| The
night had been a little restless – we had
decided not to get out the mattresses and so slept
on our motorbike kit (and all of the red dust!)
and Moroccan rug. Both of us also woke at the
slightest sound and so woke un-refreshed still
covered in a layer of dust despite trying last
night to ‘wet-wipe’ it all off. (Thank
god for wet-wipes!)
We
headed back to the ‘main’ road and
the border crossing at Farafenn for entry into
The Gambia. The road was much more of the same
and by the time we’d reached the border
it was much later than we’d hoped.
The
border formalities on both sides were no problem
with the border guards in The Gambia being very
helpful giving advice as to the best route to
take and the road conditions. The carnet was stamped
out of Senegal and used for entry into The Gambia
– the border guards are well versed in the
Carnet formalities. It was also so very strange
to hear English once again instead of us having
to struggle with our slowly improving French!
Waved
on our way we made a decision to stay on the North
bank of the river and head East towards Georgetown.
This route was shorter in distance than the south
bank road and despite the south side being asphalt
this was in very poor condition with many potholes
whereas the north side was having a new road constructed
and much of it was flattened and hard piste in
readiness for the asphalt. We started to make
good progress but were stopped frequently at customs
posts and controls with each stop being no less
that half and hour each! Nothing was asked for
(apart from the last new guard) but all were interested
in asking us where we’d travelled to how
long were we travelling where did we come from
– the questions were endless and of course
all in fluent English so we couldn't’t pretend
we didn’t understand in order to speed things
up by not having to answer! The last guard was
a pain in the butt! Apparently he’d just
been in the job for 3 days and wanted to do everything
perfectly and ‘by the book’. This
meant that he wanted to see all our paperwork
including the Carnet, which was nicely packed
away as we only get it out for borders, plus what
was in Simon’s large and rather full pockets
and these suites have a lot of pockets! When Simon
offered to empty his pockets, because the guard
was going through them one-by-one he got uppity!
Then came the ‘gift’ request and this
guy wasn’t going to take ‘No’
for an answer. It was now getting late and we
really needed to make a move and so offered him
a pack of cigarettes from our precious bribe supply
– this worked and we were allowed to go
on our way. We had another 35km to go in order
to reach Georgetown and it was getting dark and
the road quality had disintegrated and was now
full of amazingly huge potholes! This meant that
we were having to constantly weave from one side
of the now rutted and sandy mud road to the other
trying to avoid these large holes – sometimes
there were just too many and despite the fact
that we were going slowly they’d still give
you a jolt as we carefully rode into them! This
became very tiring and by 6:30pm we stopped, pulled
over behind a hedge and set up the tent just on
the edge of a field of maze. Too knackered to
do anything else, a pan of instant soup was the
only thing we could be bothered to do! |
