February 23 :: Sukuta, Gambia
February 23 :: Sukuta, Gambia :: 42km / 3267km total
I rode over to the airport in the morning to check on the situation regarding boxing my bike and ticket options to Freetown, expecting problems and hardships. Shockingly I was doubly happy to find that a) the airport has bike boxes, FREE, and b) my ticket is open, giving me the option of modifying my March 6 flight date, if I want, for FREE. Yay! I pedalled back to the campground compound in a very good mood, and went for a long walk to a nearby National Park that has original jungle vegetation and monkeys.
The campground served up a fantastic dinner and I spent the night chatting with other overlanders... most of the residents of the campground have driven overland from Europe to here, along the same route as me. Their stories and stories of other people they've met are fantastic, and make me very happy I'm NOT going to Guinea - tourists caught unawares in politically-troubled Guinea have been worked over by the military in the last few weeks, in some cases robbed of thousands of dollars. One of the overlanders spent 5 days in a Senegalese jail... long story, but basically the police saw how rich he was, dreamt up some charges, and waited for him to break. Somehow he got word through to his embassy (Austrian) and managed to get out, and fled the country here into Gambia. Even relatively-stable Senegal is SO messed up and corrupt, its hard to believe. Ya, if I think about coming back to Africa, I'm going to be REALLY CHOOSY when picking countries to visit. There is a safe, stable belt of countries down the Southeast part of Africa... but they're not 'in season' for cycling during the Canadian Winter, so it will probably be quite a while until I return here.
I rode over to the airport in the morning to check on the situation regarding boxing my bike and ticket options to Freetown, expecting problems and hardships. Shockingly I was doubly happy to find that a) the airport has bike boxes, FREE, and b) my ticket is open, giving me the option of modifying my March 6 flight date, if I want, for FREE. Yay! I pedalled back to the campground compound in a very good mood, and went for a long walk to a nearby National Park that has original jungle vegetation and monkeys.
The campground served up a fantastic dinner and I spent the night chatting with other overlanders... most of the residents of the campground have driven overland from Europe to here, along the same route as me. Their stories and stories of other people they've met are fantastic, and make me very happy I'm NOT going to Guinea - tourists caught unawares in politically-troubled Guinea have been worked over by the military in the last few weeks, in some cases robbed of thousands of dollars. One of the overlanders spent 5 days in a Senegalese jail... long story, but basically the police saw how rich he was, dreamt up some charges, and waited for him to break. Somehow he got word through to his embassy (Austrian) and managed to get out, and fled the country here into Gambia. Even relatively-stable Senegal is SO messed up and corrupt, its hard to believe. Ya, if I think about coming back to Africa, I'm going to be REALLY CHOOSY when picking countries to visit. There is a safe, stable belt of countries down the Southeast part of Africa... but they're not 'in season' for cycling during the Canadian Winter, so it will probably be quite a while until I return here.
posted by Graham Durrant at 5:50 AM
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