resort hotel that warned tourists against mixing with locals, which we found abhorrent. But, of course, there’s so much more to the coast than that kind of place and, astonishingly, the interior is often ignored. In particular, travelling along the route of the river – which runs right through the country and gave The Gambia its name – is lush and rich with wildlife as well as small friendly towns.

We immediately headed east along the north side of the river to Kuntaur, and squeezed into the car park of a guesthouse that had the ideal terrace for watching rather fantastic sunsets.

The main reason for being there was to take some river trips to try to see chimps, hippos and other wildlife.

I have wanted to see chimps since I was a little kid. I even wrote to a now appallingly disgraced children’s TV show in the UK to ask if they could fix it for me to have a chimps’ tea party. Aged about eight, I was yet to appreciate that seeing animals in their natural habitat was far more preferable to dressing them in a shirt and tie and compelling them to drink PG Tips. The chimps in this national park area were rescued from traffickers and first resettled there in the 1970s. Their growing groups live independently on three islands on the river. Not even the park guards set foot on the islands, but instead monitor the animals from boats on the river. Although the chimps are self-sufficient, each day the guards bring extra snacks to encourage them to the water’s edge so they can be observed for illnesses and other developments. This also gives us our chance to catch a glimpse as they emerge from the thick forest.

We arranged morning and evening trips with the self-styled ‘Captain Hippo’ and couldn’t have had a better day of sightings – as well as the chimps (yay, at last!) and hippos we also saw a couple of crocs, red colobus monkeys and lots of wonderful birds, of which The Gambia has a huge array. Photo dump alert…

VIDEO: baby hippo makes a brief appearance.

As if we hadn’t had enough close encounters for one day, in between trips Jeremy was lying on a bench under a tree at the guesthouse when a huge snake fell off a branch while wrestling a lizard, slapping to the ground next to his head. He shouted “snake!” and the staff – who up til this point had been languorous to put it mildly – leapt over like a shot. “A green mamba,” someone said. We all froze, then it slithered rapidly back up the tree trunk and was gone. Everyone was chattering away and I kept asking, “is it dangerous?” even though I really knew the answer. At my third attempt someone answered, “YES, it’s deadly”. Death within 30 minutes of a venomous bite, in fact, as Google later told me. Jeremy moved to a different resting spot and the afternoon returned surprisingly quickly to its sleepy state.

We drove on to Janjanbureh (the most fabulously named Gambian town, except maybe for Jambanjelly) and attempted to get the ferry to the other side of the river but it was broken down – we weren’t in a rush and it was incredibly hot so we decided not to wait. We looked for a nearby camping place on the map but the route to it was rough and overgrown. I walked the path to see if it was possible, and came across an abandoned lodge that was full of monkeys and goats. I walked on to another but it was unreachable due to the trees. As I returned, Lamin was waiting at the ‘abandoned’ place, which was in fact open and belonged to him. He urged us to tackle the rutted track and come inside but the best parking spot was only accessible via a dried-out rice field which was basically a bucking bronco for Ivy.

When the knobbly surface kept making us lurch towards a low branch we stopped to reconsider. No problem for Lamin, who just leapt up the tree and started chopping off the branch. We have a number of union health and safety reps in our friendship group who may want to look away now, as this has all the markings of a safety video about what not to do in the workplace.

In the end, the shady spot was worth all the sweating. Monkeys bounded around and played on Ivy and we had a river view to ourselves. Like so many places we’ve been, it was in an unbeatable location but very run down and frustratingly full of unfulfilled potential. However the resources, infrastructure – and perhaps knowledge and experience – are often seriously lacking.

After a couple of nights we attempted the ferry again. It was working but the heavy truck ahead of us was having some trouble getting up the ramp and it looked like more delays were in store. Eventually it was manually shoved on!

We travelled west out to the coast, passing through an insane number of police and military checkpoints on the way – all of which were exceedingly friendly except for one weird bloke purporting to be a narcotics officer who showed me pictures of his family then asked for my phone number (it wasn’t a come on; this kind of thing isn’t unusual in The Gambia – I intend to write more about interactions, cultural differences and privacy/personal space in a future post). Following a recommendation from another traveller, again we found ourselves in a lovely location with rustic facilities. The owner Hassan is keen to improve the place but is dealing with very limited resources. Their ‘beach bar/cafe’ could be great but no food or drinks are advertised – on request, one night his sister cooked us a whopping great yassa (rice with a caramelised onion, vinegar and mustard sauce) with fresh tuna and delicious veggies.

The beach, in Brufut, was well south of the main package holiday strip, nicknamed ‘Senegambia’, and was much more peaceful. We again coincided with our Mauritania desert buddies, Claudio, Ramona and the twins, and had a lovely farewell meal at the beach as they were picking up the pace and heading south faster than us.

We switched into organising mode and moved to a campsite in Banjul to get things done and get organised for flying to the UK for Christmas (yep, the blog is always lagging behind real time..). Yet another slow puncture had to be attended to, and we finally had our broken entrance step repaired by a welder – a one-hour job that took all day due to a seven-hour power cut. Don’t get me started on the things people have to put up with here in their daily lives.

I also found time to be a bird bore (again). Some incredible little birds were hanging around the tree right next to our camping spot, so it would have been rude not to.

We flew to Barcelona then split off to spend Christmas with our families in Scotland and England. It’s the first time we’ve ever had Christmas apart, but we didn’t want to turn it into a long and expensive UK tour, so needs must. It was a rather brief stay but lovely to check in!

Back in The Gambia, Vueling airlines managed to fill our new year days with infuriating admin by losing Jeremy’s bag, which contained €600 worth of spare parts for Ivy among many other things. Aaargh. It was resolved and turned up a few days later, to massive sighs of relief, and we headed south to yet another beach, near Tanjeh.

We were busy making some plans, including a final decision on whether to visit Guinea-Bissau, a small country that’s often skipped by overlanders as it’s not necessary to pass through it on the route south and many are hurrying to get through West/Central Africa before the rainy season comes. We’re doing this region in two stints so we have a bit more time, and Guinea-Bissau sounded so intriguing and beautiful. We headed south back into Senegal, got our visas at the consulate in the city of Ziguinchor and took the phenomenally bumpy road towards yet another border.

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