Alphabet Travel

Fifty kilometres; it was an inoffensive distance to travel between the villages of Bintang and Tendaba. On the map, it was a mere wiggle, a jubilant jump eastwards then westwards, passing a handful of small villages. In my head, I had us relaxing beside the Gambia River by lunchtime, eating chicken and chips with our feet propped on garden chairs. We had been camping, badly, for two days and nights now, and were orange with road dust, ready for some R&R. Here’s how the fifty kms treated us:

Phase one – A lift from Bintang village to Sibanor village, where we hope to flag a giri-giri minibus. The lift goes well; we ride alongside a huge basket of ripe red tomatoes and we only break down once.

Phase two – A whole hour by the roadside, in the company of fruit sellers and bored little boys. Every giri-giri going our way is full. We all gather dust in the shade of a tree filled with bats. Finally one that goes only as far as the next village arrives and we jump on board.

Phase three – For two and a half hours we share a bench with some tired looking women who have been waiting all morning to travel to the next town. When a giri-giri that miraculously has space finally pulls over, we discover, after loading our bags onto the roof, that there is not enough room for everyone. The conductor tries to kick off two of the women to make space for us but we protest, and watch miserably as the bus squeals away coating us in sand. For forty five minutes we try to flag down every moving vehicle, from lorries to pickups. At last a bus collects us, taking us just twenty km onwards to tiny Kalagi. Sigh.

Phase four – In Kalagi we quickly board the hottest giri-giri on earth and slowly bake all the way to Kwinella village where…

Phase five – … we are surrounded by children grabbing us as we try, and fail, to locate a cold bottle of Coke for the unavoidable five km walk we will have to make to reach Tendaba Camp.

Phase six – The walk is not so unavoidable; a teenage boy wants to drive us there on his donkey cart for a hundred dalasi. While he fetches the cart, we sit outside his school and chat to his teachers. The cart is slow – slower than walking – but with the weight off our shoulders we can watch hornbills flying from tree to tree, and fend off requests from the driver’s younger brother to relieve us of everything we own. ‘Can I have your hat? Can I have that book? Can I have a football? Give me your watch. A pen? Some sweets?’ We ride on.

Phase seven – Arrival. Down two bottles of Fanta on the spot to the surprise of the bar staff. Shower off a world of grime and stand amazed in equal measure by the great wide Gambia River and the number of hours of the day that have magically vanished. Feel as though I have been submerged in quicksand almost until death then pulled out at the last moment.

Our time in The Gambia was great, but there was certainly a point at which we began to dread moving between places on account of the gaping time and energy vortex that would kick in, inevitably, every time we tried to progress further east into the tiny country’s slender belly. It was a situation best explained by Paul Simon; ‘sometimes the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ away.’ In Tendaba we walked, talked and relaxed. Seth edited photos, I wrote. The river sunsets were beautiful, cold Julbrew beer in hand, while pied kingfishers fished in the shallow water all around us. We stayed for one day, two days, three… until we knew we were staying because we couldn’t bother leaving. To reach our ‘F’ though, a town called Farafenni, we needed to hit the road. It was forty kilometres away – who knew what the Gambia could hit us with for such a modest sounding distance? Actually, it wasn’t so bad; just a ferry, two buses, one taxi and a lift with some kind birdwatchers.

Farafenni inspired a touch of depression in me. It was another small and dusty town with no distinguishing features. There were the usual kids calling ‘toubab! toubab!’, the usual quiet market stocked with the usual vegetables, meat slabs and dusty fish scales blowing about underfoot. Shops sold the same shampoo, same hair extensions, same soap, same flip flops as ever. As usual none of the buildings were tall. As usual everyone rested until the sun had calmed down. I had known not to expect monuments on every corner in West Africa, yet was missing them, yearning for features beyond the colourful dress of local women shopping in the street, for inspiration outside of everyday life. I suspected that such feelings were pretty lame on my part and grumpily played Nintendo in our cheap hotel room, hoping to kick the mood care of retro gaming. The guidebook mentioned some stone circles in a place called Wassu. Briefly I became excited by the idea.

‘Are they old?’ I asked a guy at our hotel.

‘Ye-es,’ he said, uncertain, his face coming over a little misty, ‘maybe eighty years?’

There was a picture of them on the back of one of the Gambian notes. They looked older than eighty but not very inspiring.

‘Actually,’ I admitted, ‘we have some like this in England.’

‘I know you do!’ said a cheery young Gambian, a charity worker, ‘Stonehenge!’

I glanced for the last time at the picture of the modest stone circle of Wassu and decided not to suggest a visit there to Seth when he returned from his photo mission in the sleepy market. Luckily he would discover a very living Farafennian feature come the close of the day.

Earlier, we had been strolling around town in the company of a little group of children. At the sight and sound of revelry up ahead, they stopped dead in their tracks and conversed anxiously amongst themselves in Wolof.

‘Don’t go there,’ translated little Abdullah at last, pointing ahead, where figures seemed to be frolicking in the dust. ‘Come, we will go this way…’

‘What’s wrong with this street?’ asked Seth, ‘It sounds like a festival.’

‘Bad people -criminals. If you don’t give them money, they kill you.’

‘With knives,’ added a little girl clutching a schoolbag, genuinely scared.

To please them and hedge our bets, we returned to Eddy’s Hotel Bar and settled in the courtyard beneath a big tree full of bats, the sounds of the festival of terror growing ever closer. A young man in a baseball cap joined us to chat, explaining this was a once a year festival for Farafenni, offering to take us out onto the street to see it. Seth accepted his offer but I opted to drink a Julbrew and hang out with the garden toads and bats. The drumming and shouting drew closer. I looked at the sky and thought about Asia, especially Japan. I realised I was missing it. I had a head full of bamboo groves, lamp lit inns, steaming bowls of udon, the gonging of temple bells, priests in purple robes. That person who walked eight hundred miles, to eighty eight temples – was that really me? For some reason on this day I was having trouble living in the now. The now was boring me. I wasn’t interested in what was going on outside; just interested in musing. I knew the writer in me should be out there on the street but plain simple Lu, stripped of any further identity, just wanted to chill and be a little moody and enjoy the beer. Seth burst back onto the scene, wired and hyperactive, as though he had popped around the corner, downed twenty espressos, and popped back.

‘Louie, that was such a good one for you to miss!’ he told me, breathlessly, ‘I’m so glad you didn’t come.’

The festival, it transpired, centred on a man dressed in tree root tendrils who ran at people with machetes, brandishing and clashing them in their faces until money was produced. With him were a gang of loud shouting men, adding to the general impression of being attacked.

‘I gave 10 dalasi,’ explained Seth, ‘and 25 extra for a photo.’ He showed me the image on his camera screen. It was taken with an unsteady hand and showed a group of mad looking men and an unearthly figure clad in orange foliage, the eyes only just visible, holding sharp machetes aloft. This mythical creature, the Kankaran (spelling and facts here in need of much further research) danced and ran through the streets, causing mayhem. ‘If I’d been alone, I wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on, I would have just run screaming down the street!’

Seth’s guide suggested that you could clap instead of giving money if you wished, but as a foreigner money would be expected. So, we concluded, it was kind of like a festival of mugging. I noticed the guide looked just as flustered as Seth, and both of them drained their first Julbrew notably fast.

‘You have to work hard and train to be the Kankaran, ‘ said the guide.

‘Are there always men who follow him like that?’ asked Seth.

‘Yes, but at night, maybe he goes alone.’

I tried to shake the thought of the Kankaran arriving at our door in the night. Clearly there was a lot more to learn about this festival, its significance and the Kankaran, but for now I knew that Farafenni was not so featureless after all; I had just been looking for feature in the wrong places.

90km lay between us and our next destination. I figured it could only take all day. Our minibus was turned back by the police for not having a reflector in its front window. Grumbling, the driver took an hour long detour, bought a big road works sign and stuffed it in the window (obscuring a disturbing amount of his actual view out but hey…) Many hours, two more buses and a boat ride later, we were on the island of Janjanbureh, right in the middle of the Gambia River, a strange dusty place from where we would sail out, come morning, to try to see hippos. (Known locally as heepos, which sounds even better.)

Our boatman, Sadjo, took us out to what is known as Junction 6, a point in the river where a tributary forks away from the busy thoroughfare, away from ferries and fishermen, and hence a quiet spot perfect for wildlife. The heepos were there, comically elusive, popping their round heads, flapping ears and beady eyes above the water long enough to let out an indignant snort, then plunging under again. Waiting for them to resurface was a bit like that whack-a-mole game you play at retro arcades in places like Scarborough; heepos would pop up where you least expected them and plunge down before you had a moment to collect yourself. All of this led to lots of squinting at riverbanks. Those blessed with the awesome gift of perfect vision will never know what such scenarios are like for those of us who see like bats. Sadjo couldn’t get his head around how I could be missing so many hippo surfacings, and seemed to conclude that I had mental difficulties.

‘There!’ he yelled, annoyed, for the fiftieth time, pointing at a seemingly featureless patch of water on the other side of the river, ‘there there there!’ He was our boatman, and I liked him, but I don’t think he knew how close I was to pushing him in the river in these moments. I resolved never to come heepo spotting without my glasses ever again.

Possibly sensing my frustration, a kind heepo surfaced just a few metres from the boat – snorted – winked? – then descended. Excellent. On the way back, baboons watched us from the river bank, the bigger ones eyeing us as though they would have liked to give us all a big bite. It was a hot ride back, and I thought about contact lenses, but all in all there’s nothing quite like your first heepo sighting, however fuzzy round the edges.

Travel by public transport in West Africa; it’s totally exhausting, overwhelming, new, strange, and not without its moments of absolute brilliance. I’m sure that in this blog I come off a little serious, and perhaps a little complaining. It is due to being knackered, which is always a sign of good travel. I want to leave you with the ingredients for the epic journey we just completed:

A Recipe for getting from Janjanbureh, The Gambia to Bamako, Mali
1 x taxi to island’s south bank
1 x tiny ferry over Gambia River
Wait one hour in a tiny restaurant chatting to locals over a warm Sprite, then add…
1 x minibus to the town of Basse Santa Su
1 x taxi to the appropriate bush taxi depot
Now wait for three and a half hours for fellow passengers to join your party. Read. Get covered in dust. Begin to lose faith until finally…
1 x ride across Gambia-Senegal border in bashed up shell of a car with almost entire upholstery stripped, broken doors, holes in the floor and no glass in the windows, in the company of ten adults, a baby, plus a boy on the roof. Stop twice when bumper and exhaust fall off respectively.
Arrive in Velingara, Senegal, and take…
1 x taxi to bush taxi depot
Wait for one hour in the dark, then add…
1 x slow journey to Tambacounda, stopping at numerous police checks and passing alarming numbers of bush fires
Partake of 11pm steak and beer in tiny bar by cheap hotel where you have
1 x sticky night’s sleep
Then, stirring in one more taxi and a mission to the bank, add…
1 x minibus to the Senegal-Mali border, taking a mere six hours and at one stage reversing slowly through a busy market for no reason at all. NB, many live goats being tied to roof racks.
After an hour of police immigration formalities, take…
1 x taxi over border to Diboli, Mali
…where you can indulge in a feast of fishy crunchy rice and a plate of goat parts, including rectum, then stir in…
1 x 18 hour bus journey from hell, stopping randomly for many hours for no reason, while ill woman behind you wails and appears to be suffering from hallucinations, and two babies scream each time the vehicle stops
And there you have it! From Janjanbureh to Bamako; piece of cake.

[Lu]

Encircled by loud, angry men who literally herd us towards the bus to Mbour while spraying us both with a fine layer of whisky tainted spittle, it is at least satisfying to know that this will be the last of our Dakar experiences. When you have been hustled, hassled, followed by thieves and robbed, even an overcrowded bus begins to look good, as long as it is going somewhere – anywhere – away from the city. While Seth runs off to get some water, I perch on a fold-down aisle seat of questionable stability, and unsurprisingly find myself being yelled at again. With tired eyes, I look up to see who it is this time. Ah, it’s the drunk conductor, telling me to shove Seth’s camera bag onto the dirty floor beneath my seat. Smiling, I explain I’m just holding it for him until he gets back from the stall.

‘This rule is the same for everyone! My mother, my sister, my grandmother!’ he spits in disgust, as though I have just requested a glass of champagne and a pink pillow to cushion my pampered arse. ‘What does it matter to you?’ (prodding the bag) ‘For me, the police see this bag like this, I am charged 6000 CFA!’

To shut him up, I slide the bag beneath the seat and share conspiratorial glances with the women around me, like check this idiot out. All on board, I can’t help flipping the finger to Dakar one last time before the doors fold close. It punished me by fortifying itself into a virtual gridlock of traffic and we crawl along the roads for two fumy hours before it unleashes us into the countryside. As if to mark the moment, the little girl next to me suddenly sends two great fountains of brown projectile vomit right down the aisle in quick succession. I’m thinking it must be a case of too much Coca-Cola pre-journey. I glance sympathetically at the man next to me who still can’t quite believe the state of his freshly puked on T-shirt and trousers. This is travel.

We were heading for The Gambia, Africa’s smallest country, and in fact the further south we got from Dakar, the more the redeeming qualities of Senegal began to show themselves. In Mbour, the fishing port was bright and lively, and there was a seaside restaurant that played Phil Collins on the stereo, as much a hit with me as it was with the owner’s African grey parrot (though both of us only whistled along to the fast tracks. I think Easy Lover was its favourite.) (And hey there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a bit of Phil. Come on, what about the Tarzan soundtrack? Classic.) On Easter day, the Christian sector of the community got dressed up in their Sunday best and were shuttled around town on donkey carts, creating a spectacle that looked a hundred years outdated though very endearing. Further south still was tiny Toubacouta, where Boubo the boatman took us out on the Sine-Saloum Delta to see monkeys running alongside the mangroves. There were many birds, including the goliath heron, who truly lives up to his name. (It is hard to say who would win in a fight, man or bird.) The sun set behind a row of petrified looking baobab trees and the sky filled with squawking parakeets. Pelicans, egrets and kingfishers squabbled loudly over the best branches on their favourite island as the sun fell.

At the Senegalese border post, a gang of four giant money-changing women flew at us before we had even climbed off the back of the motorbikes we had been travelling on. Annoyed with their pushiness, Seth gave them the cold shoulder, and they haughtily turned to me, looking me up and down with disapproval. I smiled benignly.

‘This is good?,’ said the ringleader, big enough to wrestle in Japan, moving forward and tapping the crotch of my jeans. ‘This is good? This works?’ I couldn’t believe it; my fertility in question once again. What was with this bizarre obsession? OK, in comparison to many of the African women I had met so far, I was more Wile E Coyote to their Jessica Rabbit, but why my height and, in this case, relative slimness, should render me so unfeminine in their eyes was beginning phase me. Best not to show it.

‘I hope so, ‘ I confided, ‘ What’s your name?’ She began to soften. When we had talked a while, and she had discussed me in detail with her girlfriends in secretive Wolof, she eventually announced she liked me, though with naughty glance that kind of made me want to run. Seth and I crossed into The Gambia, leaving the francophone world behind us and entering one in which English was widely spoken. For a month I had been muddling along with just a few phrases, straining to understand conversations in a language which, granted, is not my favourite, so to stroll into the taxi rank and immediate fall into a discussion with the locals was fantastic. A man in a flat hat and long tunic tut-tutted Seth and I for lighting up a cigarettes. ‘I gave up in the seventies!’ he wagged a finger. Further talk bizarrely revealed that he had been in the army and trained at Sandhurst. A faraway look came across this Gambian gentleman’s face as he said, ‘I have very good memories… ah, it was a good time.’ Straight away, I felt The Gambia was going to be an interesting place.

Banjul, the capital, was about as unintimidating as an African city can be. It was a walking town, and even the low-level hustlers were mostly just friendly young guys trying to get you to visit their juice bar. There were local characters who would just start chatting to you on the street, telling you their life story. One especially brilliant, woolly-hatted fisherman hung out at Michel’s restaurant, and swore by their onion soup with the loyalty with which one might swear by a football team. ‘You must try it! They put cheese in it! Cheese in the soup!‘ We tried it. It was indeed strangely good. He had fished in a good many places, and spoke excitably on the topic, especially when it came to lobsters. ‘Nouadhibou,’ he reminisced about the place that had been our first port of call in Mauritania, ‘It has the best brown lobsters in the world.’

At the root of these travels lays the alphabet, and the letter ‘E’ is generally a tough one. I had spotted one on the north bank opposite Banjul (which lies at the point where the Gambia River meets the sea) but it was hard to say if it was its own independent town or part of the town of Barra, from where we had caught the ferry the previous day. Being an ex-colony, The Gambia also has its fair share of old and new names, and I didn’t want to take us to a town that had either merged with another one or had a new name. Internet research and chats with locals finally confirmed that Essau existed. To reach it, we would have to repeat the least pleasant experience of the previous day – the ferry trip; the most likely place in The Gambia to have your pockets picked or your bag snatched due to the crush and rush of people.

‘This is dedication to the cause,’ I told Seth, as we boarded the notorious ferry after a long hot wait in the sun. Essau was dusty, with a torn up road that had been undergoing road works for three years. Eighteen year-old Adam politely asked to join us and show us around, asking only for our email addresses and a new pair of flip-flops in return. The three of us explored Essau, meeting his family first before walking the dusty little streets of the town, disturbing bright birds in the trees and bringing much crazy adrenaline to the legions of kids who came to shout ‘toubab! toubab!’ at us (there’s always a word for strange western outsiders.) Perhaps the oddest moment I recall is when, as we stood by a clutch of palm trees at the water’s edge, adam pointed to a small house and said to me, ‘There was another European lady here once, and her name was Lu, and she lived in that house, and they called this place paradise.’ I gawped at him. Another Lu? Right here, in Essau, a place that not even half The Gambians we met would have known of? And what was this about paradise? He couldn’t tell me much more about it and I thought it was the most peculiar thing I had heard in years. Back on the ferry, with a truckful of oxen and a cluster of people, we turned our eyes to the south, planning to visit Gunjur before heading inland to the Gambia that lies away from the coastal resorts, a Gambia that sees far less tourism.

With our arrival in little Gunjur came the first night of camping since the desert. We are not natural campers. We do stuff like pitch our tent on slopes, or near termite mounds, and there was that time when Seth sprayed Deet all around the inside of it while we were in there and we almost choked to death/blinded ourselves. Fortunately the Footsteps Ecolodge was so nice that we spent most of our time looking at birds by its freshwater pool, and drinking yummy Julbrew beer in its bar. It had a bird book which we used to identify the species we had spotted so far (total twitchers, very worrying). The best of all was the red cheeked cordon-bleu, a little bright blue bird with a clown like smile and scarlet cheeks that make it look like it’s been on the gin. Walking to the fishing port via miles and miles of bush, there were paranoid hornbills that always flew ahead to the next tree, and a huge osprey wheeling overhead. The catch was just coming in as we arrived, women rushing to meet the boat with plastic buckets on their heads with which to carry the fish to shore. They waded out, not caring how wet their clothes got, while waves crashed against the wooden boat and the fishermen steered it closer to the land. It was so close-knit and intimate a scene, so much smaller than other fishing ports had been, that I had a moment of feeling acutely voyeuristic and walked away, a little uncomfortable. Pied kingfishers were fishing at a little swamp nearby. We both crept close to take their photo. Pleased with ourselves, returning to the beach, a passing local shook our hands and greeted us, pointing back at the swamp, ‘So, you went to see the crocodile, then?’ sometimes it’s not what you want to hear.

The next day, it became apparent that travelling in the interior of The Gambia was not the straightforward, short distance, town-hopping joyride we thought it might be. The road along the south bank of the Gambia River was dusty, quiet, potholed and – due to the sudden intense heat – alarmingly prone to little bush fires. But it wasn’t just the road conditions, it was the will of the driver to actually get anywhere that could make or break a journey. We reached the junction town of Brikama with no problems, and soon jumped onto a minibus that was due to head to Bintang, our next destination. You wait for the minibus to fill up – that’s normal – but you don’t normally wait for the driver to eat lunch, chat to his friends, fiddle with the horn, mess around in the bonnet, go for prayers (fair enough) then load up half the town onto the roof. Bintang was only 30km away, but we waited almost three hours for the minibus to actually head there. Once on the road, the driver and conductor would pull over to chat to friends and family on the way. I knew I would have to adjust myself to think more like the locals, to chill out, and yet there was that sense of life… slowly… ebbing… away…

The Bintang Bolong Lodge was peaceful and cute, with a restaurant on a pier overhanging the Bintang River. We were the only guests that night and we camped (never mind that we camped with termites). Determined to swim, Seth asked waitress Carla if it was safe to do so.

‘Yes,’ she shrugged, smiling. He stripped down to swimming gear and approached the river. He was standing on the jetty looking worried when I caught up with him (too grumpy to swim after the slowest 30km journey in history, and thinking to myself you could walk that distance in as much time.)

‘Aren’t you getting in?’ I asked

‘ I think I saw a jellyfish!’

Sure enough, there in the green water was a huge, ugly orange jellyfish the size of a football. And another. Both of us had presumed the river was freshwater and couldn’t help giggling at this strange turn of events. Desperate, still, to swim in the muggy heat, Seth padded back to restaurant and asked Carla if these jellyfish sting.

‘Yes,’ she shrugged, smiling.

Brave and quite mad, Seth climbed in, and I agreed to be his guardian, looking out for jellyfish, though reminding him I had bat eyes. Five minutes later he re-emerged, having been stung twice, and quickly developed a couple of nice rashes. The jellyfish wobbled around gleefully in water, pleased to have ousted him. When no spasms etc. occurred within the hour, we relaxed, and watched bats terrorise poor Carla in the restaurant as she brought us fish and chips. The sleepy village of Bintang, which had appeared to be little more than a quaint village with water pumps, livestock, a little boat dock and a small mosque, waited until after dark before holding some kind of intense and loud Bob Marley disco which induced much joyous shouting and yelling, mingling with donkey brays and sheep bleating that formed a more likely soundtrack. We lay in our tent, sleepless, hot, termite-infested, but inclined to laugh, even when at three in the morning a nocturnal peep-peeping bird joined in the chaotic chorus.

There was the kind of sunrise travel agents thrive on the following morning. We rose bleary eyed but happy. It was a good thing we had no idea exactly how many hours we would sit by the roadside, waving at buses, that day. There were still lessons in patience West Africa wanted to teach us.

[/Lu]