In a brightly painted courtyard at her home on the Atlantic Coast, shaded by citrus and avocado trees, Ida Cham Njie is teaching my girlfriend, Michelle, and I to cook fish yassa, a staple West African dish.

It’s a family effort: Ida’s sisters-in-law clean and gut the cassava fish we bought at a local market a few hours earlier, while her husband, a quietly-spoken engineer, helps prepare the vegetables.

“In our culture it is taboo for men to be near the kitchen,” Ida says. “If my mother-in-law saw this, I’d be in trouble.”

Ida is a tall, striking woman in her mid-40s. She formerly ran one of The Gambia’s top resorts, but struck out on her own in September, opening Yobouy, a catering business and cooking school specialising in traditional cuisine.

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One of a growing number of entrepreneurial locals attempting to offer tourists a more intimate, community-based experience, Ida is determined to show that there’s more to her country than golf, game fishing and birdwatching cruises.

The Gambia is one of Africa’s smallest countries, a 350 kilometre strip along the Gambia River that is almost entirely enveloped by Senegal. Its 1.4 million people depend largely on small-scale agriculture for their livelihoods but tourism is also crucial to their fortunes.

The former British colony attracted 146,759 tourists in 2008, of which more than 40 per cent were from the UK.

It may not be as popular as, say, the Caribbean or Thailand as a wintersun destination, but The Gambia does have plenty to recommend it: terrific climate, cheap prices, decent beaches. It’s only a six hour flight from London and in the same time zone; it helps that almost everyone speaks English.

And the addition of several flash new hotels, including the eco-friendly Mandina Lodge, set in a protected 1,000-acre rainforest, and Coco Ocean, a luxury oceanfront hotel that opened last December, has helped to lure a broader range of tourists.

Yet for all its apparent appeal, we were sceptical.

After ten days travelling through remote villages in Senegal, we worried that we would find The Gambia excessively touristy, even a bit dull.

Would we be trapped in a dreary resort, surrounded by grey-haired Brits interested only in improving their tans and their golf swings? A French expatriate we met in Senegal, when we told him we were heading to The Gambia, quipped, “How’s your grip?”

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