Gambia: It Gets Much Worse

Well here goes nothing. It was time to travel almost the length of the entire country in pursuit of historical sites and animal watching. Mustapha shined immediately. He walked up to the pesky taxi guys outside the hotel and chatted with them to get a good price. Apparently he didn't like the price available because we only took that first cab to a place where there were more cabs, then we switched. I have to admit he was good at that, but that's about all he was good at. I kept thinking he's taking us to hell but he's doing a good job getting us there.

We drove past Arch 22, built to commemorate the military coup d'etat of July 22, 1994. It's the most interesting sounding landmark in the whole country that I'm aware of, and has some sort of museum inside. Can we stop at this political and historical landmark? Nope, we're gonna drive 6 hours to nowhere and look at birds.

I made it rain dalasis.

We headed back to Banjul to take the ferry back across the river. Now that it's Sunday, the crowds went from ridiculous to ridiculous plus. We asked Mustapha how many people can fit on the ferry. "3,000". How many are on it now? "5,000". Lovely.

I hope that our tickets cost more than normal people's because we were treated pretty preferentially. A handful of white people were allowed near the ferry so that they could board as soon as the vehicles were loaded. Everyone else was stuck behind these padlocked gates like cattle. By the time the local folk were allowed on we'd already claimed many of the seats on the top of the ship. Not only did this feel kind of greasy but I would have rather been on a lower deck to stay out of the sun.

Once again there were ladies selling all sorts of interesting snacks. This lady was selling pre-peeled oranges to these eurotrash individuals.

Once on the other side of the river we stopped at his house and his aunt's house in the village of Essau. Both were pretty real. I don't think that either had doors. His aunt's house had several of his relatives there who we sat and chatted with a while. I could see a hen strutting around in another little room, and there were chicks wandering around their living room. Mustapha said that his dad died some years ago so he was the head of the household now. (Eyeroll). I thought it was an awesome opportunity to see how people live here, but I felt like a large reason for this detour was of the guilt trip variety. Oh well, onward!

Next on our list was Kunta Kinteh Island, named after the character from the Roots book and miniseries. On the boat ride over I kept thinking that if this is anything like that freak show Goree Island that I am going to have an outburst.

I got way too much sun on the ride over. Unsurprisingly there was no sunblock available for purchase around these parts.

The island changed hands multiple times between the British, Dutch, French, and a thing I had not heard of called the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Anyhoo, the island is home to Fort James, which was a big deal in the slave trade, starting as a place to hold slaves headed for the New World, and later on as a place where the British attempted to stop slavers once slavery had become illegal in the British Empire after the passing of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.

Cannons are so awesome. Where do I need to go to get to shoot one? The cannon's little wheeled apparatus looks exactly like one I saw at a school playground in Jamaica.

This is a UNESCO site, so I could be safe in assuming that this wasn't all BS. There were lots of good signs in English to help gather the important parts of the story. We had a "guide" following us around but with the signs present I wished he would just shush his mumbling and let me read. The guide was especially annoying because he kept saying things like "Kunta was here, and Kunta did this." Dear Gambia: Kunta Kinteh is a CHARACTER, much like Spiderman but without the cool powers. Not only is he not real but the author of Roots, Alex Haley, didn't even come up with the character on his own. He plagiarized it from a novel entitled The African by Harold Courlander, got sued real bad, got whooped real bad, and settled out of court, probably for a bathtub full of money. So no, sir, Kunta did not plant that tree over there.

We learned a fun little fact around this time. The little kids have been calling me Twobob this whole time without me knowing it. Apparently it's just a catchall term for white people. Back in the colonial days the British would pay the local two bobs, two shillings, for whatever little task and the name stuck. Now everyone just take two steps away from me because I'm not giving you any money.

What could go wrong when climbing a painter's ladder out of a boat onto a dock? Nothing, that's what.

Wikipedia says that symbol on the guy's chest is the yaz. "The yaz symbolizes the "free man", which is the meaning of the Berber word amazigh, the Berbers' own name for themselves."

Back on the mainland in Albadarr Mustapha informed us that the taxi that we came in was having mechanical problems, that he didn't trust it to take us the rest of the way, and now we had to drive all the way back to the ferry town of Barra to get another one. Oh my. Mr. Fatty the truth stretcher told us that traveling from the good hotel to the bad hotel would take 6 hours. We were on about hour 5 and now we had to back track. Evan said that if he'd known there'd be so much driving that he would have stayed at the resort, and then I screamed inside my head for an hour.

I took a little video just to give an impression of what the road was like.

The broken cab's driver had something up with his right eye. No big deal, buy some eye drops when you get a chance, right? Well when we sideswiped a tree on our right side I realized a two eyed driver is probably optimal. Evan was taking a little nap on that side of the car when it happened and I may or may not have laughed when he was jarred awake by the impact. You have to find happiness in the little things.

Looking out the cab window at the countryside I can see termite mounds easily taller than I am.

I asked Mustapha if he'd ever seen the Lion King. He'd never even heard of it.

We switched cabs yet again back at Barra, this time for a van which everyone appreciated. I noticed the speedometer was broken, but then again the police here don't have radar guns so even-steven I say.

Speaking of police, their main strategy of keeping control out in the countryside seems to be a speed bump next to a little guard house in every town. All of the drivers really respected these, and always waited for permission to proceed even if the police office manning the check was busy or far away.

When we got to friggin' Janjanbureh it was after 10pm, TWELVE hours after we left our resort, and was now pitch black out. We arrived at the "hotel" Mustapha claims the president stays at and well...

Top shelf is where I keep my hat, bottom shelf is where I keep my mold.

Toilet seat? Only when the president is in town I bet.

Complimentary coffee... can.

I laid on the bed a bit to relax and felt some movement under my shirt. I jumped up and did the "oh my god something is in my clothes!" dance to shake it out. It was a cricket.

There's plenty of space between the door and the door frame so the mosquitoes don't feel left out.

Even my anger at Mustapha for lying to us and screwing us with this nasty hellhole is frustrated. This is still probably better than his house. Can I be mad at him? Maybe he legitimately thinks this is nice and if I tell him I hate it I'll hurt his feelings. Surely though he knows there's quite a difference between this hotel and the previous one, especially considering the time he spent there creeping around looking for us.

I think it's like a basic problem when interacting with people both here and in Senegal. I'm so much better off than they are that there is huge reward in it for them to try to trick me. And we are both aware of that fact so if they do trick me it's like "Sorry I had no choice because life here is so hard" and I have no choice but to agree. I hate having to be suspicious of everything everyone says to me here all of the time.

These two want dinner so we wander around in the dark in a small town in Africa looking for restaurants. What could possibly go wrong? And what the hell kind of guided tour is this? Have you done this before? Did you do any planning beforehand? How about some local history or something dude?

We stepped into this restaurant that has one little light bulb in the corner of the room, and is effectively dark. I don't want to eat here. I have to be able to SEE what I'm eating, especially in a place like this. Mustapha and the cook chat about it and decide the lighting is better outside. OK. So now we are sitting outside. In rural Africa. At night. With a bare light bulb hanging over our heads from a tree. Believe it or not but a lot of bugs are interested in that light. And many of them are bouncing off of it and falling on my head. Do I want a big plate of food right now? NO I FREAKING DON'T! I just ordered a beer and put the cap back on top in between sips. I would have just walked back to the hovel but I wouldn't be able to find it in the dark. I sat and endured these two's riveting conversation on such topics as: "Are dinosaurs real? Are dragons real?" The conversation I was having with myself was more like "How much could buying a helicopter possibly cost? Maybe I could fake a heart attack and they'd airlift me to Europe?"

This picture was taken inside a restaurant.

All sorts of species hustlin' out here.

At the end of the meal one of the staff could probably tell I was trying to set fire to the place with my eyes because he came over to shake my hand and told me "Thank you for your business. You know when people come here to visit they stay in the lodge and they eat in the lodge. That's why we hassle you to come in." I've never been so uncomfortable and felt so guilty for feeling so uncomfortable in my life.

I kept hearing this little beeping sound that was like a bunch of tiny submarines tracking me. It turned out I wasn't far off. It was bats.

Back in the hovel I tried to pretend I was camping. I wished I was because then the tent zipper would be able to keep these little beasts at bay. I finally managed to fall asleep.

I woke up sweaty at around 3am. What the heck is going on? Well the power went out in the night, which killed the fan. And it stayed out. I didn't want to use my phone because I was now unable to charge it and it contained the next day's hotel reservation. So I just laid in bed in the dark and listened to the bats and the monkeys and the bugs and waited for sunrise. Call your travel agents now folks.

The Long Road to Gambia

Our taxi man buddy Cheikhou Ndiaye was waiting to drive us to Gambia as agreed upon. Well we got to the edge of town and he wanted us to pay the full fare upfront. Shockingly we let that happen.

Well we continued driving a bit further and then stopped again. Our guy got out of the car and a new guy got in, with some mumbling from Cheikhou about him being his “friend”. Great. Let’s all be friends.

The drive was pretty cool. We saw lots of life happening, I’ll tell you that. One of the things we liked about Cheikhou was he could speak a little English. New guy=no English, which meant we didn’t get a lot of background info on what we were seeing. Oh well, it was cool.

One advantage of being in the car was I was much more comfortable with taking a lot of pictures of everyday life.

Renting a taxi cross country was the king's way to travel around here. Many people rode these colorful bus things around. They really pack them in, then a few more will hang off the back.

Kids would just walk around with these plastic buckets and beg money from cars whenever traffic slowed enough for them to approach.

The road was really brutal. We were in the car like 7 hours, and I'd say less than an hour of the trip was on properly paved roads. We were constantly dodging potholes and taking detours. The guy refused to turn the vents on in the car or anything. Finally I turned them on and he mumbled something. When we got back in the car after a stop for gas, the air was turned back off. Message received. It really got interesting when the dust started to get kicked up. The driver would roll up the window just long enough for the dust to dissipate then back down they went.

When we drove through towns traffic came to a grind, but at least there was a lot of people watching to be done.

When we reached the Gambia border in the little town of Karang our silent driver handed us our baggage and drove off, leaving us with the small crowd of hustlers that had already gathered. It’s a wonder my wallet hasn’t been stolen yet. If you wanted to, you could just run from Senegal into Gambia. I don’t think I saw any signage letting you know you were crossing a border. We saw a guy waving at us from what turned out to be Senegal immigration, but we easily could have just kept walking if we hadn’t seen each other. Leaving Senegal involved a guy writing our passport information into a guestbook looking binder thing. When he asked me my occupation I said bookseller, and he thought I was saying boxer, which I thought was pretty hilarious. He had to mime a couple shadow boxing moves before I could even tell he had things wrong.

Entering Gambia involved another official scribbling into a book. This office was notable because right smack dab in the center of the small building was like fenced in and resembled a holding cell. There were two rough looking dudes in there in the process of being held. Bummer.

The Gambia. Annoyingly the T in The Gambia is always supposed to be capitalized, grammar be dammed. I'm not going to do that here because I don't want to, but it's a Thing. Contrary to Frenchie Senegal, Gambia is a former British colony so sweet sweet English flows like honey. Although when you've heard "give me some money!" about 300 times you sometimes wish for the days when there was a language barrier. The River Gambia goes pretty deep into the continent, and Gambia was a prominent site in the slave trade as a result. In the miniseries Roots the main character Kunta Kinte is captured in Gambia. It is the smallest country on the African continent, and also sort of rhymes with "wham bam thank you Mambia".

We had to deal with yet another taxi man on the Gambia side, and I encountered another amusing little hustle. A really polite boy came to the window and asked if his brother could ride with us. He looked fine so we said ok. When he tried to get in the driver said he had to pay, and then they both looked at me as if I was going to be paying more for the privilege of riding with this stranger. Nope. I have to assume that this was a hustle to increase our cab fare.

When we reached the town of Barra we had to take a ferry to cross the river. Gambia pretty much is a river, and so doing any substantial traveling in the country involves a boat eventually. The ferry people were super nice, and let us in the gate while most people had to wait for the ferry outside. We chatted with several of the workers, most notable being Mustapha Fatty. He really went out of his way to help us, even arranging a cheap cab with his friend for us on the other side of the river.

Us with Sheikh the port security guy. They invariably ask if we're married and often express shock when we say no. One also expressed an uncomfortable level of admiration for Evan's shoes.

Watching the loading process was entertainment in itself.

One moment I was wondering how common the last name "Fatty" is around here, and the next I saw it painted on the side of fishing boat.

There were lots of ladies selling refreshments on the journey. Evan bought a coconut to drink.

The money here can be really gross. Someone handed me this thing and it was like being handed a used handkerchief.

We made it to the Kombo Beach Hotel and were pretty surprised to see that 95% of the guests were older European people.

The clientele combined with the buffet and horrid entertainment brought to mind a cruise ship.

It's funny how Africa can tire you out without you really having done anything.