Happy New Year!
on Tales Of The Gambia (The Gambia), 29/Jan/2012 20:29, 34 days ago
Yes, I know it’s a bit late as it’s now 29th January but I’m only just recently back on line. I had a particularly nasty virus (the computer kind) that infected my laptop! The combined brains of two top VSO IT specialists were no match for the little bugger so my laptop had to go into computer hospital where dedicated IT nurses worked tirelessly, day and night, to restore it to full health. It was a strange feeling losing my main connection to the outside world: liberating for a couple of days and then a bit isolating. There’s only so much fun you can have with a text message.New Year over here was good fun, thanks for asking. Six of us left for Dakar in Senegal in the wee hours of December 30th and despite the fact that the minibus that came to collect us wasn’t the one we had previously agreed with our driver (Abdul) and the boot door flipped open on the way to the ferry liberally distributing our luggage on a thankfully empty road we made it to the border. That’s where we unfortunately had to leave one of our party after sniffer dogs found 3 kilos of crack in her rucksack…oh, no, sorry, that’s a different story…after she’d left her passport in her far-away village. So 5 of us crossed the border. We’d had an increasing suspicion that we weren’t in the fastest of vans, soon borne out by the realisation that we couldn’t go above 45kmph, much slower on an incline. Oh, and there was a problem with a hole in the exhaust which meant that sooty carbon monoxide fumes filled the minibus at regular intervals. To be brief (“thank God” I hear you cry) it took us 17 hours to do a 6 hour journey and we arrived at our hotel in Dakar tripping on exhaust fumes and looking like extras from‘The Black& White Minstrel Show’…Dakar itself was great, a nice city, proper coffee, lots of patisseries, an interesting giant monument (see photos) and a slight feeling in parts that you could be in Paris. Highlights included visiting Ille de Goree, industrial quantities of cake and coffee, the strange constancy of strong wind (weather wind not flatulence) and watching the London fireworks at 12 midnight on New Year’s Eve on a French TV channel. I knew it would be wild…