TENDABA, GAMBIA — If Kunta Kinte could see the Gambia River, he wouldn’t believe it.
Picture a white yacht flying a blue and white Greek flag. Sitting on the deck are 25 people having lunch, a little white wine, a little pasta. The yacht, Pegasus, is the only vessel on the shimmering, warm river. It glides past the shore, headed back from nearly a week cruising far up-country, to places where the heat hits 105 degrees, where those aboard have seen birds and crocodiles, chimps and monkeys, been escorted by a Gambian member of parliament on a village tour and been carried on a horse cart over a flooded road.
The incongruous sight is possible, thanks to a Rivers of West Africa cruise. It began Dec. 31 through a Greek small-ship line, Variety. The cruise originates in Dakar, Senegal, and sails to southern Senegal, then 120 miles up the Gambia River in Gambia.
While most Americans have at least heard of Senegal, Gambia is barely on their radar, except for one thing — it is the legendary home of Kunta Kinte of Alex Haley’s 1974 novel, “Roots.” This cruise has air-conditioned cabins, excellent food, semiregular cellphone service and a professional crew.
On the other hand, the itin- erary is not for sissies. You have to take malaria medicine. There are dust and heat ashore. Buses have only African air-conditioning: open windows. And monkeys might steal your lunch.
One morning while anchored mid-river in the village of Tendaba, the plan is to board a local canoe, called a pirogue (pea-ROGUE), and visit the Kissi Bolong national wetland reserve. But as the pirogue heads up the river, the motor gasps and dies.
“Please check the engine,” says trip director Christian Ceplak, with remarkable calm under the circumstances. Finally the boat operator does. He swings around and drifts toward a collision with the Pegasus, tossing a deckhand the line just before we are swept downriver on the swift current.
A sad-looking replacement pirogue is sent from shore, but instead of everyone jumping into that rickety craft, their engine is swapped for ours, and four unfortunate tourist camp passengers in that pirogue have to jump from their boat to ours, mid-river.
After that, fish begin jumping out of the water, and a mullet jumps right onto the lap of one traveler from New York. However, it all proves worth it as we pass into huge mangrove swamps.
Gambia no longer has lions or elephants, which vanished in the early 1900s after too much hunting. But one thing it has never lost is its birds, millions and millions of birds. The great white pelican has a wingspan of up to 8 feet, and two of them keep company with the pirogue, flapping their way downriver like ancient flying dinosaurs. The kingfishers are the color of a black-and-white cartoon. From the bank, a giant river otter slides in the mud and peers suspiciously, then slithers away. Two green vervet monkeys watch from a tree.
Another day, and the yacht docks at Kaur, a village far off the tourist track, about 100 miles up the Gambia River. Next to the yacht is a peanut-processing facility, where local farmers sell their crop.
Early in the morning, a group of tourists walks the red dirt road toward the village. The light is gold, and the air is still. The road passes rice fields on either side, and all of a sudden, the road is flooded out, with no way across. Some boys chip in to help, placing chunks of red mud as stepping stones so everyone can hop across. But there is a second, deeper, flooded part ahead.
What to do? Then a man with a wooden cart pulled by a tired white horse passes by. “Can you give us a ride?” someone asks. He swings around, and tourists pile onto the cart and he ferries them back and forth across the flooded part. Both villagers and tourists laugh at the spectacle.
It turns out that Kaur is a lucky village because it has electricity and a gigantic cellphone tower atop a small hill. But that is just about where modernization stops.
Families live in compounds on land that has been in their families for hundreds of years, passed down from generation to generation.
In a village without a bank, cattle are wealth here, so farmers buy cattle with their peanut or rice proceeds. It’s not a tourist town, so despite the visitors, the morning market goes on as usual with its tomatoes and peppers. Some tiny children with runny noses and plastic sandals silently follow the tourists back to the yacht, eyes wide, never saying a word.
The life expectancy in Gambia is 54 years. Most women have five children. The literacy rate is 40 percent.
Our mega-yacht, which once was owned by a millionaire and also was used as a hospital ship, is comfortable and luxurious. Her Greek crew members are jolly and efficient. One evening, they perform Greek dancing and feed everyone moussaka and baklava. How odd that in the middle of the Gambia River in the middle of West Africa, Greek music drifts out over the water toward the mangroves and the monkeys.
Another day, after a 4-hour ride on the cool river from Kuntaur, we reach the village of Janjanbureh.
Freedom Tree for slaves
The tour guide is someone important, Foday Mansa, a member of the Gambian Parliament. He announces that the governor of this region wishes to meet the group. He walks everyone down the sweltering streets to the governor’s house, which conveniently has a sign out front, “Governor’s House.” The temperature is at least 102 degrees, so everyone is sticking to the shade and sitting where possible.
After a long wait, Mansa announces the governor is not feeling well, so we will not meet him after all. Mansa walks the group instead through the town to the Freedom Tree. That was a place where any Gambian slave who reached the tree could embrace it and be free. You have to give Mansa credit. Ruins of a stone building in town are often described to tourists as a “slave house” and another building down the street is said to be a “slave museum.” Actually, both were built in the 1900s by the French, he says. “They were never slave houses,” he admits.
After the sweltering tour, tourists have an alfresco West African lunch with shrimp and potatoes, pumpkin salad and cold Coke. The only problem is that green vervet monkeys try to steal the food, so eat fast.
After a few days, several people are a little sick, but they are having such a good time they try to hide it. Most issues have come from eating the food ashore, salads and fresh foods everyone knows you are not supposed to eat but look so good that common sense goes out the window. Imodium, Pepto-Bismol and antibiotics are taken behind the scenes to soothe the upset intestines. My only real sickness comes from a day in which I get way too hot on a shore excursion.
Many people on these tours want to help the children they see. So Variety Cruises came up with a way to do it: Adopt a school near Janjanbureh so it can build additional classrooms. Every week, the cruise director takes tourists to the school to check the progress of a new building. Every week, he is pleased.
Today, the tour buses drive through the dust and heat to the school. By now it is over 100 degrees, but children are just returning from lunch across hard-packed dusty paths back to class. The girls wear bright green dresses someone must have sent from England. They see the tourists and keep saying, “What is your name?” and “Do you have water bottle?”
The children are delighted, but not as much as the tourists, who feel like at last they are doing something positive during their visit here. Many of them shake hands or hug the children and smile a lot.
This close to the equator, the sunsets are sudden. The sun is round, big, orange, then it’s gone and it’s dark. It is definitely not true that if you have seen one sunset, you have seen them all.
One morning, it is chilly enough to need a sweater, and the river shimmers with mist. After 20 minutes, a pirogue full of tourists arrives at the Baboon Islands in the middle of River Gambia National Park. In 1979, with Gambia’s chimpanzee population extinct from hunters and poachers, Gambia designated three islands in the Gambia River to be chimp refuges, where confiscated animals and former lab animals can live. Today, the largest island is home to 83 chimps, most of them born here in the wild, re-establishing the population. Tourists come from all over the world to see the chimp refuge and the lush landscape that looks straight out of a Hollywood movie.
Our pirogue cruises along the island shoreline. Thick palms and tangled vines and lush trees dip over the water’s edge. A hippo peeks its nose and ears out of the river. A crocodile hides on a sandbank. Baboons and colobus monkeys with long red tails leap from tree to tree. Then someone sees a couple of chimps near the top of a tree, and everyone rushes to take pictures, but in a flash, they are gone, and if you didn’t see them, you missed them.
Ten amazing sights on the rivers of West Africa
• People harvesting salt by hand from salt flats in the Saloum Delta in southern Senegal
• Two gigantic great white pelicans flapping their 8-foot wing span as they flew down the Kissi Bolong in the Gambia
• Giant mounds of newly harvested peanuts on the village docks awaiting shipment
• Children in a rural Gambia school expected to learn sitting on hard benches with no desks, no books, no electricity, no lights, in 105-degree temperatures
• A musician playing the kora, a 21-string West African instrument made of a giant gourd, which sounds like a captivating mixture of mandolin, harp and guitar
• The Hubble space telescope streaking across the dark African sky one night, pointed out after dinner by an astronomer who happened to be one of the tourists aboard Pegasus
• Miles and miles of giant mangroves hugging the shoreline of the Gambia River, looking no different than it must have 200 years ago
• Modern cellphone towers plopped in the middle of simple villages
• A glimpse of chimps in gigantic trees in the Gambia’s River Gambia National Park
• The baobab trees, symbol of Africa, their bare branches looking like roots, as if God planted the trees upside down and enjoyed himself
Ellen Creager
Cruise aboard Pegasus isn’t for novices
THE BOAT: M/Y Pegasus, a 148-foot mega-yacht built in 1990, holds 42 passengers. It has four pretty decks and a 16-member crew. The yacht belongs to Variety Cruises, a Greek company. During the summer, the Pegasus cruises the Greek isles.
THE CRUISE: The West Africa cruise will resume Dec. 23 and continue through March 9. Book directly through Variety Cruises (, 800-319-7776). Or book through Boston-based Odysseys Unlimited, whose package includes airfare, pre-cruise hotels, tours, cruise, a tour rep and more (, 888- 370-6765).
The cruise itself costs about $2,300, but adding shore excursions, airfare, tours and extras, total trip cost is about $4,000-$5,000 per person. Book at least a “B” class cabin. (Two “C” cabins are on the lowest level near the engines.) Pegasus had Internet service most of the time, but the TV wasn’t working (a restful thing, it turned out.) Excellent food and service, basic cabins, a small library.
THE ITINERARY: Not for novices. The boat spends the first and last nights on the Atlantic Ocean, which can be rocky, then five nights on the smooth Gambia River . Shore excursions are nature-focused — to national parks, a chimp reserve, the excellent Kissi Bolong bird refuge, the Saloum River Delta. Except for Dakar, towns and villages are hot, dusty and extremely limited in amenities.
After shore excursions, “You’re going to be hot and tired and sweaty, but you’re going back onboard, where they greet you with a hot towel and juice, and you go back to your air-conditioned cabin,” says Pat Goodwin of Rochester Hills, Mich.
THE SHOPPING: Good in Dakar; limited elsewhere. Look for necklaces, carvings, batik items (be careful, some are Chinese-made) and baskets.
OTHER DETAILS: Virtually no ATMs, so bring cash to exchange. Senegal uses CFA francs, and Gambia uses the dalasi. Malaria pills are needed, although I saw only one mosquito. Bring bug spray, anti-diarrheal meds, antibiotics and medication for seasickness. Yellow fever immunization recommended.
