I am finally somewhat recovered from our 3-day long upriver adventure. We had a long weekend as Thursday was Gambian Independence Day, so we took off for a nature camp at Tendaba, about 3 hours upriver. The drive was pretty intense, 1 hour on normal roads followed by 2 hours on incredibly bumpy unpaved roads. I spent half the trip sitting cocked up on my hipbone because I got the bush taxi seat over an exposed metal bar. After arriving at Tendaba we went on a 2 hour boat cruise (on basically a giant canoe with a sketchy motor on the back) on the Gambia River. It was beautiful and felt a bit like the Florida Everglades. We saw a variety of birds and much more vegetation than there is here, closer to the city and the coast. Then we had a very late, 3-course buffet style dinner. We all realized how much our stomachs had shrunk here when we attempted to eat this seemingly enormous (though, in American terms, perfectly acceptable), amount of food. Following dinner there was a music and dance performance. The Gambians from the Tendaba village came up to sing and play drums for us, and to teach us white people to dance like a Gambian. It was really fun once you stopped thinking about how ridiculous and out of place you probably looked. I made friends with one of the little girls, who was really adorable. I also met some teenage girls and a young woman who was my age. At the end we tipped them and they went back to the village.
Then we all went to sleep in our little huts. Belle and I realized that our ceiling light and fan weren't working in our hut, and were very impressed that the staff at the camp got them fixed before we went to bed. There was electricity at the camp for half of the day since it runs off of a generator. Our hut had a queen-size bed with a malaria net and a bathroom without a door on it. The bathroom had a really nice shower...the shower head came out of the ceiling, and if you showered in the afternoon the water was even lukewarm! There was also a slightly chlorinated pool at the camp, and I practiced my swimming skills a bit.
Friday morning we woke up very early to go on a nature hike with Nags. We ate a very British-style breakfast, bread with butter, jam, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs. As usual there was also tea and instant coffee available. Personally, I thought Nags was exaggerating about the nature of our little hike. I was expecting a long walk, maybe through the village or on some sort of flat trail (there aren't many hills in the Gambia). Therefore, I was not smart enough to wear any sneakers. It turned out that what was actually planned was a 10-mile hike, albeit on a trail, and what actually ensued was a 15-mile hike in which we got lost in the African bush.
The first part of the hike was really nice. There were some slight hills on the trail, and we saw a big monkey in the forest. Also we tried a baobab right off the tree. Baobab is a kind of dry fruit with a hard outer shell. It has a chalk consistency and if you suck on it, it is sour. People here often make juice out of it. After the first two thirds of the hike, we stopped for a little rest next to the river. Nags asked a nearby Gambian where the trail along the river, back to Tendaba was at. The man said that we could go that way but that there wasn't really a trail and he didn't recommend it. He thought maybe we should turn around and follow the trail back the way we had come. Evidently the Gambian kids who had followed us from the last village agreed, as they thought this would be a good time to leave us and go back home. Being the stupid Americans we are, we didn't listen to the natives. We pushed stubbornly forward with our logic that the shortest route home would be along the river, as this would form a triangle with the trails we had taken thus far. We figured that if we kept the radio tower near the Tendaba camp in sight and the Gambia River close enough to hear, we would be all right. For a while there was some semblance of a trail, but soon this ended and we were literally wading through the bush. I stayed near the back of the group, reasoning that this would decrease my chances of stepping on a huge poisonous snake. Every so often we would send someone up a hill to see how close we were to the river, then press forward. Fortunately we had some seasoned navigators with us, but Nags, who kept insisting that he knew where we were, was not one of them. Instead, he angered some baboons that we ran across, and found the skull of a bush pig, which he paraded around on a stick, Lord of the Flies style.
Still, this was all rather entertaining until we emerged on the other side of the bush to find a giant swamp-like area. To get back to Tendaba, we soon found that we had to cross the swamp. A brave few crossed the swamp immediately. The mud was more like quicksand, and these individuals were covered in it from head to toe. They kept losing their shoes in the mud and would sink in up to their waists! As more cautious-natured individuals, I and the rest of the group resolved to find a way around the swamp. This was unsuccessful, although we were able to find a route in which we only had to wade through knee-deep quicksand. I abandoned the idea of wearing shoes and waded through. Due to my inability to swim, I found the whole experience terrifying, but still made out better than the more adventurous members of the group, who had cut-up feet from stepping on a big bed of shells and were walking around in their underwear due to the massive amounts of mud stuck to their pants. Personally, I felt a bit like Pocahantas walking around Africa barefoot, with giant clumps of mud stuck to my feet (Note: I understand that Pocahantas actually lived in America, but this is still how I felt). The sun was beating down overhead, we were dehydrated, and we had managed to wade through standing freshwater, which my travel doctor had definitely advised me against.
When we returned to Tendaba (alive!) we did some first aid on the unfortunate members of the group who had encountered the shells. Nags bought us some cold sodas, presumably to make up for the disastrous nature of the outing (even though we all secretly loved it), and we were very grateful for the lunch buffet. We spent the rest of the afternoon lounging around on the dock, reading, talking, and drinking wine. (We deserved it after the debacle that morning). We stayed one more night at Tendaba and repeated the bumpy journey home, except it was more miserable as we were all dehydrated from our little adventure, and/or had not gotten along so well with the food at the camp. Nevertheless, it was a fun weekend and we are all excited to go upriver again. Next time we will be taking the ferry across and traveling up the southern bank, so expect more stories!
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