AFRICAN QUEEN

AFRICAN QUEEN
Well here we all are..... And it’s hotter than hell. The 6 hour flight was not too bad the airline provided us with free drinks and snacks, the in-flight movie was James Bond but I guess you can’t have everything.

Tourism is sponsored by a company called "The Gambia Experience". Your first experience is the Gambian Customs Dept and being fleeced by corrupt airport officials. The Idi Amin of passport control, wearing full military uniform that any world dictator would be proud of picks random naive travellers to impose the "I'm a fat greedy corrupt bastard tax" on holiday items such as camcorders, cameras and mobile phones, if you’re insane or simply scared shitless by his barking and aggressive pointing accusing you of being a "Smuggler" ... and threats to send you to jail, you'll pay his ridiculous "fine" ... if you’re smart you bark back at him and disagree. After an hour of bartering your fine will reduce in price because they really is no law that allows him to impose his own "In my own pocket" tax regime.

Mind you, The Gambian President claims to be able to cure AIDS.. 1 in 4 Africans have AIDS... AND apparently exercise prevents Malaria, this being mosquito season the whole beach was consumed by locals doing their "physical Jerks" in the 32 degree heat, they will probably die from heat exhaustion long before any mosquito could bite them.... I figure that’s why those skinny Africans always win the London Marathon they have spent the entire life out running mossies.


I feel slightly uncomfortable here; I find it hard to ignore the amount of street beggars and starving animals. The moment you land in Banjul Airport, you are besieged with children and adults with various disabilities; one child had open sores covered in flies.


There are so many wealthy non Gambians here, they live in their beautiful white mansion houses which overlook poverty, turning a blind eye is not something I could live with on a daily basis. Culturally it is a mix of Muslim and Rasta, the Rasta’s are usually flopped over some wall or oil drum in a ganja induced coma, if by chance you can catch them awake they will try and sell you anything from a mango to a knock off mobile phone from their shanty stalls blaring badly distorted Bob Marlyesque music, when you’ve heard nothing but Bob Marley for two days, you start wishing their coffin sized 1980's boom box would be trampled by a passing anorexic donkey.


I hope you appreciate the effort here; the hotel 3 legged mangy devil dog is quicker than this Gambian 8mb wireless connection. They lose their electric supply a million times a day, when the overhead power lines sway and touch together during sand storms that whip up from nowhere. The pace of life here is painfully slow, nothing gets done in a hurry well, unless you’re a stick thin Gambian taxi driver wanting to take you somewhere you really don’t want to go, whilst you are negotiating NOT going anywhere another passing taxi driver will pull up and argue with the first taxi driver over who should take you.

This is the ideal opportunity to scarper as most of the vehicles here, have parts missing, exhaust pipes (if they have one) scrape along the potholed dirt roads, none have lights that work, the more luxury versions have one faulty blinking sidelight and a boot that doesn’t close. The road etiquette is drive like hell on any side of the road, and honk your horn... 9 times out of 10 they are high on Ganja the roads are littered with car wrecks abandoned by their drivers. Still never mind it'll make a damn good taxi for someone.


There are far too many skeletal feral animals to count the dogs are all one weird tan coloured breed with devil like amber eyes. The hotel has 7 who guard the compound; I don’t know who sleeps more the sedative dogs or the night watchman. They should have the 20 feral cats do the guarding, they are mean as hell. They roam everywhere; including the restaurant.... mid lunch the owner had to separate two fighting tom cats with a chair... you couldn’t make this stuff up.

The scenery is absolutely beautiful, the sky is the bluest I’ve ever seen, the birds and butterflies are so colourful, it’s very strange being woken by Jungle birds in the morning.

We all have third degree sunburn because we spent all day trying to get cool in the pool, you'll probably hear our screams when we turn over in bed tonight. We don’t spend much time asleep as we’ve drank so much bottled water we are up all night peeing like pensioners on a coach trip.

EURO VISION

EURO VISION
It’s nice to get off this small damp, cold island once in a while and go somewhere... Different. Where we are the foreigners for a change, where they don’t understand our warm beer and oi-oi-oi football culture.
What WAS I thinking? ... Anyone who books a holiday, where Nazi's and the sound of music is the featured attraction, deserve everything they get. Actually the main attraction was 7 nights for £199... A bargain basement passage through France, Belgium, Germany and Austria ... Cheap as chips... So I can’t really complain... However, being a Brit ... I will.

I should have realised the moment i couldn’t get in my seat at 2.35 in the bastard AM that I would be sitting behind the most ignorant man on the planet... Planet Twat... Population ONE.

He had reclined his seat on the coach so far back, I had to slot myself in my seat like bread in a toaster. Once we got underway he continued to sleep like a diabetic in an unwakeable coma for the next 12 hours. By the time we got to the nearest motorway services, I hobbled off the coach the best I could with shattered kneecaps. Every time we stopped and he got off the coach, I would slam his seat back in to the upright position. Only for him to get back on board and whack it back so far into my face.

I could have counted every spec of dandruff on his hair which was dyed blacker than any Elvis impersonators wig. It wasn’t so much his hair or his clothes that he'd somehow manage to buy from a 1978 Grattan catalogue that caught your attention, it was the fact he was traveling with a much older woman companion, on first glance we thought it was his mother but when they start cuddling up like a pair of teenagers, we begin to think otherwise.


It turns out he’s 45 and French-Latvian, which explains it all, they are only one notch above Neanderthal Man who strutted about like he was transporting genitals of rhino proportions, he doesn’t have a job except sponging off this poor delusional woman whom I could only guess was in her early seventies. She must have found him on the last page of Latvian lotharios.com that’s fer shure. To prevent an English/Latvian crisis, the tour rep swapped our seats and the slimy bastard kept his seat in the bolt upright position for the rest of his trip because they put a man in the seat behind him.

We had the best part of the deal because we got to sit in the back row of seats of the coach with the most leg room and laugh with a 50 something born again teenager with pink hair called Wendy, who has just got to start living her life due to her divorce and being the main career for her sick mother. To idle away the time we made up false rumours about the Latvian man which spread around the coach like Anthrax in a subway. Mean I know, but there were a good few hours to kill and I have never laughed so much at another’s expense.