The Gambia!

On to...THE GAMBIA!

I apologize for the delay in getting this up but a series of power outages and meetings kept me from the internet for a good week or so, and then it was spring break. The purpose of this Gambia entry is not to describe what I did in the Gambia, but how I got there. Alone. Safe and sound, after all. Alxamdulilaay!

On Wednesday morning I left the house at 5:30 am, accompanied by Jaco, who wanted to hold my hand, and with whom I had the same conversation as JB about a month ago. Geeeeez, it never ends. Anyways he walked me about ten minutes down the road to meet some friends so we could go catch the bus downtown to the Gambia. Said bus leaves most mornings and costs only 2000 cfa, whereas a sept-place (a taxi with room for seven) is 5000-6000 cfa. We even had reservations for our group of 8. However, here comes a typical Leora moment: in the taxi, on the way downtown, I realized thanks to Sam that I HAD FORGOTTEN TO TAKE MY PASSPORT from where it was locked up at school, visa-stamped and everything. We got to the bus stop, met the dads of Becky and Cate who were coming with us, and there I had to make a choice. My options: A) not go at all, wasting 60 dollars on my visa and missing an awesome trip and having to face my family after all my planning and excitement, and B) make the 12-hour journey across the border by myself, take the ferry to the capital, and meet up with them in a hotel outside the city that probably, but not definitely, existed. I chose B, and thus began the greatest adventure of my life.
First I had to get back to school and wait for someone to unlock the office and get out my passport. I got a free bus ride on the first bus leaving to go uptown for the morning, because I talked to the driver and probably made him think I'd give him my number...nope, I just got off the bus and will never see him again. I love that game. After walking to WARC I waited a good half hour for Marianne who was surprised that I was actually going to meet up with the others, then passport finally in hand took a taxi to the Gare Pompier where the sept-places leave. This was quite a scene. I got dragged around immediately by a bunch of guys to the sept-places to Gambia and after much confusion I was shoved into the back of the taxi to wait until we had seven. This only look about half an hour and can sometimes take three, I think partly because the Gambian president, in case you didn't know, announced that can cure AIDS with his hands, on Thursdays. Fridays are reserved for asthma and I think Saturdays for TB. What are we coming to, Africa? Actually, what aren't we coming to? Anyways while I was sitting there in the taxi keeping a good eye on my bag which had been ripped out of my hands and thrown in the trunk (and which I was later charged for, being a Toubab, after much argument), hundreds of vendors were poking their heads in the windows and trunk to sell EVERYTHING you can imagine. And everyone else in the car, far from being annoyed, was LOVING it. The woman in front of me, who in spite of our inability to communicate in any language later sort adopted me and helped me cross the border, bought a toy gun for her son. He sat on her lap the whole ride and pressed the button that went eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwww wwwwwweeeeeeewwwww and made other fun gun sounds for the ENTIRE ride until it broke at which point he made up for the lack of gun sounds by whining. Another woman bought a cheap gold watch, and the man next to me who also helped me out a lot later bought some headphones for his cassette player. I just got attacked by people shoving phone cards and toys and home improvement products in my face, while I held tight to my bag and said no, no, no, and eventually paid off the dudes who helped me get to the car so they'd stop asking me about my Senegalese husband. My favorite product was a toy phone with a Barbie-looking character on the front labeled "BENIGN GIRL." Yep. Harmless.
Finally we were off, and I was squashed into the back left corner with my knees up to my chest for about four and a half hours while the rest of the car squabbled back and forth in Wolof and passed the kids around to various laps, including mine, which I didn't think existed in that small space until there was a child on it. We stopped a couple of times so the kids could pee, and when they got lifted into the car, every time someone would bump their heads on the ceiling and they would wail. One of the kids had some pretty nasty ringworm-ish-looking stuff going on on his head that his mom kept picking at. It was kind of hellishly hot and the countryside was not distracting in the least. The roads everywhere are so awful that the drivers mostly go on the sides in the dirt or take weird windy shortcuts across the dust and between masses of bushes and trees. When we got to the border everyone went their separate ways and I escaped the masses of young girls speaking terrible minimal English and pushing Gambian money in my face so I would change it and get ripped off, and went in to show my passport. As an American I was brought into the back room to sign a big book and get stamped and the police were reluctant to stamp my passport when I refused to give them my number or address, but I just kept on speaking French which pissed them off enough to let me use the bathroom without paying and get me out of there. The same thing was repeated three minutes later on the Gambian side. Three of my fellow taxi-goers had waited for me, the man next to me, and the woman with ringworm-toy-gun-child. It was just so amazingly human of them to know I'd be totally lost and take me under their wing to get me where I needed to go. My Wolof amused them but it was mostly gestures. They bargained for a taxi to take us another hour out to where the ferry left for Banjul, the capital. Thankfully we only had to wait about 15 minutes for the ferry (the ride's about an hour so you can wait up to two) and after the mad rush to get on and the presentation of the tickets we sat inside a hot smelly corridor for the ride across. I met a couple of Gambians and explained (in English!) where I wanted to go, and they assured me they'd get me there somehow when I got to the other side. I wanted to wander around the deck but was put off by the loads of men loading the cars and trucks that were on the ferry, and stayed put thumbing through a guidebook while my companions stared at me sort of mutely. On the other side I was pulled by my newfound gentleman friend to where there were a line of buses waiting to go who knows where, and then three or four guys tried to get me to follow them onto various vehicles where they would very loudly ask the passengers in English and in Wolof who was going to "make the sacrifice" and get off the bus with me to take me to the town I wanted to go to. This of course was not necessary and I tried to say so but there I was stuffed into bus after bus of screaming people who were loudly expressing their disgust at having to really go out of their way for a total stranger, some stupid tourist Toubab. Finally one very large agressive woman stood up and said, I kid you not, "I will make the sacrifice," and sat down, at which point the bus was off and I got some very dirty stares. Eventually the apprenti came around to collect the fares and tried to rip me off, since the money I had changed at the border - oh yeah, I sketchily changed some money at the border, forgot about that one - was completely foreign to me. The woman next to me told him off, though, and he gave me the correct change. People continue to amaze me. I stood for the first thirty or so minutes of the ride and there were so many people that I didn't even need to hold on to anything, and then as the bus cleared out I went and sat down next to the woman who'd made the sacrifice. This is when I realized that if things didn't work out, I was actually a little bit screwed, because on the bus and later after she dragged me off and down the street to another van, she grilled me on where I was going and who I was meeting and when and how and where and why, and I couldn't come up with any satisfying answers. Our cell phones did not work, the hotel was questionable, and if the people I was meeting had gotten detained or sick in Banjul I'd have had no way of meeting up with them. Geez, what a situation. Finally the woman got so fed up with this that she got out of the van and left me in the care of another passenger who shoved me out at a stop he said was near the Abuko nature preserve that I was looking for. So, there I was, on the side of a highway, with a giant backpack, in the middle of nowhere, probably but not definitely somewhere near where I wanted to be, hadn't eaten all day, had no idea if my friend had made it, it was getting dark, and the nature preserve was closed. I walked a bit and fortunately ran into a group of English-speaking rasta dudes who pointed the way (without even hitting on me, how refreshing!) to the hotel I was looking for, three hundred meters down the highway. One of them came with me on a rickety bike and kept pointing up to this huge wall and saying "do you see the white? it is at the white." And yes it was, and there was the hotel...but no one else was there. After a good twenty minutes of terrible English conversation with the proprietor, he asked me if I was with a group of 8 americans who called to say they were coming to stay that night, and here comes the sappy part: in that moment I experienced probably the greatest sense of accomplishment I had ever felt in my life, because I had made it. When the rest of them got there after two hours, I had about the best dinner of oily chicken I've ever tasted and stayed up talking most of the night.

So what did we do in the Gambia? I'm not going into much detail because the getting there for me was the most exciting, but in the morning we went to the nature preserve with a guide. Tons of birds and crocodiles and green monkeys. Then after lunch of more chicken at the hotel, and a lot of semi-tearful goodbyes (we'd spent a lot of time talking to the hotel guys and one of them told us the most amazing story of his experience during the Sierra Leone violence and how he got out of there). We headed off to the east in a giant rented van to Tendaba Camp where we would spend two nights. The van we really bargained for and our driver was pretty pissed off but gave us a great price because he was a friend of the proprietor's. It took about three hours I think, in the dark, on the worst roads I have ever been on, and we had to stop the van cause I thought I was gonna puke at one point. Tendaba turned out to be alright - we were so excited about the huge beds with sheets and the towels and the showers! In the morning we took a sort of desert hike (lots of crabs in the mud, lots of making up verses to a parody of "we didn't start the fire" which is about senegal) and in the afternoon of the next day we took a boat tour of the wetlands where we saw more birds and even a crocodile! good times. We spent a good amount of time trying to calculate who owed who what and decide how we were going to make it back to Dakar. Very early the next morning we left by Pirogue, three hours down the Gambia River at sunrise. It was beautiful and very peaceful. We then took another sept-place back to Dakar, buying some bread before we left, and in Dakar got amazing ice cream. I went home and slept for like two days straight, I was so tired. We hadn't slept very much...in any case that was the Gambia and since I'm now finishing the story about three weeks after the fact I didn't do a great job of it but I am going to skip the week after Gambia and move on to spring break! The next entry will be up soon...