The eagle has landed.....

We have arrived in The Gambia and are relaxing in our hotel room as I speak. The was a slight delay on arriving, but we landed to 36 degree sunshine at 3:30pm local time. It was nice and a million miles away from the killer smog of the UK!! 



The Atlas Mountains - Sarah will remember fondly driving through this on our Morocco trek!!

 

The world's smallest cheese sandwich!!

 

Banjul airport, I was being paranoid about photographing sensitive installations, so did it from the plane!

 

The room is lovely and it looks out onto the sea. Closer inspection shows the place is a little bit rough around the edges but not in any way that is detrimental to the experience - although I did enjoy the engineer who came out because our shower was flooding the whole bathroom explaining to us the reason is  because the water pressure is 5 bar rather than 3 bar these days. I wondered how many people would understand what that meant. Just in case readers don't know - 5 bar is not so much a shower as a blast from a fireman's hose!!

The hotel is a maze of little pathways which are designed to get you lost I am sure, but slowly we are getting to grips with the labyrinthine layout of the hotel. We know where the restaurants and bars are, so we have clearly got our priorities right!!! The local beverage is called Julbrew, and similar to Morocco we love drinking it and have had a couple of these already ;)

Also, from what I can tell, the hotel has live entertainment most of the days, and I have to admit that while I enjoyed the group playing local music in the afternoon they were not a patch on the Gambian equivalent of Jive Bunny who could seamlessly meld Boney M's Rivers of Babylon to a Bob Marley medley before finishing with When The Saints Go Marching In. 

The people here are all very friendly, smiley and nothing is too much bother, but there is a very laid back pace of life here too, so when I phoned to get someone to mop up our bathroom from the aforementioned flooding, they took about as long as it took Noah to build his ark to come around and see us, and only then after I phoned them again to press home the point that we were going to the toilet in an inch of water!!! 

That said, when they did eventually arrive, we were inundated with helpful, smiley staff - an engineer who gave me the water pressure factoid, he also kindly found some seal for the bottom of the shower door to stop future flooding events - it clearly won't work as there is still a large gap between the door and the floor, but I didn't have the heart to tell him that. Next to arrive was a towel person, who was brining us a whole batch of clean white towels (we had used our lot to soak up the mess!), and the final person to turn up was a man whose job it was to mop up the remaining water on the floor clearly he is a newbie as he has the most mundane job of the three...

So that is the days events so far, and now, all that remains is for us to go to bed and start exploring properly tomorrow. I will post up some pictures later on.