For spring break last week we went to The Gambia. The Gambia is the weirdest place I’ve ever been to. It was fun though! A day before we had planned on leaving, we discovered that we would need a visa to get into the Gambia. We sort of panicked a bit, but then learned that you could just go down there and pay for a little pass to get across (basically a bribe). Our awesome Continuity and Change professor happened to have a brother who drives a “sept place” (a taxi like form of transportation that fits 7 people), so he arranged to have a couple of sept places meet us at ACI to take us to the border. There were a total of 10 of us, our group of 9 girls, and then our friend Nico who goes to Evergreen and has been doing an individual study abroad at ACI. Getting to the boarder was very smooth, everything went as planned. While we were figuring out all of the visa and passport stuff, our sept place drivers hooked us up with some Gambian taxi men to take us to Barra. The weirdest thing off the bat was that we had to switch our mindset back to English. Other weird things (weird now is relative to the “normal” that Senegal has become): there’s grass in some places, you are required to wear seatbelts in the front seat, there are sidewalks, their president has been in office for 17 years and they still love him (the elections are coming up from them and they already have posters us saying “Congratulations Mr. President, super weird). Gambia is the smallest country on continental Africa. It was colonized by the British and is only a tiny sliver of land surrounding the river. There’s one traffic light in the entire country. It’s in a town called “Traffic Light”. No joke.
So after we paid the people at the border, we took the taxis to Barra where we would catch a ferry to the capital, Banjul, across the river. From Banjul we’d take more taxis to Cape Point where we were staying. Thank goodness we had super helpful taxi drivers to Barra because we got there right when the boat was leaving. We had to wind our way through a market and then ran to catch the ferry. Just a bunch of silly toubabs chasing a boat. We probably looked pretty cool. The boat was rough. A bunch of us felt kind of sea sick. We had just been on the road for 6 or 7 hours, it was super hot, we hadn’t had enough water or food. Recipe for disaster. One of our group members actually passed out. Another puked off the side of the ferry. We were kind of a mess. When we got to Banjul we were able to find water and we took a little breather. Cape Point turned out to be pretty touristy, but we didn’t mind so much. We stayed in a really nice guest house that was a five minute walk from the river. We had a kitchen and bathrooms with warm water! It took us very little time to hop into our swim suits and into the water.
I’m not sure if this is true of all of the Gambia or mostly because we were in such a touristy area, but everyone there is a “guide” of some sort. They were all just so helpful. Too helpful. Too friendly. Everywhere we walked we were greeted with, “where are you going? I’m a guide. How far are you going?” It got old very quickly. They did show us a restaurant for the first night. Pretty much every other meal we made ourselves though, which was really fun. Another thing that makes the Gambia super weird is that they have the (valid) reputation of a sex-trade that is essentially young male prostitutes and old toubab ladies. Super creepy stuff. We saw it a couple of times. It was just kind of sad.
We spent most of our time in the Gambia at the beach. We also visited a crocodile pool and a monkey park, which were both pretty cool. One day we were walking around Cape Point and Bakau, looking at the market and getting a lay of the land. We were joined by a band of children at one point and just started walking with them. One of our “guides” (aka one of the guys that was following us) said that we were taking the kids to school. Before we knew it, we were walking them into their one room school house and the teacher invited us to sit in on a little lesson. It was pretty cool! One night we decided to go swimming super late and there were bio-luminescence in the water! It was absolutely beautiful. All in all, the Gambia was really fun. I’m glad it worked out. I wouldn’t necessarily go back, but it was definitely worth seeing it once!
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