Having completed a volunteer placement in Northern Senegal we felt we were ready to take on the rest of Western Africa. We had lived life with the locals –washing using a bucket of cold water, eating with one hand, conversing in ‘Wolof’ and even surviving several embarrassing toilet-related episodes! In short, we were ready. Or so we thought...
Our journey did not start well; having tried for hours to get a more accurate departure time than ‘the morning’, we missed the public bus. ‘Morning’ in Senegal obviously started a little earlier than we had anticipated! Not to be deterred, we caught a lift in a ‘sept-place’, the name explained by the vehicle being a burnt out Peugeot with everything one would expect to find in a car removed and replaced with benches capable of holding seven people (or about ten as seemed to be the reality!). And so our journey began, personal space left behind.
A week went by without serious upset and we began to feel like we could take on something challenging, something none of the other volunteers had attempted; we would explore Guinea Bissau! Now none of us had heard of Guinea Bissau prior to this trip and we did have to concede that it may be a little trickier travelling around when we couldn’t speak the national language but we had gotten this far and would be damned if we were going to turn back.
We were wrong. We were not ready for Guinea Bissau.
Having had an argument with the sept-place driver, it was dark by the time we were unceremoniously dumped across the Senegalese border at the edge of a large lake. It soon appeared that at night the only people in the area were Portuguese-speaking timber merchants and after a long while of gesturing and money-waving, we secured a lift by straddling the tree trunks that were being transported! Crossing completed and abandoned by the merchants, we started out along a dirt track in silence, the only sound coming from scurrying of monkeys in the trees and the eerie braying of a lone donkey. We came across a group of men who took us to a house that had a bedroom spare. The seven of us piled in to one room, lit by just a candle. An old man with a wooden leg followed us in with a bucket of water that he gestured was for washing – the water in the bucket smelt terrible and had a green slime coating the surface!
As soon as the sun rose, we caught a lift back to Senegal in an open backed truck doubling as a public bus. This was the one day that it rained during our stay in West Africa! Drenched and forlorn we didn’t even argue when the border officials decided we should pay for the entire busload of passengers! That night we booked a stay at a Gambian hotel with a restaurant and pool, nobody dared suggest any more adventures!
