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.
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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Plant a Tree in Ghana: Contribute to the Keta Coconut Project
By Joshua | 1 Comment » 
A while back, I reported on the devastation of the trees in the village of Keta as a result of tidal surges. The community has had trouble getting back on its feet, but now has a youth group working on a tree-planting project to which you can contribute. The tree-buying portion of this community project is being coordinated by our fellow AJWS volunteers, Peter and Hinda Schnurman. Read on for details.
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New Ghana Youth Blog!
By Joshua | 2 Comments » 
Congratulations to the PPAG Young & Wise Media Committee for creating the Ghana Youth Blog!
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Buying Bread
By Joshua | 2 Comments » 
That I am ready to go home does not matter to Africa, which persists in being everywhere I look and all around me. Our house in Mamprobi is relatively modern (compared to the villages we saw up north, anyway), and I sit on our porch on Sunday morning, reading a book and sipping bitter coffee, a vain attempt to escape. The book on my lap (Whiteman, by Tony D’Souza) is about Africa though, a US volunteer in rural Cote D’Ivoire, and the air is filled with sounds which, even after eight weeks of hearing them, are still more foreign than familiar.
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BY JOSHUA BERMAN
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