Wheelers go bumpster to bumpster on the ferry to Gambia

Posted Thursday, February 22, 2007, 3:48 PM by Lonely Planet

Days 16-19: The Wheelers take the ferry to Barra on their way to crossing the Gambian border on the Plymouth to Banjul rally.

Sunday 18 to Wednesday 21 February

We hang out at the Zebrabar campsite for three days, travelling the 18km to the colourful town of St Louis by boat. Other teams come and go and on Tuesday we set off with Dan and Ian in their Renault 4 for the last leg to Gambia. We stop at Touba, about halfway, to have a look at the country's biggest mosque and carry on to Toubakouta for the night. Another team in a Ford Sierra join us there; the Ford has undergone major surgery at Zebrabar when the front bodywork started to collapse.



The next morning we're up bright and early for the final short drive to the Gambian border at Karang and on to the ferry at Barra. It's the trip's final hassle, the ferry is notoriously slow, unreliable and crowded and the 'bumpsters', Gambia's famous tourist hustlers, are said to be out in force. In fact we don't suffer any real bumpster problems and only have to wait three hours (while we fry in the sun) for a ferry. Trucks were waiting for days.



An hour later we're across the 5km wide river and it's just 15km to the final checkpoint, the Safari Garden Hotel. We've covered 7206km from when we picked our trusty little Mitsubishi up from the village outside Exeter. As the crow flies (or the GPS indicates) we're 4274km from our first night of the trip, on the south coast of England in Torquay. Along the way, apart from putting fuel in the tank, we've had to spend precisely 10 dirham, about US$2, to fix a puncture in Agadir. Other than that it has not skipped a beat. Tomorrow morning I'll press out the dents we put in the front wings (fenders for Americans) when we were pushing the poor little thing out of a sand dune in Mauritania.

- Tony Wheeler

Track progress and view a map of the route here.

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