Question: How do you leave a country in which you have lived for two years, and to which you might never return?
Answer: You empty your house and give all your stuff to your neighbours. Then you have some drinks on the beach with friends. Then you eat pizza.
And early the next morning an ex-colleague borrows a work vehicle and drives you to the ferry terminal in Banjul, whilst listening on the radio to reactions to the American election result.
In the queue for the ferry we located a sept-place (Peugeot car with places for seven passengers) bound for Basse, the largest town in the East of The Gambia. We paid our fares, deposited our bags in the back, fended off hawkers selling watches, T-shirts and biscuits, and waited to board the boat.
The sun rose as we sailed and Banjul receded behind us. This picture shows our car on the ferry; the one with a bike on the roof. We docked in Barra, stopped briefly for fuel poured from a large bright yellow vegetable oil container, and set out along the recently-surfaced north bank road into the Gambian interior. This was the beginning of the longest road trip either of us is ever likely to make.
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 Gambia River Sunrise
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 Banjul to Barra Ferry |
At midday, with the burning sun high above us we arrived at Janjanbureh, a sleepy town located on an island where the Gambia River divides into two channels for a few kilometres. Past experience told us that at the first crossing we would have time enough waiting to slope off for a cold drink in a local bar. We were wrong. We had not counted on the sudden appearance of one of Gambia’s very few ambulances at the ferry ramp. The vessel was beckoned and came quickly, smacking into the riverbank with a thud. The ambulance and our taxi were hastily loaded on, and Louise and I returned from the bar in time to see the ferry motor away, carrying the vehicle complete with our baggage.
A group of schoolboys came to our rescue. Over here, they instructed, leading us to a small pirogue. The boat was untied, and we and they crossed in the wake of the ferry, powered by an elderly man hauling upon the single oar. Would you like to sponsor our football team, the boys enquired. No, I have heard that one before. Instead we offered to pay their fare, but schoolchildren travel free on these boats so that was not possible either. So we simply thanked them before leaping into our car for the short ride across the island to the second ferry on the south side where we experienced an unexpected lengthy delay.
We were second in the queue, and the ambulance had already crossed ahead of us on its journey to Bansang hospital, but the ferry appeared to be taking a very long time to cross back towards us. It turned out that the cable that holds and guides the boat and prevents it drifting downstream was being replaced. A new cable had been anchored on the far side and was being unwound from a reel and tied alongside the old cable, as the ferry inched across the river. When eventually the ferry reached the near bank a truck was used to pull taut the cable, which was then clamped to an anchor-point. Then the old cable was cut away. This was all very clever, and completed without any mechanical equipment except for the ferry itself and the truck.
The job had only taken about two hours and now we were ready to depart. Except that we found that we were no longer second in the queue. A number of drivers had arrived who clearly considered themselves more important than our taxi and its passengers. And this particular ferry only has room for two cars. The first people to overtake us were some Taiwanese diplomats in two large 4×4s. Then a car from the Gambian immigration service also needed to push in front. And then there was an army officer in a shiny red jeep but by this time our driver had endured enough so simply blocked the way with his Peugeot and boarded the boat. That caused a big argument and extensive entertaining gesticulating, but soon the officer found himself in a minority of one, so he grudgingly conceded defeat.
We continued to Basse where we met three friends for dinner. At the taxi garage we exchanged our remaining Dalasi for CFA which would be our currency for the next four countries. And we settled down to our final night in The Gambia, in Vera’s house in Mansajang with chickens in the yard, a gecko on the ceiling, and a pink inflatable horse in the bedroom.
The next morning we allowed ourselves a leisurely start because we only had a hundred kilometres to travel, in comparison with over three hundred the previous day. After breakfast we walked to the taxi park in Mansajang where we learned that we had just missed a ride to Velingara in Senegal. So we waited a while for the next car to fill up. I have learned that it is good to make friends in these situations as this ensures that people are willing to look out for you if anything goes wrong during the journey. So when one car failed to start, I joined the other men pushing it, and was pleased to overhear grateful remarks about the toubab.
When we set off Louise and I were lucky to be allocated the front two seats (you see, it works) and we bumped along the sandy road to the Gambia-Senegal border posts. At some crossings it is necessary to report to four separate offices. Initially this came as a surprise to me, as someone who grew up on an island and not familiar with making land crossings of national frontiers. When leaving or entering the UK you go through the airport or seaport and it is not immediately obvious that you pass through two stages of official clearance; one is passport control and the other is customs. At an African land crossing these are often located in separate buildings and can be some distance apart. So we had to face two sets of officials on the Gambian side, and another two on the Senegalese side. This would explain why, back in January when I crossed from Senegal to Guinea in the dead of night, it felt like we were perpetually and repeatedly hauled out of the vehicle and asked to show our documents; I did not understand it at the time.
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 Bush Taxi
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 Gambia Senegal Frontier |
Goodbye Gambia. This picture shows me at the frontier (one place of many at which it is unwise to disclose cameras). That marked the end of this chapter of my life. Did I really live in The Gambia for two years? The car continued to Velingara where we shared a taxi across town to the main gare routière. One thing that was interesting about our trip was our attempting to gradually make the transition to moving back UK-type living. All countries in West Africa are poor, but we found that many are better organised than our Gambia. We failed our first test of re-integration because it did not occur to us to buy a ticket for this part of the journey. In true Gambian fashion we hogged a seat in the car and placed our luggage in the back. However, the better-informed people reported to the ticket window and paid. Whoever heard of such a thing, buying a ticket for a journey? What an extraordinary initiative! As a result, we missed that car (another sept-place) and had to wait a couple of hours for the following one as they generally wait until they are full before departing. This gave us a chance to have a long conversation with a psychologically-different person who insisted that he was our good friend (in French, of course; from here everything would be in French until Ghana).
In Tambacounda we paid quite a lot of money for a disappointing room in a lodge, and went out to eat. We found a local restaurant and bought rice and sauce. Opposite us sat two Senegalese men who engaged us in conversation and enquired about our destination. It turned out that they (and others) were driving a convoy of container-lorries into Mali the following day, and would take us along if we were ready to depart at 5am. No problem. So we were early to bed early, having set the alarm for quarter-past four.
We located the lorries a few minutes before five and waited whilst the three lorry crews finished praying and rolled up their mats. Then we climbed into the cabs and were on our way. Many African roads are dotted with police and army checkpoints, some of which simply wave you to pass, while others detain you for a little while to check your luggage or inspect your documents. Fortunately, none wanted to see inside our containers, but we did have the papers inspected a number of times. I began to wonder exactly what we were carrying; we were aboard plush new vehicles in a very poor region. The drivers claimed we were carrying cement, but that did not seem likely to me and I decided it would be prudent not to enquire further.
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 Our Transport out of Senegal
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 Horsey learns to drive |
It was Friday, and our early start gave us a huge advantage in terms of getting to the Senegal-Mali frontier before Friday afternoon prayers. In fact we were in Kidira by 8am and joined an immense queue of trucks waiting to cross the bridge over the Senegal River and into Mali. We bought breakfast for our truckers and obtained an exit stamp in our passports. Then we paid a boy to push our bags in a barrow, and walked across the bridge into Mali.
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 Lorry Queue in Kidira
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 Senegal Mali Frontier |
Click to follow our journey into Mali.
Return to West Africa Overland introduction and index of pages.
