23 December 2015
Today we transferred from Tanji to Jinack Island, which involved a car ride through the most built-up part of The Gambia to the capital Banjul, and then a boat over the River Gambia and along an empty coast to almost the northernmost point of the country.
This gave us a good little glimpse of modern African life. We’ve been on safari before, which keeps you snugly sealed in a touristy bubble, and we’ve been to South Africa, but that’s a more modern country than most of Africa, so this is our first toe-dip in “real Africa”. On the whole we saw a pretty dusty and basic life, lived on the street, dominated by simple buildings of unadorned concrete block and hand-painted signs. There’s the odd pimple of a piece of more expensive architecture, presumably belonging to a multi-national with a presence in the country. Commerce happens in shops, workshops and stalls right on the roadside, and most things on sale appear to be either shiny and made cheaply in China or rustic and made locally. There’s a lot of rubbish drifting about, mostly plastic. The many dogs enjoy playing with plastic rubbish.
The boat across to Jinack went off with no more hitch than an hour’s delay getting started. Jinack Island Lodge is at the same level of basic as Tanji, but so far everything works and the service (from Amadou the manager and Moses the barman) is much more friendly and useful. Still cold showers though! Indeed, when we took a long time to return from our walk along the beach in search of otters (no luck) Moses wandered out in the dark to try and find us. Alas, today is a zero-mammals day, though we did see ospreys.
Another list, this time things we saw on the trip from Tanji to Jinack:
- Huge piles of watermelons
- Women in extremely colourful patterned clothes
- Piles of cement blocks for sale
- Metal gates and armchairs being manufactured by the road
- Donkey carts
- Limping dogs playing with rubbish
- Slogans. It is more important to finish well than to finish soon!
- Billboard ads for flights to London
- Shady shops neatly stacked ceiling-high with goods
- Bugger (below an image of a burger on a roadside restaurant)
- Shops selling Spanish tiles
- Big old armchairs gathering dust at the roadside
- Tourists riding in the open back of a pickup
- Really, loads of watermelons
- Men loading boats waist-deep in water with ten boxes stacked on the heads
- Cats catching lizards (nom nom)
- Overladen boats with various crewmen and passengers bailing
- Huge container ships
- A woman with her Filofax on her head
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