Mangroves mangroves mangroves….

So sometimes I would really like wrap around eyes. Like a fish maybe, or an antelope, either one, I’m not picky. Not to be more popular with the ladies mind you, I doubt that wrap around eyes will make you much of a hit, maybe with a weirdo, which is ok too I suppose, but that’s not the goal of wrap around eyes. The thing is you need to be able see more at times when there is so much to see. Like a fish eye lens for your eye camera, assistance for that mental photolab that allows you take images with your mind. Detachable fish eyes would be highly marketable I think. Just change the lens, get the landscape shot, then its back to bright blues. I went for a pirogue trip into the mangrove forests along the Gambia river, about 300km upstream from Banjul, and I needed fish eyes.

At one point, the Gambia river was so still that the horizon line blurred with the sky. Just a mirror of the sky, weird cloud formations in duplicate. There were hundreds of pink backed pelicans roosting in the riverbank forests; gargantuan bird flowers dressing the green. Our pirogue putt-putt putted along, across the hundreds of meters of river and straight into the green wall; it was mangroves, mangroves, mangroves. It isn’t even birding season, but there are birds everywhere, the guides voice an almost constant noise of id’s. Good guide, beautiful birds. The motor slows and you hear the high pitched whimbrelling of whimbrels, kinked beaks moving over. Fish eyes would help there, they’d let you keep up. The trees are heavy with western reef herons, dark form-white throat patch. African darters slide through the water, they dry in the trees. You see blue-bellied kingfishers, watch malachite and pied. Senegal thick knees populate the undergrowth, sandpipers dominate the shore. Purple herons, goliath herons, white backed night herons. Roseringed parakeets cross your bow, wooly necked storks on your flank. Goloneks in the savanna, royal terns on the river. A gymnogene looks for nests to raid, a cormorant dries in the sun. In the dying light, it was fields of brilliant green and contrasting red, the blinding white of a great white egret overexposing your eye camera. It can’t be captured on film. You need fish eyes.

The mangroves themselves are a sight to behold. Bigger than any mangroves I’ve seen. 12 meters high, buttress roots reaching down from five. You slice through the soup like water in the backwater calm, the rank smell of anoxic mud is just magic. A monitor lolls in a tree. Pencil roots form an organic nailboard, breathing air in the toxic ooze. There used to be dolphins and hippos here, apparently sometimes there still are. I’ve never seen a river this big, a lake really. Pirogues out fishing, terns and pelicans too… I need fish eyes.