Dakar, Deserts, Doxcycline and Me

Just returned from a fantastic week in the Gambia with 5 other volunteers. Journey down was pretty exhausting as we took a sept place (a peaugeot estate that seats 7 people) for 7 hours to get to the border so there was numb bums all round when we finally reached the ferry at Barra which took us across to the capital Banjul. Oooh, yes we were all pretty traumatised at one point in the journey as we hit a little goat and the driver just laughed : (

The next few days we spent in a little guesthouse in a small town called Bakau run by a Gambian woman called Effu who was raised in Scotland. It was protected from bumsters by barbed wire and we all felt really secluded in the little villa as she showed us how to make home made limeade...it was goood. We spent the next couple of days just lazing around on the quiet beach topping up our tans and drinking fresh fruit juices made by Larry the Juice Man as we named him.

One day we decided to be a little more active however and took local buses to Abuko Nature Reserve, a tiny local National Paek where you can just walk around the trail seeing monkeys, small crocodiles, lots of birds and some deer/buffalo thing which we weren't sure of. Ate lunch at the gorgeus Lamin Lodge, a kind of huge treehouse built overlooking the river and also took a little pirogue tour whilst we were there to see the mangroves...it was sooo peaceful. That evening we couldn't be bothered to cook dinner so we just bought ice-cream, nuttella and bananas and stuffed ourselves, I think we deserved it lol.

Came back to Thiaroye on the Monday pretty exhausted not helped by the fact that I had to get up at 7 for school on the Tuesday. Oh well.

St. Louis next week for a few days! Yay!