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July 26
Its hot and late, and I am sitting here naked in a tent listening to
the sound of bats eating the fruits out of the tree I am camped
under. They are big bats, the size of a large bird, and the slap of
their leathery wings is surprisingly calming after my 9-hour car ride
down here to the Gambia border with Senegal. It's one in the morning
and the traffic was so bad and the road so bad that our 200 kilometer
trip might as well have been a thousand. The rattly, blue, bashed up
old Peugeot came from another era of Saharan travel harking back to
the 60s. Nostalgic, but very uncomfortable. It was nice once we got
out of Dakar, cruising through the Sahel, on the far western edge of
the Sahara. The whole landscape of sand and baobab trees was
appropriately diffused with a golden yellow light around sunset. It
was breathtakingly beautiful, but also a bit strange and I thought
that most of that yellow came from the topsoil of the Sahel blowing
off into the wind and into the Atlantic Ocean not far away. The Canary
Current comes down this side of Africa and picks up all sorts of
entrained sand and topsoil that drifts on the winds off the Sahara.
That topsoil and sand helps little plankton and other small sea
creatures grow, which then get eaten by larger fish, and so on. The
Canary current has one of the largest and healthiest fish populations
on the planet, but how large and how healthy is anyone’s guess, since
there is no monitoring infrastructure of any sort other than reported
catches by the Spanish fishing trawler fleet. These same hot winds
kick up in the mid-Atlantic and help drive the hurricane season that
we thankfully missed on the way up here by our change of plan from
Fernando and South America to the coast of Africa. Tomorrow I am
bird watching and looking for the West African Manatee…I think the
manatees have it right, they sleep in the water…they live in the
water, and after my trip yesterday swimming near Madeleine Island, in
this heat, I can attest, the water is the best place to be.

July 27,
Copied from my notebook
Wow, what a place. I am on a barrier island, about 20 kilometers
from the mainland. On one side of this long skinny north-south
little strip of land in the Atlantic are the protected waters of the
Saloum-Nyoumi river delta, on the other side the rolling waves of
the Atlantic. It is here that thousands of Red-headed gulls, Royal
Terns, pelicans and many other birds make their home. It is the
Island of Birds, and it is one of the most incredible places I have
ever been. I am camping in a sandy tent, which must have been used
in a sandstorm in the Sahara the last time. It is covered with a
think brine of the finest sand ever, and like sandpaper it seems
welded to the plastic of the tent. Weird what heat and sand can do.
I have just come back from a long walk down the islands, about 5
kilometers. Around me are the 18 people of a bird counting training
course for parks officers from all over West Africa. They have all
come here with some funding from Wetlands International to learn how to count birds so they can return to their own countries and help in census data and research. Most of them work in seriously under-
funded parks that have little or no basic infrastructure other than a
thinly respected boundary and a few ramshackle buildings. We had a
communal dinner of fish and rice, eaten out of large bowls by hand.
Very tasty and very filling, which is a good thing since it’s the
only square meal I have had all day. We came here throughout a whole day, which saw the trainees begin their course sitting in a circle
under a huge African tree, like most successful endeavors in Africa.
After two truck rides, a long wait, and a longer boat trip we got
here about an hour before sunset. I ran down the beach alone, having
been told that the birds were “not far” and just made it there before
the sun went to sleep. The whole beach was full of crabs, white ones
that glowed yellow in the last rays of the sun. I stopped and made
some hurried pics of them too. There is so much to see here, and once
I got to the nesting colony I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were
thousands upon thousands of birds. It was stunning, and noisy and
and and…it occurred to me how much more stimulation I have had in the last week after getting off the boat. After more than a month of
just sea and two other people, my head has been spinning from a noisy dirty city, plans, plans changing, cars, computers, more plans,
birds, other people…we have so much that surprises us in our daily
lives that it all becomes like a waterfall, a constant stir of
background noise that we just filter out. Its great to be out here
and I will get up before dawn tomorrow to head back down the beach
and see these birds again. What a treat!

August 2, 2007

It's time to go on. I started this project trying to do many things. Mostly, I wanted to share with everyone out there what is really happening in a small part of our world. I am taking this story further, and will go up to the UK to present the idea of following changes on the earth from a sailboat and hopefully get some further funding. I hope to be back here in not too long, and continue my rediscovery of adventure and change on the islands of the Atlantic.