Tumani Tenda

The guest huts stand under shade trees on the riverbank, each one raised by a different village family and carrying that family's name: Jarju Kunda, Sonko Kunda. Half a kilometre away, the Jola village that owns them all goes about its morning.

Tumani Tenda is a young village by Gambian standards, founded in the twentieth century by a Koran scholar from Casamance, and its families still work 140 hectares of communal land, 89 of them a community forest kept deliberately as pharmacy and water store. In 1999 the village opened its own camp on a saltwater arm of the Gambia, and in 2000 the model won the international TO DO award for socially responsible tourism; camp income runs through the village treasury into schooling and a development fund. Days here are participatory: walks among medicinal trees, dugouts on the bolong, batik and soap-making, salt boiled from the river, oyster gathering with the women in the mangroves. Evenings bring Jola songs or fireside stories when the village is in the mood, not on a schedule. Book ahead and let the hosts set the pace; what you are visiting is a village working, with you folded in.