"SMILE!!” Rastaman Babu demonstrates with a yellow roll-up pinched between grinning teeth. “You're on the Smiling Coast!" The old dreadlocked fisherman steers his painted wooden motorboat away from the Atlantic and deeper into the swampy waterways. He navigates languidly through a maze of mud islands thickly forested with mangroves. Gambia’s nickname, The Smiling Coast, was devised in the '70s during a clever marketing campaign by the tourism board, but the locals have truly taken it to heart. My guide beamed as he lovingly traced the shape of his country on the map. Elongated and thin, its borders hug the curves of the River Gambia like rippling lips. A smile on the face of Africa. I'm not smiling. Our boat is an hour late for lunch. I hate being late. And I know why Gambia is curiously shaped. The trophy of a century-and-a-half-long wrestling match between England and France. France eventually relinquished a sliver of Senegalese land, mapped to the banks of the river under British control. Gambian gospel has it that their borders extend as far as our cannonballs could reach. I feel a dark pang of guilt for the past. Colonial Britain. The slave trade. I wonder how the Gambians feel about me. Shielding my phone screen from the sun, I peer anxiously at the clock. Babu offers a cheery adage: "One love, no stress!" Back home in London, tourists pose for photos, standing over the Prime Meridian line with arms outstretched like a computer game Lemming blocking its comrade’s path. From there, time is calculated: Greenwich Mean Time. From that point, each new day, year, and millennium is born. The tourists star-jump gleefully, landing with one foot in the eastern hemisphere and the other in the West. Here, 3000 miles south, the clocks run to the same hour as London, GMT, but to what the locals fondly call 'Gambia Maybe Time'. We might arrive an hour late, or two, if we turn up at all. I'm torn in two directions. I want to chill out but can't shake the familiar stress of being late. I glance at the map. The smallest country in mainland Africa looks more like a tentacle-shaped indentation in the continent, scooped out by the long finger of my ancestors probing hungrily inland towards Timbuktu and its fabled treasures. Flying fish jump as a trio in our bubbling wake, speeding alongside us like winged dolphins. As we approach an island, what looked like an origami paper crane becomes a pelican folding back huge wings and settling into her nest, a mass of tangled roots to which rows of oysters cling. I slip my phone into my pocket. Spotting a red-billed hornbill on the sand, I giggle with delight, identifying him as Zazu from The Lion King: his clumsy mannerisms identical to the animation. A cartoon made real. I rest my head against the sun-bleached wood. Lulled into a meditative slumber by the propeller's gentle spluttering and the calls of birds I cannot name, I vow never to run for a bus or dive through closing train doors again. After lunch, at dusk, we walk slowly along the shoreline. Translucent crabs scuttle from my lazy footfall and disappear, falling haphazardly into hundreds of tiny holes. Removed from civilisation and streetlamps, we swim dreamily under starlight. Babu jokes about the herd of hippos that sometimes wallows here. My mind races. Hippos! Aren’t hippos the world’s deadliest animal?! Somewhere nearby, something heavy splashes like a cannonball, and I wriggle out of the water. I'd let my guard down! What on earth was I thinking, an out-of-place Londoner, night swimming in hippo-infested waters?! Cashew tree blossom crunches underfoot like a mouthful of blunt hippopotamus teeth gnashing at my toes. I freeze, and all is still. The otherworldly outline of a behemothic baobab tree looms above the water against the purple sky. Under our feet it drinks, while its intricate twig lattice almost touches the moon. I gaze up at the scleral orb. It cuts through the darkness like the luminous clockface of Big Ben over Westminster. Rastaman Babu chuckles. "Reggae baby!" He uses the pet name I heard a catcaller try at Serekunda market and secretly liked. "You’re smiling!”