Monday, December 28, 2009
A HAPPY New Year to all.
It is now mid-December and we are still in The Gambia in west Africa. Tomorrow, we travel south into Senegal, to cross the Casamanche River at the town of Ziganchour. Rebel forces were active along the route just a few months ago, but we are told the area has recently been secured by the Senagalese army. We hope so, and that I may be able to write a column about Senegal. We plan to be home for Christmas.
The Gambia is a small country, essentially the River Gambia and its valley. On the map it pokes like a long, slim finger into the body of Senegal which surrounds it on all sides, except where the river enters the Atlantic near the capital, Banjul. The population is 1.5 million. The people are Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Dhola and Ako and smaller groups. English is the colonial heritage, and most people speak it along with their own tribal tongue. The people here are are generally tall and slim, with fine posture. They take great pride in their clothes.
Last week, I wrote about our time upriver at Bintang Bolong Lodge, an eco-tourism incentive. These days, when I hear the word ‘eco’, I cannot but recall Hermann Goering’s alleged comment upon ‘kultur’: "When I hear the word culture (substitute ‘eco’) I reach for my gun!" It is a word much abused by charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. However, Bintang Bolong Lodge is genuinely ecologically ‘correct’.
The lodge, on Bintang bolong (creek) was built using only local materials. Long, straight sticks from the lliana creepers make the railings of the walkways through the mangroves. Thick, rough hewn planks from local trees floor the walkways, cabins and bar/restaurant area, all built on stilts. The tide rises and falls beneath them.
A dirt road leads to Bintang village: in fact for 20 of the 40 miles from Banjul, the road is red dust. Its raison d’etre is to employ people in the nearby rural villages and to use the income generated to support a primary school and send two deserving graduates to second level education each year. A recent community initiative seeks to create a salt-making plant, and we saw 30-odd villagers on a Saturday morning digging trenches in the black mud. Salt pans will be built and the tide trapped as it comes in, later to evaporate and leave a deposit of sea salt.
The spacious, comfortable, straw-roofed cabins are €24 per night for bed and breakfast. & Most open onto the river, but are there are no mosquitos. Sitting on our balcony/deck, we watch a flight of pink-backed pelicans fly in and proceed in a stately flotilla down river. Three hundred metres to our left, some 20 vultures and a dozen black kites sit on the topmost branches of a huge baobob tree (perhaps a hundred feet tall), the dying sun burnishing their feathers. Two wire-tailed swallows, iridescent blue with bright red caps, land on the railing only a few feet away from us. At first light, a red-eyed Pigeon carols its repetitive orsions from our balcony. I emerge, equally red-eyed, and shoo it away.
As we walk the dusty roads we are enthralled by the almost cliched charms of Africa. Tiny children run towards us from a compound of straw-roofed, mudbrick houses, as we pass. The oldest is no more than six, some are no more than three, and more than one carries an even smaller child on his or her back. They begin to dance, slowly at first, then faster, moving together in a line. Bare feet stomp the earth in perfect time. They chant a refrain – a welcoming chant, we are told later. Their small, shiny faces, smiling or laughing at the sheer fun of it, surround us.
Three times a day, we hear the call for prayer from the village mosque. The voice is especially evocative in the evening, on the quiet of the river, still as a pond. When it finishes, we hear another voice from a distant village, and then from another, even further away. Afterwards, silence falls. A blue reef heron forages on the mud below our cabin. The timeless night of Africa draws in.
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