Sini-Saloum biker gang
Hi BoBers,
I’d joined my first real riding crew and we were having a fantastic time together. Riding together during the days and conversations ranging from politics to fart jokes and the politics of fart jokes at night. Travis is a Canadian guy who seems to have been everywhere - Chinese jail, camping with camel riders in the desert and hunting pigs deep in the rainforests of PNG. Antoine is 19 years old with a disability affecting his mobility and an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of geography and political history. He’d hate it if I called him inspiring, so I won’t go on.
I spent a couple of nights in the resort town Saly and unintentionally walked into a local bar filled with aging white men and young black women. As I was leaving, I saw a man clearly in his 80s being helped up the stairs by his 20-something partner. The lie of it all, the false intimacy and concealed intentions, really bothered me. Saly is notorious for this.
Afterwards, we went to the island of Fadiouth, famous for being made entirely out of clam shells. It is also known for being a place of peaceful coexistence between Christianity and Islam. The imam and priest even visit each other’s congregations for important events. This kind of tolerance and respect is desperately needed in the world.
From there to Gambia we crossed multiple landscapes - dry savannah dotted thorny acacia and the occasional baobab, mangrove lined tidal river deltas drifting into shadier and wetter areas, dwarfed by towering mangoes and African mahogany, close to 30m tall. We took some time and some boats to explore the delta of the Sine and Saloum rivers and spent a night on one of the less-frequented islands, and camped in a half-built resort.
Finally, we stayed a few days with a French couple who were building a campground and charged us 1.5USD per night to stay on their beautiful property. He had spent much of his life in Africa working for Médecins Sans Frontières and the WHO and had a bunch of interesting stories to tell.
I was excited to visit Gambia, an English-speaking country and member of the commonwealth, as a little break from torturing the French language.
Biker ganged, J&BoB
