Cars

This week I have become the proud owner of my own Gambian car, a rather beat-up Suzuki jeep, which I bough secondhand from a Lebanese hairdresser, having conducted all the negotiations with him in my broken French.



As you can see, it isn't the prettiest of beasts: it is full of sand, has only one mirror, no handbrake and smells slightly of fish. Seatbelts ? Not a chance ! But it should be good for going on trips around at weekends, maybe as far as Senegal once I've got a few bits of it checked out by a mechanic...

On the good side, it is a 4 wheel drive car, which is pretty vital for most of the small roads here, especially now during the rains, when half of the roads are submerged in huge puddles.

So, I though I'd write a bit about the other vehicles on the Gambian roads...

The most common cars here are the ubiquitous yellow taxis:



These guys drive very bashed-up cars of various brands, all with this yellow plus green stripe paint-job and usually the loudest stereo they can get. The drivers enthusiastically tout for business by tooting their horn whenever they drive past a pedestrian... And will swerve across a line of traffic if they think there is someone wanting a ride...

Another fairly common vehicle is the donkey cart:



These are actually amazingly good at negotiating mud and puddles : I watched a cart like this one go through a huge puddle that a big landrover had just backed off from!

Finally: right of way rules in the Gambia seem to work something like this

1) If you can see any space in the traffic, you can go for it, no matter what problems this causes for other road users. Hence it is quite ok to drive on the wrong side of a dual carriageway if the other side is in a bit of a jam.

2) Small gives way to big : basically if you are going to come off worse in a crash, you let the other guy go first !

3) If you have guys with guns in your car, you have right of way over everyone else. This rule is mainly used by the President, who zooms around with a squad of "heavies" with big guns at all times, and usually a motorcycle outrider to shoo everyone else out of the way ...