The Tranquilo Traveler
The Tranquilo Traveler is a celebration of voluntourism, slow travel, and other interesting ways to see the world. Travel writer and award- winning Moon Handbooks author Joshua Berman created The Tranquilo Travel as a resource for world trippers and international volunteers, a window to the author’s travels in Nicaragua, Belize, and beyond, and an update of his books and articles.
The Gambia from Space
By Joshua | 
No Comments » 
Just stumbled across this great NASA image of The Gambia River, or as Kunta Kinte remembered it, the “Kamby Bolongo.” Here’s the Wiki page where I found it. The thin black line is the country’s political border separating it from Senegal, and it actually extends quite a bit farther east. Tay’s village of Sara Kunda is on the north bank, toward the right of this image.
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Going to The Gambia?
By Joshua | No Comments » The most thorough and up-to-date guidebook that I’ve seen is The Bradt Guide to The Gambia by Craig Emms, Linda Barnett & Richard Human (June 2006). It is a comprehensive, insider’s job, with excellent maps.
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Crocodile Love
By Joshua | 2 Comments » 
What do you do with one day to kill in The Gambia? That’s easy: If you’re a Canadian or European sugar momma, you go to the beaches around Senegambia and respond to shouts of “Hey Boss Lady!” from glistening Gambian studs, a.k.a. “Bumsters.” If you want last-minute shopping, you head to Bakau, where you bargain for wood carvings, jewelry, and batiks. And if you’re a 30-something couple at the tail end of your extended honeymoon and looking to start a family when you get home, you go to the Katchikally Crocodile Pond, where wishes for fertility and power have been made and granted for more than 500 years.
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Sara Kunda to Kombo: Traveling in The Gambia
By Joshua | 1 Comment » 
The journey from Sara Kunda to Kombo, as the area around The Gambia’s capital is known, allows us to experience nearly every challenge encountered in upcountry African travel. (Okay, perhaps that’s a naive statement, as we aren’t in a war or disaster zone, but for this African novice, it was a long day.) That we arrive safe and sound, and with most of our possessions is pure luck, perhaps with a little protection from Tay’s leather-sewn Mandinka travelers’ juju.
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Sara Kunda: A Gambian Homecoming Part II
By Joshua | 4 Comments » 
Tay’s Toma is little Sutay, the child she helped pull from her friend and sister, Fatou, 10 years ago on a fateful moonlit night. Tay, Fatou, and their mother, who was also the village midwife, rode12 kilometers in a donkey cart to the nearest clinic, to the sound of crickets and howling hyenas. When they arrived, finding neither the electricity nor the nurse they were expecting, they lit candles, and out came little Sutay. It was the first childbirth in which my Tay had ever participated, and they’d ridden back under a velvet sky, bathed in the magic of new life (Tay would later become an OB nurse, so her Toma’s birth was a life-changing event for them both).
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Sara Kunda: A Gambian Homecoming Part I
By Joshua | No Comments » 
The pre-dawn sky is as star-shiny night-black as it was when we crawled under our mosquito net a few hours ago, at the end of our party, after the last of the goat had been consumed. Now we are up, in the candle-lit darkness, packing our bags while the Imam calls Sara Kunda to the first prayer of the day.
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The Gambia, Up the River
By Joshua | 2 Comments » 
Our first stop is Tendaba Training Camp, where we arrive after 10 pm, exhausted but excited as Tay runs into old friends and I taste my first Julbrew by the mosquito-swarming banks of the river. In the morning, Tay’s old trainer asks her to speak to the newest batch of Peace Corps Teacher Trainees. These 20 or so bright-eyed adventurers have been in country all of two weeks (26-and-a-half months to go!) and have more questions than we have time to answer, as we still have a long day ahead of us if we are to reach Tay’s village of Sara Kunda before nightfall.
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Map: Where in the World is The Gambia?
By Joshua | No Comments » 
It’s right here, a splinter of river and river bank surrounded on all sides by Senegal. The Gambia is a Mandinka island within a sea of Wolof, though that is a simplistic cultural breakdown of a place which has at least six distinct tribes. We will be traveling a counter-clockwise loop up and down the country (see red line on map below).
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Gorée to The Gambia
By Joshua | No Comments » 
A 15-hour layover in Dakar, Senegal provides just enough time to sleep a few hours in the dismal airport hotel before cruising through Dakar’s empty brown lots and smoldering mounds of trash to catch a ferry to Gorée Island. As we fight our way through the crowd of pushy airport money changers (a big difference from easy-going Ghana), I am as delighted as they are surprised to hear my wife snap at the men in their native tongue, Wolof. Her hard-won West African attitude is much more effective than my meek “Non, merci’s” and most of them back off.
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Moving On: To The Gambia
By Joshua | 1 Comment » Another chapter ends, another begins. Two months in Ghana, two months of working and seeing, of looking back on what we’ve seen, looking around at West Africa . . . and of looking ahead, to the fast approaching end of our epic honeymoon, over one year of continuous travel. But not so fast! Because the next stop, The Gambia, promises to be one of the most intense, emotionally-charged stops of our journey.
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BY JOSHUA BERMAN
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