Malta

Best thing in The Gambia

Let me tell you about Malta. No, not the quirky Mediterranean island with centuries of complex history, I’m talking about the non-alcoholic soda drink brewed by Gambia’s main beer brewery. As the name implied it has a strongly malty flavour, indeed there is even a pronounced hoppiness to it. You get the strong impression that its basis is in some of the funky by-products of the brewing process (no idea whether it really is). It is dark and sweet, though not so sugary as a Coke. Basically it is by far the best thing we found in The Gambia and it needs importing to the UK, pronto.

UPDATE. There was almost no internet available in the places we visited, and we never bothered looking for it anyway. When’s the last time you went a whole week without checking email? Nice. Anyway, back home and I’ve discovered that “Malta” is a drink known throughout the Carribean and most of Africa, and indeed there’s even a brand brewed in the UK (Ultimalt), it just isn’t well known outside the afro-carribean community as far as I can see. This must change.

Nemasu, by the way, is indeed a better place to stay than our other three choices. The beach is cleaner, there is a warm shower, we can use the light in our room whenever we like, there’s real coffee, and something actually happened at the time it was meant to (we asked for a taxi to take us to a small nature reserve called Abuko, where we found monkeys but nothing else).

Last list, then. A list of things we’ve found in The Gambia that we haven’t found anywhere else we’ve traveled to yet:

1. Everyone unhurriedly greeting each other with handshakes and friendly words
2. Children who want to hold your hand – without even asking for sweets or money
3. Children and more children – perhaps 2 in 3 people were under the age of 16
4. Many community initiatives with European backing – building clinics, schools, providing solar electricity to villages
5. Neat rows of ganja plants kept moist by constant attention on Jinack island
6. Taxis so knackered and broken it’s astonishing they even start
7. Malta

Us

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2016 at 11:21 pm and is filed under The Gambia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.