Gambia

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Dear Family and Friends

Well in the spur of the moment I and my roommates, Dan and George, decided to go travelling for ten days down to the Gambia and Casamance by sept-place and then take a ferry back. When the big day of our departure arrived, we got up nice and god awfully early to get to our destination at a relatively decent hour. So I, being the only moderately responsible one and only one that could wake up on his own, woke the boys up. Upon last minute packing, George asks if we have you seen his camera, the virtually brand new SLR with massive, and the expensive lense on it?....

Sigh

It turns out George (in his infinite forgetfulness) left his camera in its bag at the restaurant the night before after uploading photos. Panic, anxiety, and a brief moment of insanity immediately ensued. I could not think of better way to embark on a 10 journey of adventure, drinking, parting and fun on such an upbeat note. However my condensation should not be too extreme as I have done equally worse mistakes in the last year. I am not a shallow bitter person who would take this personally nor am I passively aggressively venting my anger about the situation in my blog.

This story is a small insight into my experience living with two young indesicive british twats. In all I do not mind the inconviences of their blunders, the only thing that perturbs me is that being either an observant or participant in their shinannaguns is i feel old and responcible. It is not often a feeling that I feel. Usually it is me who is the one acting far younger than my age, yet now that I am immersed in the world of freshly graduate highschool boys there is the odd moment that I feel old. A novel feeling for me really. Or maybe I have diluted myself into thinking that I am

Rant aside, we thankfully solved the crisis and found the camera. However this episode took up the entire morning that we woke up so early for. With camera back in our possession we could recommence departing Saint-Louis. Now the original game plan was no longer possible as it was 12.30 but we decided that we had to still leave Saint Louis to enjoy our travels. Since we were doing this all last minute we actually had no idea if we could enter the Gambia or not. Yet despite this lack of knowledge, plan, or any basic thinking we left saint Louis for Koalack, a major Senegalese transit hubs that we had to go through on our way to Gambia.

So as I have mentioned before my preferred means of travel in Senegal is done by sept-place. How it works is that there are preset prices for seats in seven seater taxi. This is a relatively cheap and fast way to travel if it is a busy route since each seat is sold individually and the taxi only leaves when it is full. Alas in our rush to get out of the baking heat in Saint Louis we had to wait a very anxious and boring two and a half hour wait to finally escaped the orbit of Saint Louis. Our 6 hour trip to Kaolack was long, uncomfortable; and boring; yet this abysmal day was redeemed by being pickup by a gang young local men on scooters in Koalack. For a small price these young Senegalese guys took us on the back of their cheap shiny Chinese rip off scoots down the perilous roads of Koalack at night to our hotel. We laughed off the grim and stress of the day in the boyish glee to cling to the bikes as they hurtled to our hotel.

I am not going to say much about Koalack, it is not much of a destination, it is often nicknamed by locals as the garbage dump of Senegal and has a fairly large industrial sector that dissuades must tourists coming to the city. Thus we only stayed there for a night, about 12 hours in total.

The next morning we took off for Gambia. Again this trip was filled with uncertainty as we were pretty unsure of how the border was going to go. I had called my embassy which informed me that all Canadians needed to get a visa to enter the country, which coasted a pretty penny and had to be gotten in Dakar(in addition the office was not open on weekends so visa was absolutely out of the option) However this did not perturb me to much as I had heard that the officials in Gambia had a reputation for being quite corrupt, so in my mind if legal means did not get me into the country I was banking on the power of cash to grease the bureaucratic wheels.

Our taxis deposited us at the border where we meandered around in confusion for a while until we figured out that we had to get stamped by Senegalese authorities to leave. This was done without a problem, no bribes no fuss no muss. We then walked to Gambia to get in now that we were out of Senegal. The Gambian officials were to our surprise were as equally profession and asked for no bribes and did not push us for anything. Even I, the one who needed a visa, was only asked how long we were staying in Gambia and since we were only staying one night my entrance was granted.(should be noted that travelers of other nationalities did suffer very long waits, fees, interrogation, and other obstacles. The kind border guard gave me a 72 hour visa for me to pass through the nation. The only minor hitch was that we had a very thorough drug check by the locals. They were quiet methodical to the extent of asking me why I had a condom in my back pocket and its relation to the packet of condoms in my bag. I replied only replied with a rueful grin which prompted them to take one as consolation. Border done, drug check done, a couple of condoms down, now to explore Gambia!

I had not really thought about it but the Gambia is a different country. After 5 months of speaking French to Africans was a very hard concept to wrap our little minds around the fact that they spoke English albeit at a very low level, but spoke it nonetheless… All three of us consistently spoke French to all Africans even when they spoke English and did not understand French. The second thing is that Gambia is your quintessential Banana Republic with a madman of a dictator running the country. He in his efforts to improve his impoverished tropical watery hell hole, he mandated that on the last Saturday of every month is National Cleaning Day. The entire nation shuts down; all traffic is put to a halt; and every able bodied citizen is compelled by their benevolent dictator to clean their house so it is nice when the tourists come by. This in combination with large inflows of foreign cash and a semi repressive regime meant that the nation was marginally cleaner than Senegal.

Since we arrived on the last Saturday of the month we were stranded for several hours at the border waiting for the mandatory cleaning to be conducted. Also we were fairly incredulous when we first heard about this. We thought it was some ploy to get money from us, but when the officials back the story of everyone else this was no farce. The other plague that we constantly fought while in Gambia was that there is another currency and since I had been in Senegal for so long I thought of all my prices in CFA and had no idea what the exchange rate was between the Gambia Delais(sounds like dollars). In addition the only point of reference of a decent price was in comparison to Senegal since tourist prices were impressively exorbitant. Fortunately at the border the transport still took CFA so we could get a cab to the ferry which would than take us to Banjul the capital of Gambia.

Since we had no guide book we had no idea where we were going to stay, how much we should pay for, or even where we should go. With this background information imagine three thirsty hungry young travelers wandering the quiet streets of Banjul fresh from apparent cleaning looking for some kind of adventure. Due to the “holiday” everything that could have caught our interest was closed and we were hopelessly lost. We quickly surmised after wandering around for several hours that Banjul was not a happening place, it was a medium sized capital city that had few amenities to offer and sorely lacked in the beaches, beers and babes. On the advice of a local we were told that all of the above were in ample supply in the tourist mecca known as Kololi. We eagerly booked it out of the city in another overpriced cab which turns out locals pay only an eight of the price.

Kololi, some would call it paradise, some would call it delightful, I call it hell. Kololi is the logical conclusion of tourist development in Africa. Kololi was built out of towering hotels, pools, malls, bars, restaurants, kitchy family friendly fabricated tours, hustlers, prostitutes, Rasta’s and it lived off English tourists on two week vacations. I hate to think that those who frequent this place return home thinking that they experience Africa, or that they have an understanding of African poverty, or African culture.

We arrived there hungry tired and quite frustrated; our disposition did not mix well with the well-honed and greased tourist trap that we found ourselves in. In Kololi they, in my experience, have almost perfected the art of extracting as much money from idiotic tourists as possible. This was not the place for us. Yet we booked ourselves into a 3 star hotel that cost an arm and a leg and were determined to make the best of it. The beach was actually quite unimpressive in contrast to the large 5 star hotels looming over were.

Now I should make this clear, I have to a certain degree gone native. Amenities like air conditioning, hot water, bottled water, toilette paper, toilette seats, pavement, street lights, etc are things I have gone without. Thus my interaction with the locals was a different kind of culture clash, I was a something that they did not run into very often, eg not a jet set tourist.

In short that night, despite the high prices, the pushy locals, and every soul trying to rip us off we thought we should take advantage of this oasis of decadence and have a night of debauchery. We hoped bar from bar for most the night, played pool, talked to locals, were followed by hustlers and con artists, hung out with prostitutes and smoked dope. We were very apprehensive about the later but the locals explained that we need not worry about the 5 to 10 year jail sentence or 250,000 Euro fine… it was ok everyone was doing it in the bar… You know, as they say “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”

Only in the wee hours of the night, after we had run out of money, escaped the hustlers and told the prostitutes that we were not interested that we finally went to bed. The next day, the team arose from our slumber broke, hung-over and eager to leave Kololi and Gambia. While we sat around discussing what we should do George, the one who temporarily lost his camera aptly said:
Let’s make like a banana and split
Let’s make like Tom and Cruise.
Let’s make like a tampon and get out of this BLOODY HOLE!

These three lines became the mantra that we repeated the entire day as we struggled to escape the confining clutches of Kololi and its effort to extract our every last cent. Since this was a tourist zone standard taxi fares that locals took were virtually off limits to us and everyone who approached us to offer a ride demanded ludicrous prices. After hours of haggling, arguing, hairsplitting, shouting and over stress an angel descended upon us and saved us. One of the beautiful receptionists at the hotel said that she lived near the gare routière(transit hub) and would take us there. She, on pure kindness led us like a lost tribe out of hell to the holy land. She refused to tell us her name nor take our money and was happy to see us back on track to the form of travelling that we were accustomed too.

We made out it out country without a problem and back to Senegal, which is where I will pick up the narrative in the next installment.

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Photos

Me on the ferry
Notice the moustache

Comments

[Aisha]

your blog is very insulting. It seems you were expecting only corrupt people. Shame on you.