We had a few scares along the way, beginning at Vigo airport when were told we couldn't fly without a visa (this isn't true!!). They refused to let us on unless we bought a ticket out of Gambia and wanted to charge over 1,200 euro. Thanks so much to Ivan and Kasia for organising that. We arrived at Barcelona (they let us fly that far) and the tickets were more or less ready. Eventually we were told that none of it had been necessary so we're in the process of claiming the money back.
Our arrival at Banjul was fun. The first thing we noticed was there is no sense or order or queing. On the transfer bus to the airport they just get on but don't think to move down the bus to let others on. There's a huge crush yet enough space (and more) for everyone. Inside we had to fill in a form bu couldn't give our address here (they didn't accept our PO Box address) so they confiscated our passports. While Terry and Ben "queued" (actually just stood at the back) I fought my way through and met Dom (our landlord who had come to meet us) and got the address. I then had to go back (fight my way back AGAINST the crush) to Immigration. The guy was really nice and gave me the passports straight away. What does it matter what our address is? Anyway. . . I went back to meet Terry and Ben. There was no sign of Terry, he'd been captured by Customs who weren't happy that he'd brought his computer hard drives into the country. While we were waiting for him I was told that they'd put Kat through the scanner and he would probably die!! Thanks guys. Terry was released eventually and we went out to meet Dom again.
He took us to the taxi helped by three or four Africans who wanted paying. We only had euro so we gave them about 6 or 7 euro in change but I think they wanted notes so they gave it us back. The taxi was loaded up and made a horrible noise and smelled of burning rubber. On the way home we had to keep stopping to reorganize the cases, poor Ben's guitar ended up on the roof and by the time we arrived home the bags were slipping off the roof. If we'd have known we'd have brought straps or something as the string somehow didn't seem quite substantial enough. On the way we were stopped by the military police who told us we were overloaded. A 25 dalasi bribe sorted it out. A different world!!.
Oh, I forgot to tell you about the cats. Terry was really worried that he would be embarrassed by their crying but Kat only miawed a couple of times and Tiger acted like he had been traveling the world all his life. He even came out of his box at Barcelona and sprawled over two seats. We were prepared with litter mats but they didn't use them so that was a relief!!
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