UP A LAZY RIVER
BOOKMARK
Baba stands outside the Harbour Cafe;
an unusual local yacht lies moored below Denton Bridge;
the author atop Kuntaur Hill
Banjul, which is the capital of Gambia, is not a very salubrious place. Situated on a low island, surrounded by a vast mangrove swamp, it seemed to us little more than an open sewer festooned with corrugated tin, palm fronds and decayed colonial architecture. Historically, it has suffered unduly from flooding and pestilence. Case in point: the neighborhood off which my crew, Carie, and I anchored on our arrival on a bright December aft ernoon, the most ramshackle part of the whole ramshackle town, was called Half Die, aft er a cholera epidemic that once wiped out half the city’s population.
No one who visits Gambia by yacht stays here for very long. Instead they wend their way through the serpentine maze of pencil-thin mangrove creeks west of the city and arrive at a much larger creek, where there is a well-protected anchorage just below a low bridge over which runs the only road into town. The cruising sailors who come here call this place Oyster Creek; the locals call it Denton Bridge.
Unlike the anchorage off the CVD yacht club in Dakar, where we’d been warned never to leave anything on deck lest it be stolen, Oyster Creek was very secure. Whoever controlled Denton Bridge controlled the nation’s capital, and it was therefore heavily guarded. Just a short distance from the anchorage on the far side of the road leading up to the bridge there was a large police station. On the road itself overlooking the anchorage was a military checkpoint, which was manned around the clock.
Just below the checkpoint, off the west end of the bridge, was a small beach covered with makeshift huts dressed with hand-lettered signs: Art Center, Warrior Sportfishing, Pleasure Boats For Hire. The huts were mostly empty and idle, but there was one very
