The Gambia Blog

Rebecca Sumner on the road in The Gambia. Image copyright - Listen to Africa

Listen to Africa is a brilliant project – one that utilises and pushes the blog format to its limits. It is the brainchild of Huw Williams and Rebecca Sumner, two hardy souls who have travelled extensively and, more to the point cycled extensively in various corners of the world. The Listen to Africa project is a two-year cycling expedition that will cover some 30 countries (you can see the proposed route here) with the aim of capturing various forms of footage along the way – and blogging it from the ground. Envious? Not a bit of it.

Tendaba Jetty. Image copyright - Listen to Africa

Huw and Rebecca aims for the trip are laid out on their blog: ‘a two year journey by bicycle to record some of the sounds of Africa – from oral histories and music to soundscapes and wildlife; recording and publishing sound seems an appropriate way to communicate from a continent that has so much to say and is so rarely heard outside of its own borders’. It sounds ambitious, but the fruits of it are at times astonishing – and when you see a list of their equipment, well, you can see how genuine and passionate the couple are about the project and completing it.

The scout hut at Kaira Konko. Image copyright - Listen to Africa

The site is already full of great blog entries, brilliant pictures and some genuinely fascinating audio footage. Being obviously mildly biased towards the Gambia we’ve picked out a few choice snippets from the smiling coast:

An account of Huw and Rebecca’s journey across The Gambia – including a dense audio capture at dawn in a derelict encampment in Bessi, off The Gambia’s southern road.

A soundscape of life in the mangrove swamps of the River Gambia.

An image gallery of the journey across The Gambia.