After many late nights working the clinic and the need to both renew our visitor’s visa and celebrate my birthday…a trip to Gambia was exactly what we needed.
Gambia is the tiniest nation in all of Africa and other than it’s Atlantic coastline to the west, it is wholly enclosed by Senegal. Since Gambia is a former British colony, English is spoken by most and our trip there afforded us an opportunity to ‘brush up’ on our English :)
4 hours, 2 ‘sept-places’ (7 passenger station wagons), and 2 taxis later (all in a North-Westerly direction), we arrived at the quiet beach town of Fajara on the west coast of Gambia.
The ride there was hot and a little uncomfortable but not nearly as uncomfortable as after I took a spill returning to the car from one of our many military checkpoints. In my clumsiness, I fell and sprained my right hand…pretty badly. One week later the swelling has gone down and I can now pull up my own pants (yipee) but I still can’t bare any weight in that hand…I’m enjoying being catered to though while it lasts! :)
In choosing our holiday destination, we had 2 very important criteria:
#1 – a quiet place with nice accommodations…we weren’t going to chintz this time
#2 – a lot of good restaurants to choose from…it was going to be all about the food!
With the promise of beautiful beaches, a quiet garden hotel with a classy ‘near vegetarian’ restaurant, a nearby Morrocan restaurant boasting a celebrated chef and a mean Sunday brunch, a restaurant offering a dinner buffet of Gambian fare (always fun to try new things), and a chic Indian restaurant (my favorite), Fajara seemed like the perfect pick. The clincher though was the nearby “Palais de Chocolat” ('Chocolate Palace'…need I say more?)…now we knew Fajara was the perfect place to spend a couple days.
Turns out we had to move hotels because we were kept up all night in our quiet garden hotel by bed bugs; the Sunday brunch consisted of a few cold leftovers from the day(s) before (apparently a reflection of being the end of tourist season); the Gambian buffet no longer served a buffet (also because end of season); the Indian restaurant was delicious but very expensive and we were too embarrassed to go back after not having brought enough money to pay our bill (the mandated 25% gratuity/tax…oops); and the Palais de Chocolat didn’t have anything chocolate!
Bottom line is our plan for weekend indulgence was a bust. But not all was lost…we moved to a great little place on the beach (at 2/3 the price of the Garden Hotel…go figure) where we enjoyed endless hours of strolling the beach, chatting, reading and snuggling in perfect solitude…heavenly!
We also walked to Kachikaly Crocodile Pool in Bakau village – a sacred site for locals. Apparently, crocodiles represent the power of fertility so many ‘infertile’ Gambians go there to pray and bathe in the crocodile’s water…
JP taming the crocodiles...
With some 80 adult crocs and countless little ones, this is the last water I would want to bathe in!
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