Day Four. Sanyang to Kololi to Cape Point. 9km
Sunday 23rd March. Easter Day. This stretch of coast passes a number of hotels facing The Gambia’s major tourist beaches. We were approached by a number of bumsters; these young men extract money from tourists in any of a hundred ingenious (or blunt) ways. (For example, “Hey, lovely couple! It’s me, Lamin, from the hotel; don’t you recognise me? My wife has just had a baby but I don’t have money for the naming ceremony. What can you give to help me? Do you want to come with me and see the baby?”) Judging by the number of bumsters plying the beaches, this is an effective way to make a living. A months’ salary for a young teacher begins at 700 dalasi (£15ish). An effective con-trick might net a thousand or more, depending on the generosity or naivety of the tourist, a reasonable reward for an afternoon’s work. Others work on the beaches selling fruit, cashew nuts, T-shirts, sand paintings or jewellery. We were able to fend most of them off with carefully selected words in Wolof or Mandinka, but others were more persistent and fell into step beside us, apparently willing to walk with us for as far as it took to make a sale. Until we told them we were walking to Senegal.
At Kotu a stream flows across the beach and into the sea. We waded through this water without difficulty, but also paddled upstream a little, as this is a good place to see kingfishers. There are many varieties of kingfisher in The Gambia, including the 45cm Giant Kingfisher but here at Kotu there are Pied Kingfishers that hover, and dive into the shallows to catch fish. We also saw a Western Reef Heron fishing with exaggerated darts and strides, a fat fish that looked like a swimming brain, and a man in a very unusual grass hat.
On this part of the coast there are rare Gambian cliffs that break up the sandy beaches. Waves at high tide crash into the base of these red rock walls rendering them impassable. A wise person planning this walk would have taken account of the tide and timed their approach to coincide with the descending tide. Clearly that would have been prudent but our research was minimal and therefore it was almost entirely by good fortune that we found the sea to be quite low and in most places we passed the rocky outcrops with the minimum of trouble. There were places where we scrambled over rocks and others where we had to wade. The waves and current were strong, and at times we played chicken with the sea, running between clear patches of sand before the next wave broke around us.
Some of the more exclusive hotels sit on top of these cliffs, with steps running down to the beach. We found an immense new hotel under construction that we had been unaware of; it is completely secluded from the road but visible from the sea. We climbed the steps to sneak a look around; it was an immense place with huge rooms, colourful tiled walls and floors, and spectacular views from clifftop verandas.
Back on the beach we passed a pack of dogs, one of whom had climbed halfway up the cliff and was sat apparently too close to the nest of a pair of Pied Crows. The two birds were dive-bombing at the oblivious dog, climbing high and descending rapidly and steeply towards the dog’s head, and pulling out of the dive just inches from her face. The dog seemed completely unperturbed. Two other Pied Crows engaged in an elegant synchronised aerial dance, presumably a love thing, mirroring and mimicking each other’s movements as they soared on the uplift from the cliff. These crows are usually noisy brutes that shriek from their palm tree perches in a hideous screechy voice – I had no idea they were capable of such a striking choreographed display.
We reached Bakau and walked under the long concrete jetty where the fishing boats land their catch of ladyfish, bongafish, red snapper and barracuda. A child ran across the sand pulling behind him a purple plastic Vespa moped on a string. We walked on, past the house of the British High Commissioner, yet more cliffs, and more of those transparent pasty creatures washed up on the beach. Having spent most of the previous three days walking approximately due north we were now curving round to a north-easterly direction, and ahead we saw the spray of waves slapping into Cape Point. This rocky point protrudes into the mouth of the River Gambia. We stepped carefully across the slippery rocks, and took time to swim in the calm waters of the bay on the far side.
We walked one final kilometre, now in an easterly direction with the estuary of the river Gambia on our left side. In the far distance we could see some of the buildings of Banjul, which would be the destination of our next day’s walk. We stopped at the Sandplover beach bar, enjoyed a cool drink, and made our way home.
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