Fairy lights on the veranda, tea lights on the table

Scanning the glitzy neon lights of the Senegambia Strip, I gulp. Malaria tablets never settle well in my stomach and it's been hours since I’ve eaten something.

Music throbs out of bars, steel pans merging with incongruous Eurodance beats, mini dancefloors spilling out onto the streets. A sunburnt white woman in her 60s lolls against two tall, young locals, their muscles bulging under tight t-shirts. Bumsters. They’re everywhere, approaching you in cafes and on beaches at Kotu and Kololi, even staking out the airport, waiting for lovesick older Western women who might take them home. Love and sex and VISAs.

The music swells and the woman laughs loudly as the bumsters try to teach her how to twerk. Underneath the lobster-hued skin, her face looks a little like my grandma’s. My stomach gurgles. I turn away from the Strip. On the main road, a bushtaxi rattles past noisily, a battered minibus chock-full with an eclectic bunch of passengers. “Abaraka!!” I call, mind racing for a word in Mandinka. The bushtaxi shudders to a halt and I climb aboard, gratefully pressing a fistful of dalasi into the driver’s hand and launching straight into the laps of the front row as he puts his foot on the gas. Adults chuckle good-naturedly whilst children roar with laughter somewhere by my feet. The exhaust splutters into life and I lean out, gratefully inhaling a blast of coastal air as we head out into the maze of bustling dirt roads.

“Serekundaaa!!” the driver screeches as we pull up outside a mini mall, in which lies the Gambia's only escalator. Most passengers climb out; I stay on. Taxi horns and ghettoblasters fade away. Roads become wider and leafier and the driver even eases off on the gas as we sail past silvery ribbons of river. Spiky mangrove silhouettes frame mud islands and the call of night birds echoes in the waterways.

“Lamiiin Lodge!!” – the final taxi stop and I jump down, grinning up at the two-storey wooden structure looming out of the water on stilts: an oyster farm turned restaurant, a palace of bamboo.

Settled on their veranda with softly flickering tealights reflecting in the water, I sip wonja hibiscus juice and settle into my seat, waiting whilst grilled barracuda in banana curry is prepared for me in the kitchen. A vervet monkey scampers under the table and immediately locates a packet of cashew nuts in my pocket.

Back towards the coast I can make out the neon street sign glimmer of the Strip in the distance. From here, it’s beautiful.