THE GAMBIA
At The Gambia border we had to change money on the black market (as we
had done as a group in Mauritania) as we had no money and the bureaux
de change were closed as it was dark. The rates were fine although
the money changers or whatever they are called were crafty their
calculators. I only changed 35 euros for Gambian dalasi but they
tried to make more money in 2 ways: firstly by keeping the wrong
figure in the calculator memory so that they appear to calculate the
right amount in front of you but they quickly flick the memory button
so you don't get the right total. Secondly and more obviously, you
don't get the right amount when you count it out but there are so many
notes of low value that it takes so long to count. I guess they hope
some people are stupid enough to not bother counting. Regardless, the
people were so docile I don't think they'd be able to rob anyone.

While it sounds like a negative start to The Gambia, it couldn't be
more misrepresentative. The whole exchange thing was funny more than
anything else! The border policeman asked us if we had brought him a
present but "no" was enough to deal with that. We walked past 2
prisoners behind floor to ceiling bars that you see on movies and met
up with our fellow passenger from the Dakar taxi, Modou, who lives not far from
the border in The Gambia. I chatted to him for about 3 hours in the
taxi and was such a nice guy we kind of invited ourselves to stay at
his house. Modou was trustworthy (you really can tell after 3 hours
of intense conversation) as he had made no attempt to ask for anything
from us (the small minority of people in Africa are not subtle in the
way they go about this) and he had received a Schengen visa from the
French embassy to holiday in Europe, which few people would be able to
do. He was apologetic for not inviting us already as we had
previously been asking about the hotel.

We ended up staying 2 nights. We were in our element. He lived in a
3-roomed house (2 bedrooms and a living room) with his wife and 4
children who were equally friendly. The children were well brought up
and Modou was relentless in askig if they had been working hard at
school during his stay in Dakar.

We were in our element staying at his place. Much of the reason for
my travel is to try to understand the psyche of African people from
different countries and to do so, it helps enormously to live like a
local and be treated like a local, which is really very hard in every
place in Africa so far - Morocco being the easiest place to live like
a local.

Waking up in a Gambian village was rewardng. We hadn't seen any of
the country the previous night as there are no street lights, not even
in the Gambian capital, Banjul. Walking out of a Gambian house to
explore friendly people in a pretty village was nice. We visited the
small local clinic/hospital which wasn't so well equipped as you can
imagine but the staff were incredibly dedicated to their jobs. We
were in The Gambia in the middle of a national polio mass vaccination
program. Health workers go door to door to give oral vaccinations to
anyone who has not yet received the vaccine. Polio is the disease the
UN's World Health Organisation is working to eradicate, just as they
did with smallpox in 1984. Once it's eradicated, the world can
concentrate on another disease and not worry at all about polio.

We visited the capital, Banjul (population 50,000), and the largest
city, Serekunda (population 250,000) that day. There's not all so
much to describe - they are not particularly unique cities so I'll
save time and space ;-) I do, however, still want to know why there
was a shop in Banjul selling so many bags of rice with the label "gift
of the US Government". Is that misuse of food aid, reuse of bags or
misuse of bags?

The Gambia is Africa's smallest country (half the size of Wales).
Even smaller than Djibouti, Rwanda, Togo, Swaziland and the like. The
British made the colony of Gambia when the navy sailed up the river
Gambia and fired canons inland. Where the canons landed marked the
British territory. The British subsequently used The Gambia as a base
for slavery.
I find it a country with a progressive attitude, keen to develop and
better itself. The people seem to have a positive attitude and the
government is certainly doing its best to educate the country about
malaria, AIDS, polio and the like given all the billboards around. It
has been a fairly stable country in Africa in recent times except in
1994 when there was political violence. Since then, the country has
been heading in one united direction. Nevertheless, the economy is
still weak: 70% of the foreign export earnings come from the export of
groundnuts (peanuts), which means the country is in big trouble
whenever we eat fewer bags of salted peanuts in our local pubs. Just
15% of their earnings comes from tourism despite the huge tourism
industry in The Gambia. This is because the hotels are foreign-owned,
the holidays are booked abroad, the plane companies are owned by
foreign companies. This leaves The Gambia with little.

On our 2nd full day in The Gambia, we headed east. We took a minibus
to a town called Wassu. Minibuses and shared taxis where people are
crammed in like cattle are the main forms of "public" transport in
much of Africa. Minibuses contain somewhere in the region of 30
people and are somewhere around the size of a standard 16 seater
British minibus. Luggage gets stacked up on the roof rack, making for
sagging roofs and abnormally high minibuses. Goats stand on the roof
with no support and chickens get held upside down inside the minibus
and when the windows are open, you get the feathers blowing in your
face. There is always one driver and one young boy/man at the back
who collects the money and opens and closes the door where applicabe.
Sometimes, the door is kept open all the time as it cannot be closed
(broken) or there is no space for the boy to sit so he hangs on the
back, often no handed as he deals with the money! On on day
travelling through The Gambia, we were going along very dusty roads so
orange dust covered everything we owned, including eyes for those
without sunglasses (i.e. black people) and airways for those without
masks (most). By the end of the day, I had an orange face and white
patches around my eyes (where my glasses shaded them). The roads are
obviously bumpy too but the drivers tend not to take any notice of
that - I think they either have no care for their vehicles or they
just try to fly fast enough to ride the peaks of the corrugated roads
and miss out the drops. If all this wasn't enough while sweating
plenty as usual, 2 wheels fell off our minibus, which made for an
almighty bump. Wheel nuts had fallen off, letting the wheels loose
and bending the rear left wing (couldn't really tell among the rest of
the well panel-beated shell of the minibus). They were put back on
again but there were nuts missing and the wheels nearly came off yet
again, once again in the middle of nowhere. The minibus was stopped
and we were lucky to transfer to another minibus that was returning on
the road empty.

We arrived in Wassu and took a look at the stone circles they have
there that the Gambians are proud of. Nothing too spectacular but
worth a pound nevertheless. You have to understand that the worse
things are in Africa (except when it comes to poverty), the more fun
things are because it makes everything so funny. Wassu was pretty
much vehicle-less except a couple of minibuses offering to take us to
Georgetown (Jan jan bureh) if we pay for all the seats as no other
passengers wanted to travel any further. An African wouldn't do this
so neither did we. We often get offered this kind of thing - white
people can afford any price they think. They are surprised we don't
have our own air conditioned 4x4 as all other white people do. But we
are budget travellers wanting a cultural experience! We don't just
want to see Africa through a window. The fact we dare share a minibus
with some Africans is already a mystery to locals but we like it!
As a solution to our woes, I chatted to the police at the police
checkpoint in town and we sat chatting to them while we waited for
private vehicles to come past. The police asked the 1st one that came
along if we could hitch with them. The driver said yes and we jumped
in the back of his open back van, even happier with this than
minibuses that have wheels falling off.
We passed through Georgetown, which is an island, by 2 ferries - a
motorised one and another where all the passengers had to pull a metal
rope to which the ferry was attached in order to get the ferry across
the Gambia river. The driver took us all the way to Basse Santa Su,
the eastern Gambian border town with Senegal, where another policeman
showed us to a guest house....

The guest house cost a mere 2 pounds between 3 people for the night
but we got what we paid for! One dirty room with a mattress and sheet
that hadn't seen any cleaning agents since their manufacture; bars
over the small window, which had little glass left inside and electric
wires hanging out of the walls since the days the electricity was
pulled out of the place. Again, fun! We loved The Gambia for all
these random experiences!

Going through the Gambia during the day was all we got to see of the
country outside the built up west of the country. Nevertheless, it is
small and so we got a good view of rural Gambia - green and lush as
it's set around a river - no surprise there. There's also lots of
birdlife to which we were treated a little. Some nickname the country
"Africa for beginners". I could see why as the people are so easy
going, the country is beautiful and easy to travel around.