Makasutu Culture Forest

The Gambia is a strange and lovely sliver of a country — essentially a river with banks attached — and most visitors never leave the strip of beach hotels near the coast. I understand the temptation; the beaches are genuinely good. But Lia gets restless on a lounger faster than anyone I know, and on our third day she announced, in the tone she uses when a decision has already been made, that we were going inland to a forest she had read about. Makasutu turned out to be the best call of the trip.

A forest somebody decided to save

Makasutu is a private reserve of around a thousand acres, the work of two men who bought up parcels of degraded land in the 1990s and spent years letting the forest knit itself back together. The result is a mosaic of habitats packed into a small area — palm forest, savanna woodland, salt marsh, and a tidal mangrove creek that breathes in and out with the Atlantic far downstream. A local guide named Lamin walked us through it at the pace of someone who has all the time in the world, which, that morning, we did too.

He showed us the palms tapped for palm wine, a milky stuff drawn from the crown of the tree that ferments by the hour, so that the same gourd is sweet at breakfast and frankly aggressive by lunch. We tried the breakfast version. It tasted of yeast and coconut and faint regret. Lamin found this funnier than I did.

Down the creek at the turn of the tide

The heart of a visit is the boat trip along the bolong, the mangrove creek, taken in a dugout pirogue as the tide turns. We slid out with the falling water, the mangrove roots exposing themselves like a tangle of arthritic fingers, mudskippers flipping across the banks, and oysters clamped to the roots in clusters that the local women harvest by the basket. A pied kingfisher hovered, dropped, missed, and tried again with the wounded dignity of a creature being watched.

The baboons are Makasutu’s celebrities, and they know it. A troop came down to the forest edge near the visitor lodge in the late afternoon, and one large male crossed the open ground a few metres from our table with the unhurried swagger of someone who pays no rent and answers to no one. Lia, predictably, gripped my arm. The baboon did not so much as glance at us. We had, correctly, ceased to be interesting the moment we stopped holding food.

It is an easy day trip from the coast, and I would push anyone who has flopped onto a Gambian beach to do it. The country is more than its shoreline, and Makasutu is the gentlest possible introduction to that fact.

When to go: the dry season, roughly November to May, is the most comfortable and best for wildlife along the creek. The birdlife peaks in the cooler early months. The rains from July to September turn everything green and dramatic but make the tracks and the heat harder going.