This past Thursday April 4th
was Senegalese Independence day and we didn’t have school. My friends and I decided to take advantage of
the four-day weekend, leave Senegal for Independence Day and travel to The
Gambia. For those who don’t know The
Gambia (yes it has a “The” in the name) is a small country inside of
Senegal. It is surrounded by Senegal on
three sides and the Atlantic Ocean on the fourth side, I like to say Senegal is
eating The Gambia like a Pac-Man. The
British colonized The Gambia and therefore the national language is English, and
by English I mean very broken sentences that dont make sense. The
Gambia is also currently under a dictatorship where the president is not to be
discussed in a bad way (can you say Harry Potter), and there are billboards
with phrases such as “All Gambian women rally behind him,” and “It is every
Gambian’s sacred right and duty to vote for Him.” Needless to say The Gambia is a weird place
and we definitely discovered all of it’s weird glory this past weekend.
We decided
to leave Dakar after school on Wednesday evening, which led us to arrive at the
Gambian border around 1:30am in the morning.
To our surprise and dismay, the border was closed and there were no
hotels or places to stay nearby with the exception of under all of the trucks waiting
to cross in the morning. Because we were
left with very few options we may or may not have crossed the Gambian border
through back roads at 2am without receiving a passport stamp, but I will leave
that part of the story up to your imagination.
We should
have known at that point that the weekend would only get weirder, and it
did. On Thursday morning we left
Farfeeni and travelled to a small village called Tendaba via the WORST and
dustiest roads I have ever driven on. We
arrived at our encampment, Tendaba camp and were immediately welcomed by two
guys who worked there named Aaron and Brown Skin (yes he called himself Brown
Skin, I do not know his real name).
These two boys became our tour guides for the next two days as they took
us on a pirogue ride through the Baobolong Wetland Reserve parallel to the
river, and gave us a quasi-tourist drum and dance lesson. On Friday we had a different guide named
Lamine who took us on a 6 hour, probably 15km walk to the Kiang West National
Park, which was about a 3km walk from our hotel. The walk itself was beautiful and it was nice
to see nature as it is lacking a little in Dakar. We also saw about 3 groups of Baboons and my
friend Bridget educated us on the baboons from her primatology class last
semester, thanks Bridge! The 6 hour walk
was a little rough towards the end as the heat rose and we ran out of water,
but we made it back to Tendaba camp thankfully and spent the rest of the day
relaxing, and also jumping off a dock into the Gambian river with a random
group of Gambians.
the group with Brown Skin and Aaron
Tendaba Camp
Wetland Reserve
Kiang West National Park
Just dancing with our new friends
Sadly, on
Saturday morning we left Tendaba camp for the capitol city, Banjul. We had to leave at 6am because
apparently there was a national cleaning day in The Gambia on Saturday and all
of the roads were closed from 9am-1pm (have I mentioned this is a weird
country?) We only made it to Banjul
because we kept convincing our driver that it was only 8:45 when it was in fact
9:30 and he was the only car on the road.
Banjul was
by far the weirdest leg of the trip and we decided that in Banjul you pick your
poison, mosquitoes or men because there is an abundance of both and they just
want to follow you. The dictator does
not allow a lot of things in Banjul and therefore the city was creepily cleaner
than other parts of Africa we have seen, and there is absolutely no
nightlife. We spent the day having two
picnics to save money, one at a park and one on the beach, walking around the
city a little and then playing cards at our hotel to escape the men and mosquitoes.
The dictator
One example of weird signs in Banjul
these faces sum up our weekend perfectly
Needless to
say on Sunday we were ready to head back to Dakar, the city we have much more appreciation for now. Little did
we know the journey back would take 10 hours and would involve us taking a taxi
to a ferry, a two hour ferry ride, a 20 mile car ride to the border, an hour at
the border as we argued about our “sketchy” entrance into the country, a taxi
to the garage, and finally a 5 hour sept-place ride back to Dakar.
Overall it
was a crazy weekend filled with unpredictable situations, delicious buffet
meals, lots of card playing, swimming in the Gambian River, meeting a lot of
Rastas, getting about 50 mosquito bites, and somehow making it back to
Dakar. Lets just say for The Gambia,
“been there, done that, probably wont go back.”
Also here is my upcoming schedule:
-Next two weeks in Dakar
-April 26-28th Sine Saloum region in Senegal
-May 3rd-5th Riding Camels in Lompoul Desert and visiting the old capitol city of St. Louis
-May 22nd fly to Croatia to meet my parents
-May 29th-June 9th Bop around Europe
(let me know if you want to join!)
-June 10th-July 19th SIT International
Studies and Multilateral Diplomacy Program
-July 20th Fly back to Washington!
-August 18th Fly back to DC!
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