Coast Walk Introduction

Why would you want to walk the coastline of the Gambia? When I first studied a map of the Gambian coast, I realised that it would be possible to cover the whole distance in not many days. This kind of reasoning would be unlikely to impress triathletes, the climbers of Everest and the swimmers of la Manche, who select endurance exploits for their difficulty. Nonetheless for me I chose to make this epic trip because it can be achieved without too much hardship. And it would be quite fun to be able to put on record that I had perambulated along every mile of Atlantic coast that The Gambia has to offer. I imagine that not many people have seen every beach, paddled in every bay, and forded every river all the way from the Allahein River in the South to Ginak Island in the North.

If you want to walk the entire coastline of a country then this is a good one to choose. It would be a much bigger undertaking to walk the coast of Australia or India. And Indonesia would present all kinds of challenges. Both Luxembourg and Swaziland would be too easy. So Gambia it will be. I am going to walk the complete coastline of The Gambia, from Kartong to Buniada Point. There are one or two tricky bits a long the way, but we’ll deal with those as we get to them.

 

Day One.  Allahein to Gunjur 12km

Day Two. Gunjur to Sanyang. 10km

Day Three.  Sanyang to Kololi. 25km

Day Four.  Sanyang to Kololi to Cape Point. 9km

Day Five.  Cape Point to Banjul. 16km

Day Six.  Barra to Madiyana. 13km

Day Seven.  Madiyana to Buniada Point  and then to Ginak Niji (via Senegal). 15km