A country that is a river with banks — the coast and its fish-smoking beaches, the gallery forest at Abuko, the ferry to the north bank for the slave fort the river is dismantling, then east on tarmac to the mangrove creeks at Tendaba, the megalith field at Wassu and the chimpanzee islands above Kuntaur, before the same road back.
Banjul
Banjul sits on an island at the mouth of the river and has fewer than forty thousand residents; the country's real city is Serekunda, ten kilometres west, and the hotel strip runs on beyond it. Give the first day to Banjul anyway. Albert Market, the National Museum, and Arch 22 — thirty-five metres of concrete gateway built in 1996 to commemorate the coup that brought Yahya Jammeh to power two years earlier, still straddling the road into the capital nearly a decade after the man himself flew out. Sleep at Fajara or Bakau, where the food and the transport are.
Abuko and the Mandina creeks
Abuko is half an hour inland and about a hundred hectares in size, which sounds trivial until you are inside it — gallery forest along a stream, fenced in 1916 to protect Banjul's water supply, gazetted in 1968 as the first protected area in the country and never cut since. Red colobus, green monkeys, crocodiles in the pool, and the bird list that explains why half the arrivals at the airport are carrying binoculars. In the afternoon, Makasutu on the Mandina Bolong: four square kilometres of forest, palm and mangrove assembled privately over years and run as a reserve, with a tide creek you take a pirogue into.
South down the coast to Kartong
Through Brufut, Tanji, Sanyang and Gunjur to Kartong, where the Allahein river is the Senegalese border and the crocodile pool at Folonko is a working shrine rather than an attraction. Tanji Bird Reserve was gazetted in 1993 and covers about six square kilometres of dune, lagoon and scrub, with the Bijol Islands offshore closed during the breeding season. The better half of the day is the fish landing at Tanji: pirogues coming in on the tide, hundreds of women working the smoking racks, the whole coastal economy in one place. It is also where the argument is. Foreign-owned fishmeal plants along this shore buy bonga — the cheap fish Gambians actually eat — and grind it for export feed, and in May 2017 the lagoon behind the Gunjur plant turned red and the fish in it died. Ask, and people will tell you at length what they think.
Over the water to Juffureh
North across the river mouth on the Gambia Ports Authority ferry — 45 minutes of crossing and an unpredictable amount of queue. Fort Bullen at Barra was built in 1826 to enforce the abolition Britain had legislated nineteen years earlier, and garrisoned by the same navy that had spent the previous century convoying and protecting it. Then thirty kilometres upriver along the north bank to Albreda and Juffureh, where Alex Haley placed the ancestor of Roots in 1976 and where the book and the series that followed brought a kind of visitor this coast had never had. Historians have picked the genealogy apart since, and the government has run a homecoming festival here since the 1990s regardless. Kunta Kinteh Island is twenty minutes offshore by pirogue: a fort begun by Courlanders in 1651 and fought over by everyone afterwards, now standing on a fraction of the island it was built on, because the river has been taking the ground out from under it for three hundred years.
The north bank, the bridge, and Tendaba
East on tarmac through Kerewan and Illiassa to Farafenni, then over the Senegambia bridge at Bambatenda — 1.9 kilometres of it, opened on 21 January 2019 — and west again along the south bank to Tendaba. About 150 kilometres and half a day with stops. Tendaba is a camp on the river bank with a jetty, and it is the base for the next day rather than a destination; walk down to the water at dusk for the pelicans and whatever the tide brings past.
Kiang West and the Bao Bolong
Kiang West was gazetted in 1987 and covers roughly 115 square kilometres of dry woodland, mudflat and creek on the south bank — one of the last places in the country with anything like an intact large-mammal list, which here means bushbuck, warthog, baboon and, if you are unusually lucky and up early, a sitatunga in the swamp. Toubab Kollon Point is the overlook. In the afternoon take the boat across into the Bao Bolong Wetland Reserve on the north bank, designated in 1996 as the country's first Ramsar site: mangrove channels that close over the boat at high water, and the salt flats behind them.
East to Janjanbureh
The South Bank Road through Soma, Pakali Ba and Brikama Ba, then a short vehicle ferry from Sankulikunda onto the island; Bansang and Basse are further upriver still and you turn off well before either. Janjanbureh was founded in 1823 as Georgetown, a British settlement upriver where captives taken off intercepted slave ships were landed and freed; the tree they were mustered under is still pointed out. The town is a grid of decaying colonial warehouses and a great deal of shade, and it is the hub of the Ninki Nanka Trail, a community-run river route set up with the Gambia Tourism Board specifically to move visitor money off the coastal strip and into villages upriver. If your dates coincide with a Kankurang appearance — the Mandinka masquerade that guards initiation, listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage — go, and ask first what you may photograph.
Wassu, Kuntaur and the Baboon Islands
Cross to Lamin Koto on the north-bank ferry and drive up to Wassu, where eleven circles of squat laterite pillars stand in a field with no fence worth the name. They are part of the Senegambian megalith zone — more than a thousand sites strung along this river and the Saloum, inscribed by UNESCO in 2006, quarried and raised over centuries by people about whom the written record says nothing at all. Then down to Kuntaur and out on the water into the River Gambia National Park. The Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Project has been releasing confiscated and orphaned chimpanzees onto the Baboon Islands since 1979 and the population is now well over a hundred, most of them born there. You watch from the boat and you do not land: the animals that were comfortable around people were the problem in the first place. Hippo and crocodile in the same stretch of river.
Back down the south bank
The long westward day, about 180 kilometres on the road you came up, and worth doing slowly rather than fast. Stop at whichever weekly lumo market you hit — the rotating regional markets are how upcountry Gambia actually trades, and Senegalese, Guinean and Malian traders come to them. End at Bintang Bolong, a creek running south off the river through mangrove, where the Portuguese had a trading station before any of the forts downstream existed and where there is now not much beyond a lodge, fish eagles and a great deal of quiet.
Brikama, and out
An hour and a half back to the coast, through Brikama. The woodcarvers' market is the obvious stop and the less obvious one is the reason musicians know the name of this town: kora playing here runs in a handful of jali families as a hereditary profession, the instrument is a twenty-one-string harp-lute with a calabash body, and the lineage teaching is still done at home rather than in an institution. Ask at the craft market and somebody will find you a player. Then the airport at Yundum, which is twenty minutes away and the reason this route ends where it does.
Good to know
Entry is simple for some passports and fiddly for others. Citizens of EU member states, the UK, ECOWAS and most Commonwealth countries — The Gambia left the Commonwealth in 2013 and rejoined in February 2018 — enter visa-free for up to 90 days. US passport holders are not on that list and need a visa, obtained in advance from the embassy in Washington; there is no e-visa, and travellers who turn up without one are in practice admitted on condition they lodge the passport with the Immigration Department in Banjul within 48 hours to have one issued there, which costs a working morning of your trip. A yellow fever certificate is demanded of arrivals from countries with a risk of transmission, and since the only land border is with Senegal, which is on that list, anyone arriving overland needs the card; The Gambia is in the risk zone itself, so carry it regardless — since 2016 it is valid for life and no state may require a booster. Malaria is the serious medical question and it is year-round nationwide, the coastal hotel strip included, rising sharply from about July to November; take prophylaxis for the whole ten days rather than for the upcountry half. The rains run roughly June to October. Tarmac survives them and laterite does not: the tracks into Kiang West and the creeks, several upcountry camps and a good deal of the birding are dry-season propositions, and November to March is when both the migrants and the roads are at their best. March to May is the heat — upcountry afternoons well above 35°C, and nothing sensible happens between noon and four. Self-drive is realistic on the paved spine, since the South Bank Road runs from the coast to Basse and the north bank is tarmac from Barra through Kerewan to Farafenni, but almost nobody does it; a car with a driver costs little more than a bare rental and absorbs the checkpoints, the fuel queue and the ferry in one payment. The Gambia drives on the right. The Banjul–Barra ferry is the weak link in this route: the crossing is about 45 minutes, foot passengers get on readily, and a vehicle can sit for hours, so go at first light or send the car round by the bridge. That bridge — 1.9 kilometres at Bambatenda-Yelitenda, opened 21 January 2019, built with African Development Bank money as part of a wider Trans-Gambia corridor project and charging a few dollars for a car — is the reason a Senegalese lorry between Dakar and Ziguinchor no longer loses two days to a thirty-kilometre crossing of somebody else's country. The Gambia is under no serious travel advisory and this route does not go looking for one, but two of its nights are on the Casamance frontier and that frontier is the country's one live security question. Kartong sits on the Allahein with Casamance on the far bank; Bintang is in Foni, the district that backs onto the same line. The MFDC insurgency on the Senegalese side has come over it more than once — the Senegalese army's offensive against MFDC bases along this stretch in March 2022 pushed several thousand Casamance villagers into Foni as refugees, and stray fire has crossed before. The disarmament agreements signed in Bissau in August 2022 and February 2025 have made it markedly quieter, and the residual hazard is unexploded ordnance and mines rather than anybody shooting at visitors. Stay on made roads in Foni, do not wander into unused bush near the border, and do not improvise a crossing into Casamance on a village track. Money is cash. The dalasi is worthless outside the country and not worth carrying home, cards work in the coastal hotels and essentially nowhere upriver, and Farafenni, Janjanbureh and Basse are places to arrive with notes. On the tourist strip you will be approached by bumsters — young men attaching themselves to visitors as guides, friends or fixers; an early, plain, unembarrassed no is understood and works, and there is a uniformed Tourism Security Unit along the hotel beaches if it does not. Do not photograph State House, the ferry terminal, the airport or anyone in uniform. Book the Baboon Islands boat and the Kiang West guide through your camp a day or two ahead: landing on the chimpanzee islands is not permitted, the number of boats going out on a given morning is small, and turning up on spec upriver is how people end up looking at a river from a jetty.
Shorter or longer?
Add two or three days from Janjanbureh: Basse is the last town of any size, a hundred kilometres further up a river that has narrowed to something you could shout across, with a weekly market that pulls traders from Guinea, Mali and Senegal and a Gambia most visitors never see. Dry season, and budget a long day back.
Banjul, Abuko, the southern beaches, the ferry over to Juffureh and Kunta Kinteh Island, and one night at Tendaba for Kiang West. Keeps the forts, the forest and the mangroves, cuts everything above Soma — which is also the stone circles and the chimpanzees.