Day One Allahein to Gunjur 12km
Friday 29th February. You don’t get many of those, so take a day off and go for a walk. Louise and I packed water and snacks, suncream and hats, binoculars and a mosquito net, and set out to find transport to Kartong, in the extreme South of The Gambia. From my house in Latrikunda we needed three different geli-gelis (minibus taxis), first to Brikama, then to Gunjur, and finally from there to Kartong. We picked up our first ride with no difficulty but the journey to Brikama was slower than normal because traffic in both directions had been constrained to just one side of the dual carriageway. President Jammeh of The Gambia was hosting the President of Mauritania, and one side of the road was closed to allow their convoy to pass through. Rush hour congestion on this highway is bad on any day but with this additional restriction we moved very slowly indeed.
The morning is usually a good time to travel. Vehicles for longer journeys leave early and Brikama taxi garage (ie. bus station) was bustling when we arrived, with passengers filling up vehicles headed for destinations all over the South of the country. Gelis do not follow a timetable; they simply leave when they are full. We just missed a vehicle departing for Gunjur but this gave us time to locate some breakfast (bread, bean paste, bits of salad) and jump into the next geli when it arrived. These vehicles are amazing. Seats made locally from metal tubes and fabric-covered foam are packed in; there is barely knee-room between the rows for someone of my stature. A narrow gangway up the centre permits access, but is closed by folding down an additional seat in each row so that passengers sit five across. The geli was soon aflame with chatter and gossip. Women, holding boxes and tubs of produce and with children on their knee, were catching up on each other’s news. Men, recognising a friend (more likely a half-brother, nephew or vague cousin), called out to each other between vehicles and engaged in lengthy greetings.
Our geli filled quickly, the driver was roused from his slumber beneath a tree, and he coaxed the engine into life. We pulled out of the taxi garage, crawled through Brikama centre, negotiated the first police checkpoint, and were soon on the open road towards Gunjur. There is a tarmac road between these towns, so the journey was smooth and relatively quick. We stopped a few times to pick up and put down passengers. The apprenti climbed onto the roof to lower down passengers’ possessions; a sack of onions, a crate of Fanta, a bicycle, two mattresses, a goat and a box of squawking chickens. And when he collected the fares (ten dalasi for this leg) he took in all the money first, and then issued change, remembering accurately the exact sum that thirty different people had given him. This is a sensible method since change is ever in short supply, but these feats of memory have always impressed me.
We changed at Gunjur and waited a short time for a final geli to Kartong. Well, actually not a short time, we waited ages, but that’s the way it is when you travel away from the towns. It is not unusual to hear of people travelling from the more remote regions who wait all day for a vehicle. Perhaps three will come by during the day, all full, so they come back the next day and try again. Tell that to the whingers who complain when their train is twenty minutes late. So we waited an hour or so before the fifteen-minute ride to Kartong, which is nearly the last place in The Gambia. Not quite the last; we then had to get from there to the Allahein River that marks the frontier with Cassamance, the south-western portion of Senegal. We tried to negotiate a ride with a taxi that happened to be there, having brought some intrepid tourists, but made little headway. Then a rare private vehicle started out our direction, so we flagged it down, jumped in the back, and completed our journey not-quite-to the border.
We were dropped at Franco’s bar that overlooks the river. From here there is an unofficial crossing to Cassamance; you can be paddled across in a dug-out canoe. This is fine for locals, but not suitable for foreign travellers as there are no facilities to complete official paperwork or have your passport stamped. Since I was last here (a year ago, on crutches just after my accident) the restaurant building has suffered a fire that started in the pizza oven and consumed the roof. So the owners have constructed a shelter of palm branches where they serve fresh juice and play mellow music. We drank freshly-squeezed orange, applied suncream, and finally, just as we approached the hottest part of the day, we were ready to commence our walk.
This river behaves oddly when it reaches the ocean. I am used to rivers that flow into the sea. That, I have been led to understand, is conventional for rivers. But this one, like some others in the region, fails to reach the sea. Instead it divides into many channels, winds through marshy mangroves and dissipates into salt flats. Therefore from Franco’s it is not possible to walk along any riverbank to get to the Atlantic beach. To contemplate walking through the mangroves would be risky indeed, inhabited as they are by crocodiles and snakes, and beset by patches of fearful sucky-mud. So from Franco’s to Allahein we followed a sand road that curved around the mangroves and to the beach. On this stretch Louise, who has a bit of a thing for birds, became very excited at seeing a broad-billed roller, several blue-cheeked bee-eaters and a black kite. The bee-eater was adorned with attractive green feathers and had cheerful flashes of red under the wings when it flew. A very handsome bird indeed.
So at last we got to the beach and found the tiny fishing settlement of Allahein. And if you think for a second about walking South to North along a West coast it would seem sensible to turn right and follow the sea. But no, we had to ensure we were starting at the frontier, so we turned to the South and walked a little way towards Cassamance. As I mentioned above there is no give-away sign like a river mouth but we did find some minor streams seeping out of the mangroves and through the sand and we took these to signify the border.
Cassamance is not always a safe region to visit as there is separatist movement here who wish to set up an independent state (have a look at a map of Senegal and you will understand why). The Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de la Cassamance (MFDC) have been known to attack military posts and vehicles. In February this year, forty vehicles were ambushed over one weekend. In May a group of cashew farmers had their ears cut off in a particularly unpleasant attack, and two soldiers and ten rebels were killed in a separate skirmish. In addition to fighting against the army of the Dakar government, the MFDC has broken into smaller groups, and now much of the fighting is between these factions. Five hundred people were killed here in the last three years of the 1990s. One group has a base not far from where we stood. And there are landmines along the border with The Gambia, which we were keen to avoid. In fact, Cassamance is the one place on earth that we (as Gambia-based VSO volunteers) are expressly forbidden to enter. We can go to Darfur as far as I know. We are allowed into Afghanistan. We can travel to Sierra Leone and Liberia, both of which have seen bloody civil wars in recent years. But we may not go to Cassamance.
Given that neither of us favoured getting our legs blown away by a landmine, we picked our route with caution, paddling in the meandering streams between The Gambia and Senegal. I will allow you to decide for yourself whether you would have stepped precociously and foolishly across the border. You can make your own mind up regarding whether we should have crossed into the war-zone and built a sandcastle, or taken photographs of ourselves performing cartwheels on the beach. In contrast with the relative safety of most of The Gambia, this place is not to be taken lightly. But it was somehow meaningful to get to the frontier and view the forbidden land. And so at last we were ready to begin.
We chose to walk the first stretch barefoot. Initially I wondered whether we might be the first people in history to walk the entire coastline of The Gambia shoeless, but I got sore feet on the second day and wore sandals, so I cannot claim that record. The sand was warm between my toes and occasionally sharp where there were shells. A number of fishing boats were pulled up on the beach and the flags that stand atop the floats of their nets were taut in the breeze. Three children played football on the beach and were using a fishing net on a wooden frame as a goal. They asked us for sweets (“Toubab, give me minty!”) so Louise gave them a lecture about tooth decay and I kicked their football away. They won’t do that again.
We crossed a much wider stream that flows out from a lagoon near the Follonko sacred crocodile pool. There are three of these pools in The Gambia and they are places of pilgrimage and prayer, particularly for childless women who bathe in the waters amongst the crocs. In the centre of this stream a shoal of fish jumped in front of me, their silver bodies reflecting flashes of sunlight as they arched across my path. We continued up the beach, walking mainly in the cool shallows and at one point stubbing my toe on a submerged rock. We found numerous sea-creatures along the sand; squid, cuttlefish, any number of dead fish, and a weird-looking thing with a shell and long antennae.
During the afternoon we needed to find lunch and seek shade from the burning sun, so we stopped at Boboi Lodge where we found a friend, Sam, with his surfboard. The surf was less than impressive but we all had a go whilst we waited for lunch. The sea was a good deal warmer than the last place I tried to surf, at Harlyn Bay in Cornwall. After lunch (fish domoda) we walked to Gunjur, a large fishing centre with many boats and smokehouses. We were accompanied for the last few kilometres by a man on a bicycle. One of the pleasant things about The Gambia is that no-one is ever in a hurry, and people always have time for each other. Just before Gunjur we passed a place where a number of people were conducting their evening prayers on the beach (this was Friday, the Muslim holy day). This man explained to us that this was a sacred site often visited by a particular Sheikh, and it had become a special place to come to pray. We observed discretely as we walked by.
In Gunjur we flirted briefly with the idea of staying in a lodge, but Sankule Beach Lodge was closed for renovations. So instead we walked a short distance beyond the village and hung our mosquito net from a tree to sleep in the open. With less than an hour of light remaining we hurriedly arranged our things and collected wood for a fire. In the sea I washed off a grimy mixture of suncream and sweat, and then lit our fire. As we sat in the orange glow we were joined by a number of pale crabs which scuttled across the sand. One in particular loitered with us next to the fire. These crabs live in holes in the sand, and I think we had built our fire on his house. Poor crab. He waited a long time, repeatedly making as if to walk into the fire but of course was beaten back by the heat. And eventually and suddenly he raced away into the darkness. I hope he found somewhere safe to sleep.
We did. The floor was hard and uncomfortable. The stars looked down on us and the half-moon rose late on in the night. A bizarre green insect tried to join us but we were safe within our net. We slept in short bursts, but awoke with the first glimmer of dawn and began the second day of our journey.
Read Coast Walk Day 2
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