Tanji

You smell Tanji before you see it. The fish-smoking ovens that line the beach run continuously through the morning and the smoke — sweet and dense, the smell of oil and salt and scorched wood — drifts north along the coast road for a kilometer before the village itself appears. It is not an unpleasant smell exactly, but it is an assertive one, and it tells you before anything else does that what you’re approaching is a place of serious work rather than leisure.

Tanji is the largest fishing village on the Gambian coast and one of the major fish-landing sites in West Africa, a status that becomes viscerally apparent at about seven in the morning when the night’s catch begins to arrive. The pirogues come in heavy and low in the water, painted in greens and yellows and blues that would look garish anywhere else, and the unloading happens with a speed and organization that belies the apparent chaos — fish carried in enamel basins on women’s heads, sorted by species, weighed on hand scales, sold and resold in fast Wolof transactions while buyers from as far as Senegal move through the crowd. The barracuda lay in shining rows. The ladyfish glittered. The catfish were enormous, whiskers trailing, looking prehistoric and slightly annoyed.

The fish-smoking operation — locally called “banda” smoking after the style of kiln used — produces the dried fish that travels across West Africa as a flavoring ingredient in stews and soups and rice dishes. The women who run the smoking ovens, most of them from the Lebu and Serer communities of Senegal who have settled here for the industry, work in shifts around clay ovens that burn continuously. The smoke is thick enough that you squint when you walk between the rows. The fish hang on racks inside, turning slowly from silver to amber to the deep brown of fully smoked product. I bought a wrapped packet of dried bonga fish to carry with me — the woman selling it looked genuinely pleased that a visitor understood what it was for.

The nearby Tanji Bird Reserve, a small coastal wetland and scrub area just south of the village, is excellent for shorebirds and migrants in the dry season. Waders work the tide line, ospreys fish the lagoon, and a colony of lesser flamingos occasionally gathers in the shallow water if conditions are right. I walked the reserve in late afternoon after the fish market had quieted, the contrast between the industrial noise of the beach and the absolute stillness of the lagoon a hundred meters inland so sharp it felt like changing channels.

Eating at Tanji is straightforward and excellent: find one of the women cooking at the market perimeter, eat whatever came off the boats that morning cooked however they’re cooking it. I had grilled barracuda with rice and a tomato sauce that tasted of the sea and of woodsmoke and of the fact that the fish was still alive ninety minutes before I was eating it. Nothing else needs to be said about the food.

When to go: Any time of year — the fishing industry runs continuously. The morning fish landing is most active from 6am to 9am, seven days a week. November through February brings the best birdwatching in the adjacent reserve and the most comfortable temperatures. The Tanji beach market is busiest in the early morning and begins to quiet by mid-afternoon.