Day 19 km 5,329 - 5,338 Barra ferry - Banjul

So near and yet so far...

The Road Book warns that the Barra ferry terminal area is not a good place to spend the night - it is right. Night has fallen and as soon as we park in the lengthy queue that has tailed back so far that we are actually in the village next to the port, the vultures descend. Bumsters, as they are known. They prey particularly on tourists and are dodgier than a dodgy thing bought at Mrs Miggins' dodgy shop. Within minutes we are swamped with offers to sell us booze, cigarettes, drugs, change money, or telling us tales of woe in order to get us to give them stuff and some are just plain menacing. Sitting in the car and winding the windows up does not help as they just stand right next to the car and stare at you through the window.

One guy, Lorenzo, is more insistent than others, he claims to know our friends from yesterday. Yeah right! He does, however, produce a scrap of paper with the Dukes names and telephone numbers on it - hmmm. Accepting the fact that he's probably as bent as a 9 bob note, we decide to trust him just a bit and Andrew goes with him to see if there's a way to prioritise ourselves in the queue, leaving me alone with the vultures. So it is a feeling of considerable relief when the other teams turn up about 30 minutes later. They also make lots and lots of new friends - you can understand it from their point of view, a large group of Europeans? The circus is in town!

There's safety in numbers, but even so we have to be on our guard; Steve is cooking up a few tins on the camping gas cooker on the back seat. He places a tin of frankfurters on the roof, bends down, looks up again - they're gone and there's a considerable crowd of eyewitnesses (and one guilty party) standing around who saw and heard nothing. The next ferry is at 07:00 (although there's no way we will be on it) so we settle down for an uncomfortable and mosquito-ridden night in the car. Neither Andrew nor I are happy campers (particularly not as he gets ripped off over a sandwich from one of the 'bumsters'). It's still going strong outside on the street around us which keeps us awake, but not very entertained (particularly as a misunderstanding between the 'bumsters' and one of the teams nearly turns into a riot), until the wee small hours. Even after everything else that we've already been through over the two and a half weeks, quite a few of us feel that this is the lowest ebb of the trip.

Lorenzo does his best to fight them off, but it's all just so full-on and constant so it really wears you out. By 01:00 it's started to calm down a bit and even though he may well have ulterior motives, Lorenzo does stay there all night keeping an eye on us and helping out with things like getting a crate of beer for thirsty travellers and finding a decent toilet for the ladies. So, if you're ever stuck at the Barra ferry terminal and a guy called Lorenzo with a Dell laptop bag (our payment for his services) approaches you, you can probably just about trust him just a little bit.

Once the ferry service starts in the morning we gradually inch our way forwards until at about 10:00 ourselves and the Nutty Boys are the first to make it on to the ferry, but are now separated from the others. Lorenzo had proudly told us that this was a very good service as "The boat has 4 engines and they all work!" after 12 hours of waiting for a 30 minutes crossing, there is a definite sense of anti-climax as we pull over to the side of the road once out of the port. Banjul! After all those days and kilometeres, we're here! But now what?

Sitting at the Safari Garden we catch up with the others as they arrive in dribs and drabs over the next couple of hours, some are going on elsewhere, others have flights booked to leave that afternoon, some are staying on and others are just playing it by ear. There s much reminiscence, a sense of achievement and a job well done, but as a group, for us the Banjul Challenge is over...