Fairy lights on the veranda, tea lights on the table

"Smile! You're on the smiling coast," Rastaman Babu demonstrates with a yellow roll-up pinched between his teeth.

The old dreadlocked fisherman steers his painted wooden motorboat past the mouth of the sea and deeper into the swampy waterways. He navigates languidly through a maze of mud islands, each thickly forested with mangroves.

Our boat is two hours late for lunch. Babu dismisses my worry with a cheery adage, "All one love; no stress!" The clocks run to the same hour as London, but to what locals fondly call ‘GMT’: Gambia Maybe Time. We might arrive an hour late, or two, if we turn up at all. I rest my head against the sun-bleached wood. Lulled into meditative slumber by the propeller's gentle spluttering and the calls of birds I cannot name, I vow never to run for a bus or dive through closing Tube doors again.

Flying fish jump as a trio in our bubbling wake, skimming the water and speeding alongside us like winged dolphins. Babu flicks a ditakh fruit into my lap and I crack open the hard shell, eagerly exposing sour green flesh. On the distant beach, an origami paper crane becomes a pelican folding back its huge wings and settling into its nest, a mass of tangled tree roots to which myriad rows of oysters cling.

I spot a red-billed hornbill and giggle with delight, identifying him as Zazu from The Lion King - a cartoon made real, his mannerisms and inelegant hop identical to the animation and just as comical.

Later, at dusk, we walk slowly along the line where the water laps the shore. Translucent crabs scuttle away from my lazy footfall and disappear into the sand, each falling haphazardly into one of a hundred tiny holes. Removed from civilisation and street lamps, we navigate with torches and swim dreamily in the starlight. Babu talks of the herd of hippo that sometimes drinks here, and my mind races. Most fatalities by a wild animal? I wriggle out of the water. How did I end up here, night swimming in an inscrutable African lake?

Cashew tree blossom crunches underfoot and a mouthful of blunt hippopotamus teeth gnashes in my head. I freeze, and all is still. The otherworldly outline of a behemothic baobab tree looms above the water against the purple sky, its seeds eerie dangling orbs suspended in shadow. Under our feet it drinks, unseen, whilst the uppermost of its intricate twig lattice almost but not quite touches the moon.

Rastaman Babu chuckles. "Reggae baby!" He uses the pet name I heard in Banjul and liked. "You’re still smiling!"