The vultures of Kachikally sacred pool peered through the sparse jungle canopy in hungry anticipation. A crocodile had just hauled itself from the water and flopped into the mud beside me. There were now more than ten in the small clearing. It wrenched its scaly green mouth open, creating a hideous sucking noise. I was slightly nervous.

‘Tek it easy Boss-man,’ assured Lamin, a local Rastafarian. ‘Dey jus chillin. Touch da skin. Go on, dey don’t bite unless dey pregnant.’ I reached for the scales. My every movement was tracked by half open yellow eyes. A snout twitched menacingly.

‘Careful Boss-man. Dat one pregnant.’

I inched away and bumped into another croc that lay sunbathing behind me. Its skin was cold but luxuriously soft. At any moment, at its pleasure, I knew that this creature could extinguish my life with a flick of its tail. I wanted to flex my arms and let out a Tarzan yell. I shivered and laughed. Gambians call the spiritual power that is unleashed by the presence of danger ‘Nyamo’. We call it adrenaline. I was full of it. I was ready to see what I’d come for.

‘So where’s the white one, Lamin? The white crocodile.’

‘Da white one? Mmmm. Who told you about dat ting?’

Days earlier, whilst I’d watched men dousing themselves with the muddy water of Berending crocodile pool in the hope of taking on some of the sacred animals strength, a wizened old hag, naked from the waist up, had screeched in my ear,

‘Give me ten Dalasi and I tell you about da white crocodile.’ With the crumpled red banknote safely in her hand she’d run away, laughing inanely and cackling,

‘Cross da river, at dawn!’

‘Bugger,’ I’d thought, ‘The old witch has conned me.’ I’d stood feeling, and no doubt looking, extremely foolish. A young Muslim boy had taken pity on me.

‘Kachikally,’ he’d whispered, ‘Go to the pool at Kachikally.’

It was probably rubbish, I’d thought, or ‘mambo jambo’ as they said in Gambia. But what if it were true? A white croc would be something to see. I’d looked at my map. Kachikally wasn’t far away. It was worth a look.

Pirogue, land-rover, ferry boat, foot. However I travelled I could not escape the wide open beauty of the landscape, or the near hopeless poverty of the populace. The fabric of cotton wool laws and social security institutions that protect Westerners from many hardships is noticeably absent in Gambia. There are no safety nets if life gets unbearably tough, only despair. Islam is supposed to feed the poor but in practice the Mosques can only re-distribute what they’ve been given. And in West Africa they’re given nothing. 

On board the ferry across the River Gambia a mother had implored me to adopt her baby and take it back to England.

‘Don’t you love your kid?’ I’d asked, dismayed. She’d looked at the Gambian capital city, Banjul, which grew more filthy and depressing the nearer we sailed to it, and replied sadly.

‘It’s because I love her dat I offer her to you, Boss-man.’

At the docks Bob Marley had shouted messages of hope and struggle from the windows of countless taxis. A driver had hailed me. He was wearing a pink ‘Bin Laden Rules!’ T-shirt.

‘I’m going to fight for Iraq!’ he’d sneered.

‘Good for you,’ I’d replied, ‘I’m going to go to the crocodile pool.’

But the white crocodile wasn’t to be found at Kachikally.

‘Not here Boss,’ Lamin laughed, stroking a couple of dark green, gently breathing beasts, ‘for dat ting you have to go south, to Folonko.’

Gambia is not a big country. Sandwiched between two parts of Senegal the borders north and south were set by how far a nineteenth century British warship anchored midstream in the River Gambia could fire its guns. At the widest they are less than sixty miles apart. My map showed that I‘d already covered over a third of the country. I figured I may as well carry on to Folonko and see the rest.

The coast immediately south of Kachikally, known locally as ‘The Land of the Red Hippo’ due to the abundance of fat sunburnt foreigners who wallow there, was like any tourist ghetto you might encounter between Athens and Accra. Holiday-makers bargained over 5p because they could. Tradesmen accepted the insult because they had to. A host of Shirley Valentines clung onto the arms of local male prostitutes (Aids? What’s that?).

‘Hello. I’m Mr Fix-it,’ echoed the automated sales pitch of the hustlers. ‘Welcome to the smiling coast! Your happiness is my pleasure! Smile and you’ll go browner! I felt like an extra in ‘1984’, bowing down before Judith Charmers. But if the beach strip was a nightmare, what lay behind it was infinitely worse.

Locals sifted through the steaming rubbish dumps, competing with pigs and vultures for the left-overs from all-you-can-eat buffets. Young people, educated to European college standard, lived in huts with no running water. They stared at my dirty football shirt like a Westerner might gawp at a Versace suit in ‘Vogue’. A kid trailed me for miles, clutching an empty plastic bottle as if it were his most valuable possession. I gave a little to the blind, the crippled and the beggars as I walked, but it felt like sticking my finger in a dyke that was disintegrating before my moist eyes.

‘If only,’ I thought, ‘if only I worked harder. If only I was rich, I could stop all this.’

I helped a fisherman, a streak of lean black muscle standing in the surf among a forest of bloated pink bodies, to haul in his net. 

‘Look at da colours Boss,’ he said, pointing at the floundering, multi hued fish. ‘Now see dis.’ He pointed at a drab dead silver fish on the beach. ‘Fish loose deir colour when dey leave da water.’ He gazed mournfully around at the signs of wealth he would never have, the easy life he would never know, and added, ‘I hope people do da same when dey leave da earth.’

Vodka followed numbing vodka as vultures hopping around on my hotels’ corrugated roof (‘click-click-click’) serenaded the suns’ dive into the Atlantic. A monitor lizard eased itself from a swamp and fell with a ‘thud’ through my window. It sat, bewildered, on my toilet seat. I grabbed its tail and showed it the door.

After dark drumbeats drew me to the beach. The people who by day waited on tourist tables were now off-duty and coming alive. They clapped and beat out rhythms on empty gallon drums, calabashes, and triangles of rattling bones. Dancers threw themselves around wildly, spraying onlookers with sweat and increasing their speed in time with the frantic drumming. They didn’t care what they looked like, or who was watching them. Like the Sufis of Cairo they were seeking freedom through entrancement. They danced for all that they understood and then, later, frantically kicking sand towards the moon, the stars and the waves, they danced for all that they felt.

The following day a frisky bundle of green Vervet monkeys welcomed me to Bijolo national park, the last remnant of primary coastal forest in Gambia. They leapt from the tangle of trees, partially illuminated by sunlight streaming between curtains of heavy vines, and rolled from behind huge buttresses, surrounding me as I rested on an upturned Baobab. The older ones kept their distance, but the babies tugged at my fingers and gazed into my eyes with a look of complete, uncomplicated trust.

The coast south of Bijolo wasn’t quaint and pretty like that of East Africa. There were no gently swaying palms overlooking idyllic cosy lagoons. Instead the Gambian sands, once known as the ‘white man’s grave’, curled untamed into an infinity of shimmering white salty haze. Vultures and gulls hovered, waiting for powerful grey waves to recede so that they might land for a few seconds to pick the eyes out of dead turtles and puffer fish. Fishermen heaved at their nets and chanted primal sounds as familiar to me as my mothers’ voice. Like the trees of the forest they exuded a feeling that they had existed forever.

The people who appeared from a seemingly empty landscape to treat me like royalty, to shake my hand, to ask how I was, and the gulls, egrets, herons and monkeys who inhabited the shoreline, all ensured that I was never alone. Sometimes I had to wait for low tide to cross rivers or hike inland to pass points where the ocean crashed against low cliffs, but most of the thirty five miles from Bijolo to Folonko was simple beach walking. In settlements that reeked of the sea men mended nets shaded by multi coloured Tibetan like prayer flags fluttering from the prows of longboats whilst women cut huge fish into steaks and loaded other, smaller, varieties into baskets destined for the smoking sheds.

Almost everybody I met wore Voodoo Ju-Ju, given to them by their local Marabout, or Muslim holy man. One lad showed me a length of leather tied around his stomach. He said that it offered protection against people wanting to harm him. To demonstrate he shoved a knife into his belly. Perhaps he didn’t push hard, or maybe the charm actually worked, but no matter how he slashed, the skin never punctured.

Another guy said that if I paid him he’d show me how powerful his Voodoo was by swallowing a bag of rusty nails. I said I wasn’t interested, although it would’ve been fascinating to watch him go to toilet the morning after he’d done it. 

A beautiful woman in regal robes sheltering under a Baobab issued forth a plume of red cola nut gob as I asked directions to the crocodile pool of Folonko. She indicated an inland direction with a tilt of her head. Fifteen minutes later I knew I was there when a man shouted,

‘Tek off da shoes. Dis sacred place here!’

The pool was sun soaked and tepid green. A vulture hopped along the wicker fence which served as a shade for women completing their fertility rites. A solitary croc sunbathed, half hidden in its burrow. It was not white. A group of kids approached to see what I was doing. They didn’t remove their shoes. Crocodiles didn’t interest them. They wanted to talk about David Beckham. The man ushered me to one side.

‘You look for da white croc? Ah, dat ting not here today. Under water now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe you try Kachikally?’

I wasn’t disappointed. My pilgrimage had been to the sacred crocodile pools of Gambia, but I might just as well have journeyed to the ancient Egyptian crocodile sanctuary of Kom Ombo or the home of newer cults such as Jerusalem, Mecca or Rome. It wasn’t important that I hadn’t seen the fabled white croc. What was important was that for a few days I’d cast off the falseness of a settled life and wandered the open road. Exactly like our ancestors had done when they’d first pulled on their trekking boots and hiked into Europe from Africa around one hundred thousand years ago. I’d been stimulated, and I’d learnt new questions. I’d moved forward, a little bit further back to my roots.

At Kachikally I sat once more at the poolside. A snout emerged from the water, followed by two yellow eyes. The crocodile dragged itself up onto the bank and slumped into the sun beside me. I noticed that as I stroked its tail my heart was settled. It seemed quite a normal thing to be doing. I reflected that you didn’t have to be African to feel at home in Africa. You only had to be human.

Click Here to return to Travel Writing listing