Eat and sleep

Eat

In the main cities (Banjul and Serrekunda) you will find quite a variety of bars. Usually, these are going to be bars with some local food with a shortlist of dishes freshly prepared for locals. If you go to some fancy restaurants, these are probably places for tourists. In the fancy places prices will be around 350 Dalasi for a dish while at a local bar you will get a full dish for 100-150 Dalasi.

The food in The Gambia is almost always very spicy and almost always based on rice. In the local places you will mostly be offered rice with different fried fishes. Go to our article "Foodie in the Gambia" for more detailed stories about the food we ate.

Drinking is an important topic for tourists. Remember to never drink tap water. Like in many other countries you need to be careful and drink water only from closed bottles. We used this also for things like brushing our teeth.

Beer is easily accessible only in touristic spots. There is a Gambian beer, Julbrew, that you will get in almost any shop or restaurant in touristic areas. Outside of these, you will have to choose between water and extremely sweet fruity drinks.

Sleep

When going to The Gambia we found a really good deal for a hostel that we could then cancel anytime so we booked one hostel for the whole stay just in case it was difficult to find a place to sleep. That was completely unnecessary. We stayed there finally for two nights and then moved on inside the country. You can easily book the place to sleep both by Airbnb and booking.com. All of the places we stayed at had showers and toilets which is not such an obvious thing in The Gambia. The prices oscillate on average around 1000 Dalasi for a night for 2 people.

A place definitely worth mentioning is Roothouse Guesthouse in Kafuta. The place is run by a lovely American woman, her partner and the help of a cute little girl. This place immediately made us feel like home, it's literally hard to find the words to describe how great it was. You have to try it!