CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
414 km from Lamin to Lamin, about 7 h 35 of riding. On the way it passes Saloum Delta, Wanar and back through Saloum Delta. It crosses from Gambia into Senegal - carry ID and check the toll rules. An island ride, so the sea is never far.
A rock in the Gambia river has been renamed three times, and each name tells you a chapter. In 1651, the Duchy of Courland, a small Baltic state, built a fort on the island and called it St Andrew's. The British took it ten years later and renamed it James Island, after the Duke of York, and it passed back and forth between the British, French and pirates, a base for the trade in enslaved Africans, and later a fort and a mission. In 2011 the Gambian government renamed it Kunta Kinteh Island, after the hero of Alex Haley's novel Roots, who is said to have been taken from the village of Juffureh on the riverbank, close by. Whether or not the story of Kunta Kinte is literally true, the island has become a powerful symbol of the slave trade, and the ruins of the fort, with its crumbling walls and cannons, are a sober sight. The island and the related sites on the shore were listed as a World Heritage property in 2003.
Read the complete James Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
James Island is where the day begins. Next is Saloum Delta.
The Saloum Delta is where the river Saloum and its arms dissolve into a maze of mangrove channels, sandbanks and low islands before meeting the Atlantic, about halfway between Dakar and the Gambian border. It is a flat, watery, shimmering place, where the horizon is a line of mangroves and the only things standing taller than a man are baobabs and the occasional village water tower. Locals call the narrow creeks bolongs, and they wind through the delta like veins.
Read the complete Saloum Delta write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Saloum Delta comes up about 61 km into the recorded legs. Next is Wanar.
The strangest stones in Africa may be the lyre-shaped ones at Wanar. The site, in the Sine-Saloum region of central Senegal, is among the largest groups of megaliths on the continent, with dozens of circles made of tall, rounded laterite pillars, and among them stand a few unusual forked stones, shaped like a lyre or a letter Y, with a notch cut in the top. Archaeologists think they were made by deliberately splitting the stone, and the form seems to echo the shape of a branched tree. Nobody can say for sure what the shape meant, which is part of the appeal. The stones at Wanar form part of the Senegambian stone circles, listed as World Heritage in 2006.
Read the complete Wanar write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 208 km into the recorded legs you reach Wanar. Next is back through Saloum Delta.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Saloum Delta write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Saloum Delta, late in the day. Next is James Island.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete James Island write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at James Island. That is the ride.
James Island → Saloum Delta is 61 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Saloum Delta → Wanar is 147 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Wanar → back through Saloum Delta is 145 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Saloum Delta → James Island is 61 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.