Small in size but rich in African character, The Gambia and its resort-dotted coastline offer perhaps the closest English-speaking 'winter sun' destination from Europe. The interior, dominated by the lush jungle-fringed Gambia River, is home to plentiful birds and monkeys, time-warped traditional villages and mysterious megalithic sites. Bradt's The Gambia reveals all the background and practical information needed to explore arguably Africa's most welcoming and safest country, alongside detailed coverage of the many new eco lodges and informed advice on the country's birdwatching possibilities. The Gambia is a perfect destination for first-time visitors to the continent and remains popular with UK and European visitors - regularly attracting over 100,000 arrivals a year.

Author Biography

Philip Briggs has been exploring the highways, byways and backwaters of Africa since 1986, when he spent several months backpacking on a shoestring from Nairobi to Cape Town. His association with Bradt started in 1991 when he wrote the first guidebook to South Africa to be published after the release of Nelson Mandela. Over the rest of the 1990s, Philip wrote a series of pioneering Bradt Guides to destinations that were then - and in some cases still are - otherwise practically uncharted by the travel publishing industry. These included the first dedicated guidebooks to Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Ghana and Rwanda, all of which are now in their 4th-7th edition. More recently he wrote the only guidebook to Somaliland, also published by Bradt. He first visited The Gambia in the late 1990s as part of an extended trip to West Africa and returned there twice, most recently in 2008 to research an overhauled new edition of the Insight Guide to The Gambia and Senegal. He has visited more than two dozen African countries in total and written about most of them for specialist travel and wildlife magazines including Africa Birds & Birding, Africa Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Travel Africa and Wanderlust.