I'm A Survivor

My family and I spent a few days around town in Banjul. Then on Saturday, we went on an excursion upriver to Tendaba and Janjanbureh, two towns in the rural up-country region of The Gambia. We saw chimpanzees, hippos, huge monitor lizards, red and green monkeys and lots and lots and lots of birds. We traveled to Tendaba and Janjanbureh by road (dirt and paved) and also by the River Gambia. So we spent a lot of time on the water this week. We also spent some time in the river water...something I was not planning on. While we were at Janjanbureh, we went on a bird-watching, wildlife-spotting expedition on the river. We got on the Lady Hippo, our double-decker river boat, and set out. Our British and Scottish companions were very helpful in spotting birds. They got quite excited when they saw the African Darter and the Great Eagle Owl. I got excited when I saw goats on the riverbank. About 20 minutes into our journey, we hit a snag. The boat became stuck on a mudbar. Our captain revved and revved the engine, but the Lady Hippo just would not budge. So, he jumped in to investigate and see exactly what we were stuck on. Whatever he saw must have convinced him that pushing the boat would help un-budge us. He pushed and all we did was start leaning from side to side; I think he must have been trying to rock us off the mudbar. He kept shouting for us to stand on strategic points around the boat to distibute the weight evenly to balance the boat...or to help him rock it more...we weren't really sure. After a few unsuccessful minutes of this activity, all the men on the boat jumped ship to give the captain a bit more muscle. So my dad and the two Brits, Clive and Tim, got into the river, pushed a bit more, and proceeded to spin us around in 360 degree circles. Then Clive's wife Alison decided she'd like to help also and tossed herself out of the Lady Hippo. And then Jessica jumped out, even though my mom would have rather Jess stayed on the boat. Even with all those people out in the river pushing us around in circles, the boat still would not budge. The captain then got out his cell phone (or mobile, as they call them here) and called the captain of another boat out on the river that day. When we saw the other boat coming toward us, it looked a bit like a pirate ship coming to get us, so I called them the Somalian pirates. All the Somalian pirates jumped out of their ship and swam over to our ship and began to push in an attempt to free the Lady Hippo from the mudbar. What actually happened was we spun around in a circle much faster now because we had more muscle. The captain must have wrote it off as a lost cause because he started motioning for the people still on the boat to jump off and swim over to the pirate ship. So we packed the cameras, binoculars and phones into plastic buckets to be carried/floated to the pirate ship, plopped the coolers of beer and soda into the river, and jumped into an African freshwater river....exactly what the travel doctor at the Reading Hospital said not to do. We swam over, dragged ourselves over the bow of the pirate ship and managed to get lots of little bruises and scratches in the process. Once everyone had made it onto the pirate ship safely, it was complimentary beer and soda for the survivors while the captain of the stuck Lady Hippo had to wait for the tide to come in and free him.