03/08/2026
Travels With Lamin - Chapter 15 - Lamin and the Drone
An excerpt from the full chapter at https://www.bfigcharity.org/lamin-and-the-drone/
And so, on 14th January 2026, I drove to Manchester Airport, endured all the usual check-in and luggage-related shenanigans, ate a full English breakfast and drank a pint of cider.
This is a longstanding tradition.
The full English breakfast gives me my first photograph for Facebook and reassures everyone that my journey to West Africa has begun in the most culturally appropriate way possible.
Then I climbed aboard the aeroplane bound for The Gambia.
Right from the outset, things were unusual.
The captain announced that our flight time would be five and a half hours.
I looked at the passenger sitting next to me.
“I don’t think that’s right,” I said.
Normally, the flight to The Gambia takes somewhere between six and six and a half hours. And that is from Gatwick, which is several hundred miles closer to The Gambia than Manchester.
I didn’t wish to question the captain’s knowledge of aviation.
But I did.
Nevertheless, before switching off my phone, I managed to send Lamin a hurried message warning him that I might arrive an hour earlier than expected.
Then, I switched my phone off.
And I went to sleep.
Or, at least, I entered that peculiar half-sleeping, half-dozing state that is possible only on an aeroplane, where your neck hurts, your mouth falls open and you repeatedly wake up convinced that several hours have passed when it has actually been eleven minutes.
But it makes the journey feel quicker.
And, as the captain had predicted, we arrived after only five and a half hours.
There must have been a very strong wind encouraging the aeroplane to go faster.
But…five and a half hours!
An extra hour in The Gambia.
Marvellous.
I joined the rest of the passengers and slowly filed towards the cabin door.
This is a moment I always savour.
Upon reaching the open door, the heat rushes into the aircraft like someone opening an enormous oven.
I love it.
Then comes that wonderful dry smell of sandy roads, burning charcoal and a faint but unmistakable hint of fish.
I love it.
Then I step outside, blinking, into the glorious Gambian sunshine.
I love it.
And then comes the slightly ridiculous bus journey to the immigration hall at Banjul International Airport.
I don’t love that quite as much.
Honestly, I could walk from the aeroplane to the correct entrance in less than two minutes.
I have legs.
The entrance is clearly visible.
There is nothing particularly dangerous between me and it.
But walking is not permitted.
Instead, I and as many other passengers as physically possible are crammed into a very hot, very dusty bus.
It is the Gambian version of Sardines.
Except, instead of squeezing as many people as possible into a wardrobe, the challenge is to force an entire planeload of passengers into a bus without anybody having a panic attack or dying of suffocation.
Eventually, through some small miracle of engineering, the doors close.
And then comes the truly ridiculous part.
Rather than driving directly to the nearby entrance, the bus sets off in the opposite direction.
It travels away from the terminal.
Down a service road.
For no obvious reason.
Then, perhaps because common sense finally intervenes—or because the driver senses that the engine is about to splutter to a lifeless stop—the bus turns around.
It then drives back up another service road and deposits a heaving mass of hot, dusty and increasingly bewildered passengers outside the entrance we could have walked to several minutes earlier.
In hindsight, I love it.
It’s all part of the fun.
However, by this point, I was beginning to feel slightly nervous.
I found myself thinking about my drone.
The drone was sitting innocently enough in my backpack, slung over my right shoulder, but now it suddenly seemed rather more conspicuous than it had five minutes earlier.
The strange thing was that, to anyone watching, I looked exactly as I always did after stepping off a flight to The Gambia.
Slightly battered.
Very sweaty.
Increasingly dusty.
And considerably more unkempt than when I’d left Manchester.
The only difference was that somewhere beyond Immigration Control, a Gambian man I’d never met before was supposedly waiting to collect me.
I didn’t know his name.
I didn’t know what he looked like.
I only knew that he was expecting me.
Along with the rest of the weary passengers, I drifted towards Immigration Control, where an impressively long queue had already formed.
Everyone wore the same slightly glazed expression of people who had spent five and a half hours folded into an aeroplane seat and now just wanted to get on with their holiday.
As always, I looked wistfully towards the much shorter queue marked Residents Only.
Surely, after all these years of visiting The Gambia and travelling around West Africa, they’d let me use that one.
No.
I decided not to test the theory.
Maybe one day.
Instead, I shuffled patiently forwards until I eventually found myself standing in front of a small glass-fronted immigration booth occupied by a very serious-looking Gambian Immigration Officer.
The officer studied my passport for a few moments before glancing up at me.
“What is the purpose of your visit?”
“Holiday. And charity work.”
A not uncommon answer in The Gambia.
“Where are you staying?”
This is where things became ever so slightly awkward.
He was clearly expecting the name of a hotel.
“I’m staying with a friend.”
He paused.
“Where?”
“Tranquil, near Bijilo.”
There was another pause while he tried to decide whether this was an acceptable answer or whether I’d simply misunderstood the question. Eventually, apparently satisfied that I hadn’t invented a fictional village in an attempt to gain entry to the country, he nodded and turned to the biometric scanner.
“Finger.”
I pressed my index finger onto the little square of glass.
Nothing.
“Press.”
I pressed a little harder.
Nothing.
“Harder.”
By now, I was convinced that if I applied any more pressure I’d simply push the scanner through the desk.
Still nothing.
He sighed almost imperceptibly and pointed at another finger.
We repeated the process.
Then another.
And another.
Then, my thumbs.
Occasionally, the machine rewarded our combined efforts with a reluctant beep, only to immediately refuse to recognise the very next finger as though we’d never met before.
After several minutes of increasingly determined pressing, prodding and silent mutual disappointment, the officer reached what appeared to be the only logical conclusion.
He gave up.
Presumably, because he’d decided that the machine had collected enough of my fingerprints to satisfy the Gambian authorities.
The officer pointed towards a small camera mounted on the end of a flexible metal stalk.
I leant forwards, stooped slightly and peered into it.
Nothing happened.
The officer looked at me with a faint expression of bewilderment before making an upward waving motion with his hand.
I had absolutely no idea what he was trying to tell me.
He repeated the gesture, this time with a slightly more exaggerated flourish, as though communicating with someone who didn’t share a common language.
It finally dawned on me that he wasn’t telling me to stand up straighter.
He was telling me to straighten the camera.
I cautiously grabbed hold of the bendy metal stalk and raised it until the lens was somewhere around eye level instead of chest height. The officer immediately nodded with quiet approval.
“Yes.”
I looked into the camera once more.
This time it beeped almost instantly.
After the prolonged battle with the fingerprint scanner, I couldn’t help feeling slightly insulted that facial recognition appeared to recognise my face without the slightest hesitation.
I paid the requisite airport fee.
And then, with one final stamp in my passport, he waved me through as though deciding that anyone prepared to wrestle with Gambian immigration technology for that long was probably harmless enough.
I stepped into the baggage reclaim hall, where the familiar carousel was already turning lazily beneath rows of anxious faces searching for suitcases that all looked remarkably similar.
I stood beside the carousel and resigned myself to the usual long wait, while quietly hoping that my luggage hadn’t decided to take a holiday, completely independent of me, in South Africa.
This was where things changed.
Read the complete chapter at https://www.bfigcharity.org/lamin-and-the-drone/
And read all available chapters at https://www.bfigcharity.org/travels-with-lamin/
