Life's A Beach

First of all I’d like to apologise as I’m pretty sure I’ve used this title before and also because it has been a while since my last post, but there really hasn’t been much to write home about.
From Dakar’s main bus terminal I got in a “sept place” which drove me for a couple of hours to Mbour where I could find a taxi to take me to the neighbouring town of Saly. This was a nice relaxed beach-town where I spent a couple of days just doing what you do in a beach-town, in other words not very much. However it largely caters to retired French people and families and although it wasn’t expensive it was pricier than I would prefer. So after a couple of days I kept moving south and after a combination of minibuses and taxis I reached the even tinier town of Palmarin. Here I found a beautiful cheap lodge and spent a few nights in a shared tent, going on a pirogue (motorised wooden canoe) cruise through the mangroves and just wandered the endlessly empty Atlantic beach. After a few days of doing this I decided to keep moving and through a couple of “sept places” I reached the Gambian border in Karang. It was nice to be greeted in English after spending time in Francophone Africa, which has been nice but although I can understand a lot of French, it is nowhere near good enough to have proper conversations with people. After getting my passport stamped I got a minibus to the town of Barra where I could get a ferry across The Gambia River and arrived in the capital city of Banjul. The Gambia is the smallest country by size in mainland Africa and Banjul is the smallest capital with its population of around thirty thousand people. I quickly noticed it may also be the capital with most frequent power cuts and most mosquitoes per capita in any capital I have been, though I can’t verify these “facts.” There really wasn’t much to do or see here so the following day I moved to the beach town of Bakao.

Bakao was a nice quiet place, but the beach was rather ominous, a short rocky stretch of sand with stray dogs and vultures fighting over the garbage, so after two nights I moved to Kololi. Here I found a wonderful guesthouse owned by a Gambian woman named Aisa who used to live in Sweden, I was recommended this place by a friend back home who knows Aisa, and when she heard I was from Sweden, she quickly arranged a room for me at a very good price. The beach here is great, weather has been incredible and beers are cheap, so that is my current situation, not much is really happening as I kind of got stuck here, it has been a great place to just relax and get a bit of a holiday from my holiday, but I know that I will have to keep moving on soon.