This is how Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, describes the Senegambia Confederation:-

“The Sénégambia Confederation was a loose confederation between the West African countries of Senegal and its neighbor the Gambia, which is almost completely surrounded by Senegal. The confederation came into existence on 1 February 1982 following an agreement between the two countries signed on 12 December 1981. The federation was intended to promote cooperation between the two countries, but was dissolved by Senegal on 30 September 1989 when The Gambia refused to move closer toward union.”¹

It is a shame it did not work because the names of the two countries are just perfect for a merger, imagine trying to make a coherent name from a French-German confederation.  Senegambia is also the name of The Gambias most famous holiday resort, a fact which does not quite hold the same resonance.

Arriving in Dakar in the early hours was not as daunting as we anticipated, the streets were empty and we were greeted by a sea breeze, very welcoming after over a month in landlocked countries.  It was a bit chilly however so we got back on the bus and slept until dawn.

For no apparent reason I always imagined that Senegal would be more developed, more Westernised, than other West African nations but, outside of Dakar, this is not true.  The rest of Senegal is a mix pf scrubby, dry landscape and more medium-sized trees, interspersed by groups of half-built (or half-ruined?) concrete blocks.  There are none of the typical African villages that grace the landscapes of other countries in the region.  Even the other ‘cities’ in Senegal are no more than flyblown one-road towns.  Dakar keeps the wealth and, instead of expanding organically with constant overspill, seems to be constantly redefining its borders, keeping a fine line between the city and its surrounds.  This fact is exacerbated by President Wade’s decision to rebuild all of Dakar’s major highways at the same time.  Guess what is everybody’s favourite complaint in Dakar?

Independence Square, Dakar

Dakar is, however, very developed and cosmopolitan.  You could be forgiven for mistaking the city centre for a European city with its grand Place d’Independence, a giant square with flower gardens, clean pathways, a central water feature and the high rise office buildings lining either side.  People warned us that Dakar is one of West Africa’s most dangerous cities but we did not feel threatened at all.  We enjoyed wandering around, stopping for a coffee from the street vendors with their little carts or demolishing a giant baguette from one of the street side huts.  The baguettes seemed to be Dakar’s sole, and soul, food during the day, nothing else being sold on the street.  They are stuffed with mince and onions, eggs, chips and salad, topped with ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and chilli sauce.  A culinary coup and cheap too, costing around 50p.

Ile d'Goree

Four kilometres offshore is the Ile d’Goree, an island that houses a former slave prison.  The island has been beautifully restored, all of the buildings painted in bright colours and artists display their work on street corners.  The restaurants offer a plat du jour for the hourly ferry packed with tourists.  It is a beautiful place however and the restoration and preservation would not be possible without the tourist dollars.  It signifies the mature attitude to tourism taken by Senegal, looking at the long-term, not the short.

Ile d'Goree

Senegal is prohibitively expensive, with accommodation costing more than in many European countries.  With this in mind we headed south to The Gambia for a weeks holiday on the beach in an English-speaking country. 

You might think, looking at a map that Dakar to Banjul would be quite a short trip.  You would be wrong however.  Despite leaving our hotel before dawn we did not reach the border until 6pm, after waiting for the bus to fill and enduring the challenge of Dakar’s transport infrastructure.  Two friendly guys shared a taxi with us to Barra, paying extra to go off-road and catch the last ferry across to Banjul.  We arrived in Banjul after dark and shared another taxi to Bakau, the northernmost, and most low-key of The Gambia’s Atlantic resorts.  The two guys were a perfect example of the hospitality of Gambians, so friendly and welcoming it becomes irritating, rather similar to my experiences in Pakistan.  These guys even paid our bribes to the immigration officials and changed money for us, giving us the correct rate of CFA to Gambian Dalasi so that we did not get ripped off on the border!

It is strange how just crossing the border from Senegal into The Gambia felt like moving from a desert land into a tropical, jungle environment.  In reality this was not so true but it certainly felt like it.  Arriving in Banjul reminded me first of Labuanbajo on Flores, another small fishing village that has been expanded into a major port seemingly against its will and, secondly, of Belize, another former British colony isolated amongst countries that have escaped the shackle of different former European power.  Also, both Belize and The Gambia feel like they would feel more comfortable if they were islands in the Caribbean as opposed to being stuck on the side of a giant, overpowering landmass.

Bakau beach, The Gambia

Bakau was surprisingly nice, much more relaxed than I imagined, bearing in mind the heavy charter traffic from Europe.  The beach, whilst nice was full of fat, milky Europeans, all desperately trying to get as much of a tan as possible, only beer bellies and saggy boobs.  The most shocking aspect of tourism in The Gambia is the sex tourists.  However, it is not like in the Asian countries with fat ugly men wandering around with little teenage beauties on their arms, here it is old women picking up local boys for a week of fun.  At first I thought it was not as disgusting a sight as in Thailand or The Philippines, but after seeing one woman, so overweight she was on crutches, with a tight, bleached, perm with her ‘beach boy’ I began to change my mind.

We soon escaped down the coast to Kartong, on the southern border of The Gambia with the Casamance region of Senegal.  Despite only being 40km it took seven rides to get there.  Initially we planned to travel through The Gambia to Casamance and then take the twice weekly ferry from Ziguinchor, the capital of Casamance, back to Dakar.  Inevitably though, the ferry was having its annual safety inspection and service during the fortnight we wanted to use it.  This follows the disaster of 2002 where the previous ferry, the MS Joola, sunk off the coast of Gunjur in The Gambia and almost 2000 people drowned.  Many people in Kartong and Gunjur told us that for days afterwards bodies were being washed ashore and for several months afterwards nobody ate any fish for fear of passive cannibalism.  It was Senegal’s worst ever disaster and, thankfully, the operators of the new ferry are incredibly diligent with the safety checks and maximum capacities.

So instead of Casamance we relaxed in Kartong, renting a tree house at Boboi Beach Lodge, and relaxing with Kate and Karen, who had escaped the shackles of their package holiday and fled to quieter environs.  Our treehouse was only ten metres from the beach I enjoyed being reminded how relaxing it is to sleep within earshot of the waves.

Whale slaughter, Kartong

Kartong had had an eventful few days prior to our arrival.  First there was a bush fire which ripped through the tree-line just metres from the beach, destroying anything in its path for a couple of days and then a whale decided to beach itself just fifty metres from Boboi.  The villagers tried for two days to get it back into the water.  Then the whale died so they cut it up and shared the meat between everybody.  Some people refused their share however as last time a whale beached itself, whole villages were very sick after eating the meat.  It seems like the whales come ashore there specifically to die.  Whilst viewing the slaughter I met a group of young lads keen for me to play football with them.  They supplied us with bags of the juiciest, sweetest grapefruits as payment for afternoon games on the beach.

We also spent a morning in Gunjur, the next village to the north and a vibrant fishing community.  We wandered around the brightly coloured boats, the pungent smoking houses and the modern ice plant, a Japanese-Gambian joint venture.

Gunjur beach

Leaving Kartong was far easier than getting there and by lunchtime we had arrived in Banjul, the national capital. We got a from in the peculiarly named Princess Diana Hotel, under the gaze of Arch 22, a modern monstrosity celebrating Gambian independence.  Banjul is a typical former British administrative centre with colonial buildings, gardens and a disused cricket ground.  There is also a sizeable Lebanese community, overspill from those in the Francophone countries, which supply cheap kebab meals, which somehow do not have the same stigma as that of kebabs in the UK.

Disused cricket pitch, Banjul

The Gambia is full of guys with long dreadlocks, self-confessed ‘rastas’ whose only religions seems to be the pursuit of relaxation.  This is fine until you need something done, such as getting the nightwatchman to open the hotel door when somebody wants to catch the first ferry to Barra.  We did make the first ferry in the end and spent the entire day getting to St. Louis in northern Senegal.  Again, the distance is not so far but once you factor in two delays waiting for other passengers for our sept-place, Peugeot 504’ estates with three rows of seats, two ‘careful’ drivers (one is unusual, two is just damn unlucky) and five hours negotiating the bumper-bumper roads in and back out of Dakar it all becomes clear.  We arrived in the deserted gare routiere of St Louis, 4km from the centre, after midnight.  If it wasn’t for a stupidly generous taxi driver offering to drive us into the centre for peanuts I don’t know what we would have done.

St Louis is a beautiful place, the most beautiful we have seen in West Africa, which is not saying a lot, as beautiful as Ile d’Goree, which says much more.  It has three parts, the face being the beautiful island between the commerce of the Sor district on the mainland and the heart and lungs of the fishing village of N’Dar on the Langue de Barbarie peninsula.  The island of St Louis sits in-between the mainland and the peninsula and is connected to the mainland by the Faidherbe bridge, designed by Gustave Eiffel and originally built to cross the Danube, transported to St Louis in 1897.  The buildings on the island are similar to those on Goree, restored and painted in different bright colours with bougainvillea hanging over terraces.  The N’Dor district contains the entire fishing industry, from the fishing boats to the women drying the fish on the beach, smoking it in little huts or freezing it in the plant.  It still retains some tradition with the main mode of transport being horse-and-cart and the guys sat in the streets outside the mosque, seemingly immune to the din from the loudspeakers, drinking tea and working on their social relationships.  The whole district is enveloped in an odour of rotten fish and horse manure and the main street is covered in sand which at each end becomes muddy from the melted ice, fish blood and horse piss.

St Louis

The only negative experience we had in St Louis was somebody attempting to steal Monika’s camera in broad daylight in the middle of the street.  He was so unprofessional however that I caught him at it.  I only shouted and pushed him however, now I regret not causing him more trouble, somehow preventing him from trying again on the next tourist.  The fact that we were so shocked by this however shows how safe West Africa is to travel in, especially regards theft which is almost unheard of in travellers circles.  This one negative experience however was far outweighed that evening by Dobet Gnahore concert (http://www.dobetgnahore.com) an Ivorian singer.   It was a perfect style of African jazz, blending influences, and languages of various West African nations.  It cost just two pounds each entrance, and we bought the CD afterwards, we were lucky because they only had ten for sale!  Dobet and the backing singer had excellent voice s and were both great dancers.  The drummer was great, lots of paradiddles and tempo changes and he played without sticks, bashing his palms on the cymbals and snares for some songs.  The downsides were the white, very camp, guitarist and bass player, who, although technically excellent, had some really corny Shadows-esque dance routines and cheesy grins. But if you shut your eyes, or concentrated on the singing and dancing, it was OK.  Apart from when the backing singer got electrocuted by her mike! 

Cars rapide, St Louis

Close to St Louis is the Zebrabar, a famous campment offering a chance for world-class birdwatching.  It is true that in Senegal and The Gambia the main tourism draw, apart from the ‘beach boys’, for most is the birdwatching as it is here that the migratory birds from Europe spend their winters.  There are many national parks, including the park adjacent to the Zebrabar, which send ‘twitchers’ into fits of excitement.  For us however the opportunities were too few for casual observers and the cost of staying there, even in our tent, was too high to stay more than one night.  Leaving the Zebrabar means waiting in the village of Gandiol for a bus or shared taxi and being subject to the horrid swarms of children asking for gifts.  We are really surprised at how many kids are asking for gifts, not beggars these are just normal school kids.  I did think it was due to some ill-advised tourists but they are most prevalent in those places not receiving so much tourist traffic.  I think the teachers, and worse the parents encourage this, in fact in Gandiol even grown women brazenly asked for money or gifts.  This would not happen in countries such as Ghana, Togo or Benin, they have so much pride and self-respect that the idea of asking a white person for money would horrify them.  I wonder why it happens in Senegal and Mali.

Crabs near the Zebrabar

Despite this final depressing experience I have very much enjoyed travel in Senegal and The Gambia.  The people are, on the whole, very much more polite and civilised than in Mali, even when they are trying to rip you off.  Although I was disappointed with rural Senegal, both Dakar and St Louis are very impressive and, even though we did not venture into the jungle interior, the coast of The Gambia justified its popularity amongst Europes sun-seekers.

¹ www.wikipedia.com