My first visit to the Gambia in West Africa was in 1980, largely because it was the only sub-Saharan country I could actually afford to get to. Ten years later, as a science lecturer at a College of Further Education, I hatched the idea of returning to Gambia with some of my students on a series of field trips. For the first of these, I set off with 11 students and two other members of staff, our primary objective being to study the mangrove creeks with their highly adapted flora and specialist fauna, as well as to spend time at a small reserve whose nice range of monkey species makes "niche separation" readily observable.

Virtually all Gambia's tourist hotels are on the Atlantic coast; walking north along the beach from our hotel, we came to another called Bungalow Beach, and I remembered something I'd read some years previously.