Power and water

We’ve been holidaying in Gambia for over 10 years and are very much aware that the one thing you can guarantee is that at some point you may experience difficulties with power and water.  One hotel we stayed in back in 2004 used to switch off the electric and water after midnight and not re connect until about 7am the following morning, thankfully this is not so much the case nowadays, most hotels will have generators as back up for power cuts but I always carry a torch just in case (I wouldn't want to spill my wine!!), this came in handy at the bird camp in Georgetown for both walking back to the tent in the evenings and also for visiting the bathroom during the night, the room did have light bulbs but they were very low energy.  Most restaurants will have lamps to put on the tables during power cuts as was the case during one of our evening meals at the Bakau Guest House (Ken’s favourite), power was off for short periods of time during the day at the hotel we stayed in but it is really not a problem for us. 

 

Entrance to Bakau Guest House 

View from Bakau Guest House's outdoor restaurant

 

Readers may remember that I ended the blog of our journey back from Georgetown saying that the following day Ken went fishing & I spent the day under the shower, this is why :-
 

Water is a different matter, on our arrival at the bird camp in Georgetown the owner/manager? showed us the room and bathroom and I asked about water he pointed to the sink and shower area, so far so good I thought, however on trying to have a bit of a wash and clean teeth on our first night I found that there was no water available, we used bottled water and cleaned up as best we could hoping that the situation would be resolved the following morning – it wasn’t so again we did the best we could with bottled water and some hand wipes I had brought with me.  An employee of the camp apologised and explained that it was because the water relied on sunlight and there hadn’t been any the previous day (this explanation seemed highly unlikely but we decided to leave it be) unfortunately there was no water in any of the rooms for the duration of our stay at Georgetown, so no way of washing hair, by the time I had spent 3 days travelling/walking round scrub land in baking sun/been rained on/bitten by flies and spent 4 hours waiting for the ferry in the hell hole of Barra all I wanted was to stand under a shower for several days ! !

Thankfully our room at Cape Point Hotel had hot water in abundance! ! 

At this rate I'll still be blogging about this years holiday when next years comes round - YES we're going back again !!