Well, BST has arrived in the UK along with unseasonally good sunshine figures - and with it getting light nice and early in the morning and staying light till 8 or later at night all we need is a bit of Gambian heat in sunshine for me to feel really comfortable.

Many thanks for many the kind comments emailed to me about the site, it is particulary pleasing that people feel the site captures some of the Gambian atmosphere with its look and feel and the loads of pictures included.

The 'New' Guestbook is OK, but there is not as much Chat & Banta in the New Bantaba as there was in the previous one. It is a shame that you only get the listing in the order they appear rather than most recent, as a result people commenting on older issues go un-noticed unless you scroll down. SORRY this is just a missing feature of the Bravenet utility.

The Chat room has never prooved very successful it is rather a long wait getting logged in and once there no one is in it with you, so I suspect people just don't bother, maybe when I retire I'll sit round waiting for visitors.

The photo uploading to the Picture Gallery seems to work fine, where images are really large I copy and reduce them and re-publish them with the headings provided by the user, and placed some of them in the relevant folders. The current Photo Gallery utility is limited to 50 images and although I have had to delete some to make room for others there have never been so many submission to suggest that I upgrade to the 2000 image utility.

Use the link at the end of this page to take a look at the Picture Gallery.

I try to keep on top of the very wide variety of emails that I receive each day. They are generally lovely to get and regulary prompt me to provide a new page on the site to cover this or that issue or update a page that is out of date.

Hopefully, visitors are now seeing updates & regular new pages. Last year was difficult for personal reasons and the problem of updating the site from Gambia (from Novemeber to February each year) has made moving the site to a new host a matter of importance.

This shouldn't make any difference to site visitors - www.GambiaTouristSupport.com will remain the web address and visitors who arrive via a search engine direct to an old Lineone page (the current host via Tiscali) will open pages on the new site as soon as they reach the GTS home page.

Many GTS members & non members who have visited the new GTS Bar and Restaurant and sent email feed back, that has been fantastic - such comments as "even better, if that was possible", "great value as always", "a wonderful job - keep it up"

No bad emails at all - although we had one party of 6 just after we moved who complained about everything and left saying "Rubbish - but you don't '.....' care do you?" to me as they left. We do care enormously, visitors like that go back to the hotel and instead of encouraging new customers because of a great night out - put people off and quite apart from that, we always aim at providing the very best quality service and food at the best prices.

The interest in Working holidays has shot up, and although we only have two working holiday visitors in Gambia at present, we have several more lined up for visits during the rest of this year and early next year. But there is ample scope for many more - every school in Gambia is delighted to have volunteer helpers and we are more than pleased to help them find those helpers - there is no need to have a teaching qualification your ability to speak and read English is the vital skill they all need.

A number of people have emailed me about Foday - Fo no longer works with GTS but still helps GTS whenever he can, promoting us and explaining the work we do. Fo now has funding from elsewhere to buy land and set up his own music project, but I understand that he is also hoping to travel extensively in West Africa and Europe, improving his musical skills.

Fo's unexpected departure from GTS left great opportunities for others to take up positions and stamp their own skills and abilities on the project. Kaberiou Jabang, has proved his financial and organisational abilities by getting GTS into a position of financial balance for the very first time in the 5 years we have been operating, he has achieved this with the essential financial control skills he learnt as an officer in his local Mosque.

Memberships taken out in Gambia have grown as has our ability to provide independant accommodation for members & working holiday placements, we now regularly deal with multiple membership groups each week.

Kabs is as keen as I have always been to increase GTS's staffing which has enabled us to provide a better and broader service to our members & potential members. We now have 3 permanent members of Staff, Lamin (Rasta) and Isatou our first female host and office assistant.

Both Lamin and Isatou are able to visit schools, take photographs, process them for the web, deal with emails and phone calls as well as hosting members during their visit.

On the Restaurant side, Lamin Drammeh (Mansa) has steadily developed his abilities as the Assistant Manager from Nov to May & Full Manager from June to Oct. He very successfully kept the Bar and Restaurant running over the whole rainey season, which was a brilliant achievment. GTS is now in a number of the major published guides to The Gambia, unfortunately as Dardeema in the Bradt guide, but we understand that we will be mentioned in other guide books due for reprinting soon.