Bike Trek 2003
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The
last few days leading up to Christmas: they usually are full of braving the
crowds for those last few purchases, finishing up the decorations around the
house, making cookies and gingerbread houses, and listening to hours after hours
after hours of Christmas carols. Right? Nope, not this year. For Doug, Erik
and I, the crowds we faced were hordes of small children chasing us down the
streets, the Christmas treats were baobab icees (sugary sweet frozen fruit concoctions
that you suck out of a plastic bag), the only 'music' was a kora concert that
played long into the night one night in Kerewan (looong after we wanted to be
asleep), and the holiday exhaustion was felt more in our rear ends than in our
feet. For Christmas this year, we biked the 370-ish kilometers from the far
end of the Gambia, in Basse, to the Atlantic Ocean in Kombo.
Over Thanksgiving we had attempted to plan out our route, and since we didn't
really know when (or how) we'd be able to
contact one another, we set a date to meet in Basse on the 18th. That would
hopefully give us enough time to complete the trek by Christmas. There were
quite a few people who had expressed interest in the trip, but when we all showed
up in Basse on the 19th (Gambian punctuality is starting to rub off on us, I
suppose), we were only 3: Doug, Erik, and myself. The 2 of them had traveled
much further than I had to get to Basse, and had experienced an especially horrendous
bit of transport luck, including flat tires, overly chatty Gambian women, and
a mostly sleepless night spent in a strangers' house. Furthermore, Erik seemed
to have some strange bacteria brewing under the skin of his upper lip, causing
a fever and a considerable amount of pain. We decided that despite our delay
in getting there, we would put off leaving until at least the next day. That
night we caught up with some of the upcountry volunteers, wandered around the
Basse market a bit, and got some sleep.
We
hadn't managed to do ANY preparation during our exhausted stupor the day before,
and Erik was still suffering quite a bit from mysterious African skin funk,
so getting ready took quite a while. We chowed down on bean sandwiches and the
rare chocolate bar (SUCH a treat to find upcountry!) while trying to figure
out how to affix luggage racks that were blatantly the wrong size to the backs
of our Peace Corps issued bikes. We finally settled for a slightly sketchy configuration
that only vaguely endangered our safety, strapped our bags onto our bikes, and
set off down the road. Basse to Bansang was fairly uneventful, once we actually
got on the road. 55km on paved roads is not all that difficult, and the roads
here were refreshingly free of potholes, so it was pretty smooth sailing. We
stopped on the way out of town to get a picture of the sign showing the mileage
to the sea, and the random Gambian man who stopped to take our picture 
actually
had been to Portland, where Erik went to college! Funny things happen here…
We pedaled off towards the west, skirting through little Fula villages everywhere
(and only later came to fully appreciate the understated friendliness of the
Fulas), whooping and hollering on the downhill stretches, and generally feeling
pretty good. We arrived in Bansang well before dark (about 4 and a half hours
of riding behind us), and decided to congratulate ourselves on completing the
first leg of our journey by having a cold Julbrew beer. We stopped in at Bansang's
finest: the post office/ bar/ hotel/ restaurant. A rare piece of work. We then
settled down to a huge spread for dinner: an assortment of odds and ends from
the Bansang market and the local toubob shop, including many loaves of bread,
local-style peanut butter, bananas and oranges, tomatoes, Happy-Cow cheese (doesn't
go bad if not refrigerated), and ovaltine chocolate malt drink. Mmmmm…
After
a decent night's rest at the Bansang regional Peace Corps house, the next morning
we had a breakfast of fried egg sandwiches and hot coffee and set off on the
road again. We crossed a ferry onto McCarthy Island and stopped in to visit
some volunteers from our training group there… after being led in circles
by a series of small boys trying to direct us to the right house (of dubious
help, but I guess I couldn't do much better on my own), we managed to track
down Vicki, who knocked our (stinky) socks off with the intensity of the COLDNESS
of her water. Wow, that's American cold!! (they've got occasionally working
electricity on the island, when the power company doesn't sell off the fuel,
and her compound has a refrigerator. Fancy stuff.) We also go bread fresh out
of the oven: the long French-style bread loaves that they bake in big rounded
mud-brick wood-fire ovens. Yummy. After sending her on her way (she was off
on a trip to Senegal herself), we crossed over the second ferry (a little canopy-covered
putt-putting one, this time) to the North Bank. Doug had us in stitches; when
a particularly haughty Gambian man refused to be accommodating and slow down
his Mandinka, Doug turned and greeted him profusely in Spanish. Why not, eh??
We then headed off towards Wassau, site of the ancient 
Gambian
stone circles (thought to be relatives to the ones in Stonehenge).
The going was significantly slower now: we had given up some of the country's nicest paved roads for gravelly red laterite with big dips and craters peppering the way. We still managed to make okay time to Wassau, and decided to stop and take a wander through the site anyways (because who knew when we'd be back again??) Jenny, one of the health volunteers from last years' batch, had offered to let us crash in her hut there for the night (despite the fact that she was off acting as Santa Clause for the other volunteers in the country, delivering their letters and packages on mail-run), but we decided that YES! last night we had slept in cushy accommodations, but tonight we were going to be ADVENTUROUS!
Our
map showed that the road ahead took a pretty big loop to the north, but that
there was a direct bush trail; furthermore, it had some old English forts on
it. Neat-oh! Let's spend a night out camping in the bush! So we picked out the
little village where the trail took off from the main road, and set out for
it. When we got there, we were cornered by a group of very concerned Gambians:
we wanted to do WHAT?? Didn't we know there were wolves in the bush? Had we
ever BEEN there before? Did we know the way??? (Erik had a wonderful answer
for this: "I've never been to AFRICA before. If I only went places I knew,
I wouldn't be here in the first place." I don't think they quite understood
what he meant, but it was a good answer nonetheless.) So we tried our best to
quell their fears, got a bearing on direction from them, and set of to battle
the sandy trails. Before
too long we got to another village (so much for "remote" bush trails!),
and decided that rather than face the same inquisitiveness here, we'd camp on
a hill we'd seen just off the path behind us. So we turned back around (quick,
before the "toubobing" begins!) and pedaled off towards the base of
the hill. First through a field of already harvested cornstalks. Next into knee-high
grass. Then head high. Before we knew it the grass was about 8 feet tall, and
there were prickly things all around us. It hadn't looked this high from the
trail! The opportunities for collecting firewood were looking slimmer than we'd
hoped; 
worse,
the amount of daylight left would hardly allow us the time necessary to set
up camp. We called a quick huddle and decided to call a retreat back to Wassau.
Slightly disappointed and pretty tired as well, we biked back in to town as
quickly as the fading daylight would allow. We were met by Jenny's extremely
gracious family, who offered us water, to wash off the road, and privacy (a
rare gift among Gambians, who mostly want to chat into all hours of the night.)
Gambian hospitality, although definitely stifling at times, can be absolutely
spectacular. Our trip was full of little unexpected incidences of kindness-
the last day, for example, we stopped in at this tiny little Wolof village to
ask for water, and the man who brought it to us also offered us giant heaping
handfuls of groundnuts. It's amazing too, how many times the people in markets
or little roadside stalls will just toss in a little something extra with what
you're buying.
The next morning we did some fiddling with our bikes- apparently our sojourn
through the cornfields was not well received by our gears. Jenny's family brought
us a breakfast of rice-groundnut porridge (my personal favorite), which we practically
inhaled. We then headed off in the same direction as the night before, although
we had abandoned our hopes of taking the bush route (too much sand to fight
on the trails). The quality of the road increased as we went on- road construction
was obviously coming this
direction. The scenery was actually really beautiful: we passed ponds full of
water lilies, reeds, and herons, we passed thick stands of coconut trees, we
passed construction sites where real roadwork was happening. The villagers,
however, got more and more in our faces: you could see the children running
out into the streets as you came into a town, and they would line up on either
side of the road to get the best vantage point. It would start off quiet and
rapidly build "toubob, toubob TOUBOB TOUBOB!!!!! Give me dalasi give me
pen give me your bicycle, give me give me give me!!!!" We developed a huge
variety of strategies and defense mechanisms to deal with it, ranging from patient
attempts to reason with them to firm and frustrated NO LEAVE ME ALONE. Sometimes
I would say nope, I won't give you my bike but I'll sell it to you. How about
a million dalasi? Our favorite answer, however, was just to completely baffle
them by replying with a loud raspberry. "Give me money!" "Thhhbbbbt!!!"
We stopped in to visit Jenni from our training group, who had a bitik selling
frozen
wanjo and baobab in her front yard (the lucky duck!) We feasted on peanut butter
and jelly and hit the road again for the afternoon, heading for the home of
Joe, a volunteer that none of us had ever met, in a village that we were only
vaguely sure existed. Hmmm…
Around 5:30 we managed to find the village of Balangar, which had a distinctively
old-west feel to it. I wish I had taken some pictures of the landscapes there:
I don't know what it was, but somehow it just felt different there. We started
asking around for our mystery volunteer, and despite the fact that it was a
sprawling village with probably hundreds of compounds, everyone seemed to know
who and where he was. We finally found his compound and wandered in. We had
an amusingly awkward few moments: I realized that he was not the same person
I thought he was, and started saying "ummm… we heard we might be able
to stay here for the night…??" at the same time that he greeted us
in French "Bonjour?", not really knowing if we were tourists coming
down from Senegal or what. We soon sorted things out and managed to find spots
on his floor to rest up for the night. The wear and tear of the road was starting
to get to us- Erik was 
still
reasonably coherent, but Doug and I could barely complete a sentence on our
own. Joe, our host, started off for Kombo early the next morning, leaving us
to close up his house on our own. Doug had developed a pretty bad fever over
the course of the night and decided that what he really wanted was to keep sleeping
and then catch transport the rest of the way in to Kombo. Erik and I debated
accompanying him before finally decided that we needed the glory of riding all
the way to the ocean. So I left Doug my cell phone, in case things got significantly
worse, and we started off again (actually getting an early morning start for
the first time on the trip!) We managed to make it to Farafenni before noon,
and after chatting with a few volunteers at the hospital and drinking some more
icees, Erik and I decided that we would try to really push it that day and make
it to Kerewan. We essentially burned through what we had planned on riding in
2 days in a single loooong, painful day; and on a piece of what is probably
the worst road in the country. There are some pretty bad roads in this country,
but the piece from Farafenni to Kerewan was almost exclusively washboard surface
with a 2-3 inch thick coating of sand/dust. Miserable. We had started biking
at about 9:00 that morning, and finally limped into Kerewan, Erik with a flat
tire and both of us with hopelessly sore butts, around 5:30 in the evening.
After a little negotiating we managed to find the regional house, and the travel
gods must have been favoring us that day because there was a group of new forestry
volunteers gathered there already preparing dinner!! It really doesn't get much
better than that. We contemplated going to see a concert that evening, but as
we were almost asleep at 8:00, decided that it probably wasn't going to happen.
As luck would have it, the concert came to us: it was close enough that we could
hear it all night long. Which, considering how tired we were, wasn't exactly
the kind of luck we wanted, but c'est la vie.
Last
morning on the road. Our bikes were hopelessly in need of attention, and we
had lost Doug, our trusty bike mechanic. Erik and I started early and methodically
went through all of the adjustable parts, trying to figure out what exactly
they DID. After a few hours of fiddling we had managed to master the art of
tuning a bike. Good enough for government work, at least! J Full of our sense
of accomplishment, we set off for the last 50 km, and with the smoothest road
in the country we clicked through the kilometers faster than we had thought
possible. We had a nice egg- and- salsa sandwich at Isaac's place, I left my
bicycle there for ease of transport back to site, and then we wandered over
to the ferry terminal. It was an absolute zoo: huge lines of cars massed up
to get on the boat, people crowded together in what seemed no coherent order,
people fought with security guards who were trying to maintain some semblance
of organization… we sat around for a while wondering what the heck was
going on before someone finally came by and "rescued"
us- pulled Erik at a run through hordes of people towards the ticked counter
while I kept an eye on his bike and tried to fend off marriage requests from
rapidly amassing crowds of young men. We then ran up the gangplank and crossed
onto the ferry seconds before they threw off the ropes and set off for the opposite
shore. The Gambia River's mouth into the Atlantic Ocean is HUGE, an impressive
body of water. We took turns climbing up to the higher levels of the boat to
get a view of the distant banks of both shores and the endless expanses of blue
off to the west. Erik wandered among the vehicles on the boat to try to arrange
a ride for us once we hit the other side (might be easier than haggling at the
car park??), and we thought we had arranged a reasonably cheap ride with a large
van. Of course, when we got off the ferry and walked up next to the driver,
a quick look into the back revealed that it was completely full… why the
aparante thought he could sell us seats for the 2 of us and a bike was beyond
me. So off we went to try our luck with the taxis- turns out a ride into the
Peace Corps office was going to be considerably more expensive than we had thought,
but we were too tired to really care.
Over
the course of the last few days, we had thought long and hard about what would
signify the true final end to this journey. Our trip would finally be over,
we had decided, when we were swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. So after dropping
off the bike in the Peace Corps office, Erik and I quickly grabbed a change
of clothes and jogged the last mile down the Pipeline, crowded metropolitan
Kairaba Avenue, towards Laybatos, confusing Gambians and tourists alike (what
the heck are these crazy dirty toubobs doing?!). As the last of daylight faded
away we made it up the hill and down between the hammocks and, throwing our
clean clothing and sneakers aside on the beach, straight into the waves.
So that's it for our bike trip. We managed to find all of the food we had been fantasizing about for the extent of our trip: Christmas dinner of pizza and Guinness, warm chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream on top, cold cokes with ICE in them (!!), and milkshakes. We had a couple of nice gatherings on Christmas eve and Christmas day, and long lazy days sitting around chatting with the other volunteers and reading books and listening to children running around the streets performing what I can only term the Gambian version of Christmas caroling: they band together and dress one of them up in leaves, with sticks coming out of the top of his head, and go from house to house dancing and banging more sticks, or giant seed pods, together and asking for money. Odd, odd phenomenon.
Things
out at site are going pretty well, all things considered. School's in full swing
now (we even have enough teachers at the middle school! Although the elementary
school is still operating on only 3 teachers for 6 grades), the health center
staff is busy (we just finished an insane mass-immunization campaign), I'm making
better friends with some of my villagers and getting along spectacularly well
with my family. After being "alone" at site for the last 2 months
I have new forestry volunteers nearby (10 and 15km away) to keep me company.
Nice to have someone within a reasonable distance that I can have "normal"
conversations with.
Merry Christmas to all, and Happy New Year!
Love and hugs,
Sarah
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