BOBOI BEACH LODGE
We arrived in Banjul on a 6:30 PM flight from London and after navigating customs, swam through the heat toward the exit, melting a little more with each step.
Buba, a Gambian national, and the manager of the Boboi Beach Lodge, greeted us inside the airport and led us to our German friend, Antje who stood behind the barricade outside, waving excitedly and shouting, “Fantastisch! Fantastisch!”
When we reached the car, Antje’s friend, Tomas, a German entrepreneur and inventor, was sleeping soundly in the front seat, waking only when we tumbled in. Laughingly, Buba told us that his snoring shook the entire car.
The five of us set off for Boboi Beach.
Dusk was falling. By the time we reached the roiling city of Brikama, it was completely dark. Due to end-of-day traffic, the 40-minute drive took us over an hour. The air was thick with the smell of smoke, diesel, and spices. Everywhere, bursts of action—women in bright fabrics toting children, boys with baskets of fruit on their heads, men weaving through the lanes with firewood haphazardly strapped to the back of their mopeds.
Buba, Saffie, & Little Boboi
At the lodge, Buba’s wife, Saffie and their six-year-old daughter, Kaddy, greeted us in the near dark. The night watchman, an impossibly-tall man named, Karamba showed us to our room. On the way, we walked past Antje’s tree house, creaking high on its stilts. She beckoned to us from the balcony.
“Come up and see!”
We climbed the steps and found a magical space partitioned into a large deck facing the ocean and adjacent sleeping quarters—two beds bordered by sturdy walls of woven palm. Underneath, on the ground level, there was a private bath and shower. Antje, with her artist’s eye, had spread colorful batiks on the beds and wedged postcards of the Canary Islands (where she now lives) in between the cracks on the walls.
We were not staying in a tree house, but in a large lodge room facing the ocean. It was generous and clean with a double bed, metal cabinet for storing our things, two chairs, and a bath with toilet, sink and shower.
We unpacked and walked back to the restaurant where the surf boomed somewhere beyond in the dark. It was invitingly clean and spare, a smattering of wooden tables and chairs on worn mosaic tiles with a view of the gauzy ocean.
Ablai, the cook asked us what we would like to eat. It was near to nine o’clock, but our stomachs growled.
“What do you suggest?”
“We have crepes with french fries,” he replied. “Or butterfish with rice and yassa or dolmada.”
Butterfish is a unique fish. It thrives in a mix of salt and freshwater and has no bones. Yassa sauce is a Gambian staple of onions and mustard; Dolmada is a spicy, sweet peanut dressing.
We ordered one of each and Ablai brought them to the table, a self-assured look in his eyes. The fish was sweet and tender, cooked to perfection. The sauces—explosively savory. We ate until our plates were nearly licked clean.
“What should we drink?” We asked.
Ablai held up a bottle. “Julebrew.” A very good beer, he informed us. A Gambian beer.
We propped up our feet in the darkness and listened to the phantom ocean embroidered by the flutter of insects in the night. As we drank our Julebrews, the forest of palm fronds whipped wildly above our heads. Fatigue set in.
It was the first of many good nights at Boboi.