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The Banjul/Barra Ferry

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I’d been warned about the Banjul/Barra ferry – the ferry across the River Gambia and usual entry point for travellers to Senegal. In fact I’d heard so much about it I was half expecting to walk into something akin to Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. I’d asked people if they’d been on the ferry, and the general response involved a gradual slackening of the jaw and a distant hollow look, before a response along the lines of ‘ah yes, the Barra ferry. Good luck with that.’ I approached with a mixture of tense nervous excitement, and total bloody fear…

Well, I wont say I was disappointed exactly, but the whole thing ran rather smoothly, and I actually found the experience quite calming in its own way. We arrived with the sun around 7.30 – just as a the ferry from Barra came into port. I was with a driver and an older English couple and we’d already found ourselves a huge trolley and loaded our bags onto it, and as we stood in the half-light the gates opened and the ferry’s cargo poured out in front of us. It was a steady stream of abundance – vehicular and human: people carrying wares for market, some with great lurid pillows of material on their heads, others with who-knows-what in rusting wheelbarrows; there were mothers with babies tied to their backs in sarongs, groups of school children in their bright white shirts and head scarves. An open-sided lorry rolled past us with a hammock strung at one end containing a dozing form, an ancient truck, more holes than body, a car with blacked-out windows containing some dignitary or other… As the stream thinned, we started to pick our way onto the ferry, now part of another pulsing ragged company. We climbed up ferric stairs to the upper decks to where narrow seats lined the boat’s alarmingly thing outer walls. Behind us, vehicles had started to board, cramming into the available space and as we swayed on the light swell, it was impossible to tell if the sounds of creaking metal were from the lorries ranged beneath us or the ferry itself. We awaited launch.

From the Banjul/Barra Ferry, sunrise

From the Banjul/Barra Ferry, sunrise

Not more than 5 minutes into the short journey and I look down to see someone in the fairly intimate act of adding what looks like honey to the end of one of my right trainer. I have no idea how he got there, or indeed what on earth he’s up to. I remove my foot exclaiming ‘oi!’ at him and what is now three crouching mates. ‘S’ok, s’ok!’ he says and draws my foot back gingerly. He draws my attention to the (very) mildly flapping front part of trainer and tells me he has ‘the very best glue in the country’ for the job; and because, like so many Gambian scamsters, he’s made the situation seem like a fait accompli, and one my shockingly stiff and inbuilt sense of politeness simply can’t cope with ending, I let him carry on. He takes another globule of honey on a ragged dishcloth and applies it gently to the shoe, then reaches into his bag (it’s barely a bag to be honest – like the truck we’d seen earlier, more hole than substance) for a needle and thread. I’m, by now, wincing with frustration at my inability to extricate myself from this situation, but resigned to the fact that it’ll be over shortly enough. I barely register a whimper when he starts on the other shoe and one of his mates starts washing my now fixed trainer. I pay up, of course, confusedly humiliated (for me, for him, for the whole stupid situation), but safe in the knowledge that with my ultra-fixed trainers, I could probably walk on that water down there if I wanted.

The rest of the crossing passed serenely. I stood near the bridge and let the sun warm me; I spoke briefly with a male nurse who was about to walk three hours upriver to the hospital at Farafenni; I watched a girl emerge from the skylight in a white bus taking photographs of the approaching shore. There is a zone that I only seem to access on ferry journeys, somewhere between reverie and a kind of watchful mental paralysis. It’s a state I wish I could access elsewhere as it has a peculiar magic about it – alive with possibility and poignancy. As we docked at Barra though, the moment was broken by the sudden upsurge in activity and volume. A great tinny roar over the loudspeaker informed us it was time to depart and as I looked down over the narrowing front of the boat I spotted our bags, guarded by our impossibly tall Senegalese driver. He flashed a wide, wide smile and beckoned us down the steps. We joined the throng and walked along the narrow corridor past the battered vehicles waiting to board. The Gambia/Senegal border was next.

The Banjul/Barra Ferry

The Banjul/Barra Ferry - nearing Barra

Birds at Mandina

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There is a quiet magic at Mandina, a magic born of the simple pleasure of being amongst abundant nature. It positively teems with life – the very land buzzing with a kind of thrumming undercurrent of existence. It gets into your pores. Any stay there is about seeking new ways of absorbing all that life around you: laying still in a hammock letting the humid air, thick with scents and calls, lay heavily on your body; walking through the ringing forest, feeling the liquid heat rising out of the ground, seeing flashes of colour, the glare of baboons. But it’s out on the water that the information comes through clearest – umoored for a moment, free from the pull of the land…

The River Gambia

The River Gambia - Image by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/ankehuber/}Anke Huber{/link}

The tide was very low by now and the mangrove roots with their shellfish passengers were almost totally exposed. You could see through the knotty mass to the great mudflats beyond, and hear the odd sucking and slapping of the shifting surface as the land exhaled in great warm sighs. Due to the low tide we had go out in a shallow bottomed boat which we picked up from the deck of the last floating lodge. The sun was already making its steady downturn and our pilot urged us on, saying that the birds were already beginning their journey home. As we made our way along the ever-widening tributary we could make out the high piping call of kingfishers and turn to see the afterglow of blue as one shot into the undergrowth, and we also spotted a sedate sea-eagle perched nonchalantly in the top branches of a mangrove cluster, eyeing up the river for food, or simply resting for the night. After a time we came to a part of the river were two tributaries met and we sat in a great sweep of river with the engine silenced.

A trio of bee eaters in The Gambia

A trio of bee eaters in The Gambia

Great massed ranks of white egrets and herons flew across the horizon in front of the glowing disc of the sun, wave after wave, sometimes as many as thirty birds in a flock, the silence broken only by the almost imperceptible beat of wings and the occasional muted croak. This procession continued for what seemed like ages, and the total count must have been well into the thousands – where they went is still a relative secret, but it is rumoured that there is an island somewhere out in the mangroves that sags under the weight of close to five thousand birds. In time this will surely be sought out and become a spectacular attraction but for now the very thought of it in all its spattered feathered glory is a joy to behold. Mangroves have shallow root systems and join together to share nutrients, small islands have been known to become dislodged and float out into the ocean, washing up on foreign shores many thousands of miles away. If one day the birds clasped their talons in unison and took to the skies might they not create a vast forested, flying island? Now there would be a spectacle…

Sunset, The River Gambia

Sunset, The River Gambia

After a time we were jolted from our reveries by our pilot who was exclaiming loudly ‘Goliath Heron! Goliath Heron!’ This massive stilted bird is one of The Gambia’s largest and a rare find. Unlike the other herons we had seen in their regiments and squadrons, this bird was solitary and elusive, preferring to stay deep in the mangroves. The heron, a beautiful mix of velvety purples and greys, was balanced in the top of a mangrove cluster blending almost perfectly into the greying sun-devoid sky; as we approached we again killed the engine and trained the camera on it. As if reading some avian script it rose gracefully from the tree and slowly flapping its massive wings flew low across the water to the opposite bank, where it once more sat atop a bound reef of mangroves. The pilot was laughing to himself, and he told us it was good luck to see a Goliath Heron. He asked did we want to continue on to see more of the river but the sky was darkening and to be frank we were full up, engorged by all this effortless beauty. Instead we turned for home, leaving Goliath in peace.

Sunset, The River Gambia Photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/helen61/}helen.2006{/link}

Sunset, The River Gambia Photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/helen61/}helen.2006{/link}

Later, as we turned to leave the encampment, the moon was full again but lower now and we could pick it out through the dense branches of the mango trees. Maybe it was just the fatigue but somehow, just beneath the surface of things, it was possible to sense the minute tremors as the insistent tug of gravity returned the massive body of water to the parched mangrove beds.

If you’re interested in bird watching in The Gambia you can find out more on our birding pages on the Gambia website. Alternatively, you can download this PDF which features a checklist of all bird species in The Gambia – 569 of them!