In yet another of our West African adventures, we travelled from Senegal to Sierra Leone overland on public transport – that is, by bus, bike, or bush-taxi. There are four or five crossings between Guinea and Sierra Leone: the main one at Parnelap on the Conakry-Freetown Highway brings you into Sierra Leone near Kambia. Bush-taxis and buses run regularly between the two capitals.

The other crossings are more distant and difficult, mainly due to the state of the roads on either side, and lack of transport. This border-crossing guide is about our experience using the remote border at Medina Oula in Guinea, which brings you into Sierra Leone near Kamakwie.

Before you go

Visas

You need a Sierra Leone visa and your Yellow Fever vaccination certificate to cross the border. There is no Visa on Arrival for Sierra Leone, so bring it from home or get it in a neighboring country. We picked ours up at the Embassy in The Gambia: other nearby options include Conakry and Monrovia. It’s an expensive one: a one-month single-entry is around 100+ USD, depending on your nationality and probably where you get it.

Embassies in West Africa tend to move all the time, without notice or any updates to their last known address. The most time-consuming part of getting a visa is often finding an Embassy. The Sierra Leone Embassy in The Gambia has moved from Banjul to a pretty obscure location on the Senegambia road and possibly moved again, further down the road heading away from the beach, towards Serekunda.

Assuming you find an Embassy, it’s probably easier to pick the visa up on the way than to bring it from home. Applying at your home Embassy/Consulate (or closest one), you may need a letter of invitation arranged through a tour operator, or hotel bookings/an itinerary at the very least, and proof of funds/insurance, plus the usual documentation (application, Yellow Fever certificate, photograph). Applying in The Gambia we literally sat down at the officer’s desk, filled out the forms, handed him a photo, and paid. He wrote out the visas and stuck them in our passports on the spot.

Money

Bring some Le (Leones, the currency used in Sierra Leone) with you. Change money before you cross the border. On this route from Guinea, there isn’t a town with an ATM anywhere near the border on either side and there were no money-changers around when we crossed – this is a very little-used crossing. The last reliable option to change money in Guinea is in Kindia, and the first in Sierra Leone is Kamakwie. Know the rate before you go, and watch out when you’re dealing with money-changers in the street.

Keep in mind that the only ATMs accepting international cards are in Freetown, and they are supremely unreliable at best, so you should bring most of the money you’ll need with you in USD, and change it as you go. This is a cash-based economy: forget about credit cards (other than if you’re planning to stay at the top hotels in Freetown).

The route

You can get from Kindia to Medina Oula (Guinea), across the border, and on to Kamakwie (Sierra Leone) in a day. You’ll need to string rides together: depending on how that works out, you might end up traveling after dark. A lot of this will involve motorbikes: I strongly suggest bringing a helmet, because you won’t easily find one there.

If you are planning to visit Outamba-Kilimi National Park in Sierra Leone, this is the time to do it: the park is a detour off the ‘main’ road from the border going towards Kamakwie. Detouring to the park should take a little less time than going right through to Kamakwie. There are some huts in the park and you can stay the night before traveling onwards. If you plan to do this, bring food with you and the staff will cook it for you. Supplies at the park are pretty basic leaning towards non-existent, and also expensive. This is not the Masai Mara – they don’t seem to be expecting guests much.

All the time estimates for driving distances here are just that: estimates. It’s really going to depend on the roads, your vehicle and driver (confidence, speed and ability), and possibly the weather. Don’t do this in the rainy season.

Kindia to Medina Oula

Go early to the main market in Kindia where all the transport congregates. Ask around for a car (taxi-brousse) going to Medina Oula. Expect to wait a few hours for the car to fill up. Use that time to pick up food (in case you get stuck along the way; also, if you are planning to stay at Outamba Kilimi). There are money-changers in and near the market although finding one with Leones can take a while.

On the way you’ll stop at a checkpoint not too far from Medina Oula. We met two soldiers here who checked our passports and gave us a hard time. There was no English spoken at all.

It’s around 65 kms to Medina Oula and takes about three hours.

Medina Oula to the Border

Medina is a tiny village with a police post where you’ll show your passport, the officer will record your details, and stamp you out.

The no-man’s land is about 10 kms of bad road through the forest, so you’ll need a ride. Everyone will know that you need a ride, so the motorbike taxi-drivers will find you. Bargain hard. The cost seems to include bribes the driver will pay to the guards at the border on the way out.

At the start of the border road, where there is a gun turret just pointed in the general direction of Sierra Leone, show your passport again (and the driver will probably pay the guards). Expect around thirty minutes on the road – hang on tight, and you’re going to get dirty.

Formalities are pretty casual at the Sierra Leone border post in the forest. Passport, visa, maybe a quick bag check. Best of all: a super-friendly ‘Welcome to Sierra Leone!’ – seriously, so good to hear English again.

There isn’t any onward transport here. Ask the border guards to let your Guinean driver take you the rest of the way to the first small village (I think it’s called Sainya, it’s very close) and drop you off there before he returns home.

The border to Kamakwie/Outamba-Kilimi National Park

Having reached the first village in Sierra Leone, you’ll need to arrange your next ride: a motorbike taxi (ocada) to take you either to Kamakwie or to Outamba-Kilimi Park Headquarters. The park is a detour off the road from the border going towards Kamakwie. Detouring to the park should take a little bit less time than going right through to Kamakwie. The roads are such a mess it almost doesn’t make a difference. Either way, it’s around 40 – 50 kms of more hilly, rutted, crumbling, forested track. It took us about an hour and fifteen minutes to reach the park HQ.

By now you’ll probably be filthy – no worries, you can wash up in the Little Scarcies River (or not. But it’s your only option).

If you spend a night or two in the park, when you decide to leave the camp staff can organise motorbike taxis to Kamakwie for you, which will take around an hour (a little less than 30 kms). You’ll cross a river on the way using a raft-type ferry manually pulled across on cables. Feel free to pitch in and pull.

Onward travel: Kamakwie to Makeni

From Kamakwie things get easier – you can pick up a bush taxi or poda-poda (minibus) going the next 100 kms on to Makeni, about a two hour drive (on much better roads).

And there you have it! As the friendly soldiers said, ‘Welcome to Sierra Leone!’

Read more

For more about travelling in these two countries and things to see and do while you’re at it, check out my stories from Guinea and Sierra Leone.

I also wrote a story about our experience crossing this border (it was a long, fun day):

Africa’s Wild West: The Road to Sierra Leone

The post How to cross the border from Guinea to Sierra Leone appeared first on WhirledAway.

Today Koidu is filled with diamond offices, diamond traders and buyers.

Anybody can dig for diamonds – and that’s just what many people do, to the detriment of their farms. We wanted to see some diamond miners in action so we walked out to the bridge and looked down the river. Sure enough, we spotted some guys with the tell-tale big round sieves and shovels, so we scrambled down the bank. Picking our way through the mud and long grass, we went over to say hello.

They had not found any diamonds that day – most artisanal miners rarely do. It’s illegal to bring diamonds out of the country (much to Oyv’s relief), so although a miner with shifty bloodshot eyes offered to hook us up, we went back to town without any expensive souvenirs.

The war is in the past now, and at first glance Sierra Leone looks alright. Yes, the people are visibly poor, but they generally have roofs over their heads, they have food, they seem to get by on a day-to-day basis. But in talking to the NGO workers we’ve met, we hear the same story again and again. There is no working sanitation system, no properly functioning public healthcare or education. Literacy rates and life expectancy are low; infant mortality is high. There is actually almost no electricity; only some parts of Freetown sometimes have power and everyone else relies on private generators or makes do without. This beautiful, friendly little nation languishes at the bottom of the list of the 10 least developed countries in the world.

As seems to so often be the case with African countries, whenever things are looking up another disaster strikes. Sierra Leone was still struggling to get back on its feet after the devastating 11 year long civil war when Ebola broke out. Although the country has officially been ‘Ebola-free’ as of November 2015, we still see reminders of the deadly epidemic everywhere. Faded notices in every public space remind citizens that ‘Ebola Stops With You’; or attempt to discourage the lingering ‘Ebola Survivor Stigma’; admonish us to always wash our hands; and most ominously, instruct that ‘If your relative dies at home, pray and pay your respects at least 1 metre away from the body, and call the burial team’. At our hotel in Bo this list of Ebola-avoidance tips was posted beside the door to our room:

But everyone knows that tourism generates income, and in the face of seemingly insurmountable problems many people are striving to bring out the best this country has to offer. And there is so much to discover in Sierra Leone.

We moved on to Tiwai Island, a little eco-reserve in the Moa river. Our first hint that there is yet some work to be done came when the guide bringing us across the river slurped up the last of his Amaretto (street vendors sell all sorts of alcohol in little foil packets for enjoyment on the go) and threw the empty packet overboard, straight into the water.

Tiwai is a co-operative effort with the best of intentions: Sierra Leone’s non-existent tourists are meant to stay in a community-run camp and go on guided nature walks.

This meant convincing the people living in the surrounding villages that nature conservation and the tourism to follow would benefit everyone and bring in as much money as poaching chimpanzees, diamond-mining and destructive farming practices. It’s working, and the locals run a rudimentary camp, maintain the hiking trails in the forest and knowledgeable guides are available for early morning walks. Ours snuck stealthily ahead through groves of gigantic bamboo, signaling us to hush and pointing out red and black colobus monkeys, Diana monkeys and countless species of birds all around.

Like any other tourist attraction in this country Tiwai is just not quite ready yet: it’s hard to get to, impossible to reach the staff in advance, and the camp is both disorganised and costs a lot more than it should. However, in terms of having a quiet forest to yourself and a hammock swinging by the river, it’s hard to beat.

Getting away from Tiwai turned out to be easier than we expected: we caught a ride from the village with an English expat who visits the camp sometimes for research.

Foreigners driving around jungle roads ‘upcountry’ in a land cruiser is not a regular sight and the people in every village we drove through turned out to wave.

As we travel from place to place, we’ve noticed no shortage of churches and mosques, and a lot of evangelising on billboards with invitations to church groups or sessions with famous visiting miracle workers, along with reminders that doom is approaching:

The proprietor at one guesthouse we stayed at was not shy about posting his rules:

Every poda-poda in the country is emblazoned with one slogan or another, mostly religious:

Some other favourites I didn’t manage to snap include ‘God Bless my Boss’, ‘God is One’, ‘I Hope to Allah’ and, the ironclad excuse absolving reckless drivers and inept conductors of all responsibility, the one that makes the heart of every weary traveller sink into their shoes: ‘God’s Time is Best’.

By New Year’s we’d made it to Bureh Beach. The Freetown peninsula is famous for its staggeringly beautiful beaches, and the rumours are not exaggerated. At Bureh, a clutch of houses and some shops back a long empty expanse of golden sand that seems to stretch on forever.

It’s wonderful.

The major downside to Bureh (and many other places) is corruption: the local chief collects an entry fee from every person who comes to visit. None of this money ends up where it should, re-invested in the community: instead, it goes into the chief’s pockets.

There are just a few basic guesthouse operations, mainly catering to the NGO crowd from Freetown. We got ourselves a tent on the beach and celebrated the arrival of 2017 with the expats around a bonfire on the beach.

We felt a bit rough on New Year’s Day, but what a place to recover!

A few days later, still unable to tear ourselves a way, we moved into a hut and stuck around a bit longer.

We ate simple meals of grilled fish and plantains, and wandered every day for kilometers up the beach.

One day we visited Tacaguama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, which aims to reintegrate chimps captured for pets or orphaned in the bush meat trade, back into the wild.

Tacaguama was big news in 2006 when 31 enterprising chimps wedged open the door to their enclosure and orchestrated a breakout. They ran amok in the forest, attacked two visitors and killed a taxi driver before they were rounded up. Bruno, the mastermind behind the breakout, and two of his accomplices remain at large to this day.

Eventually we made our way from ‘upcountry’ – that is, basically anywhere outside of the peninsula – to a horrible, frenetic, sweltering, suburb called Waterloo, and on to Freetown itself.

Sierra Leone’s links to Britain are especially visible in the names of towns and villages (which bear little resemblance to their namesakes): Waterloo, Regent, Kent, Gloucester, York and Aberdeen, to name just a few.

English is the official language in Sierra Leone although its regular use is mainly limited to the capital. We’ve noticed English speakers often use quaint and rather formal phrases, such as wishing us ‘Many happy returns’ and offering ‘Compliments of the season’, as we’re here at Christmas. There are also around 23 local languages including Krio, the lingua-franca that unites us all – it’s partially understandable even to a visitor. And then there’s this less quaint and formal notice we see scrawled on walls everywhere:

In 1787, British philanthropists founded a ‘Province of Freedom’ on the site of present-day Freetown as a homeland for liberated slaves. Many American slaves were granted their freedom in return for fighting for England in the War of Independence. But they ended up impoverished on the streets of London while others were resettled (miserably) in Nova Scotia. The new province’s first settlers regularly encountered disaster – they were unprepared for the hostile climate and met with resistance by local tribes already living there. Although Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 it continued to thrive, helped along by chiefs who sold their own people. The British navy began intercepting and releasing slave cargoes setting sail from other parts of Africa. These ‘recaptive’ Africans were sent to Freetown, regardless of where they’d come from in the first place. Although originally intended for self-governed independence, the floundering settlement was taken on as a Crown Colony by Britain in 1808.

At the start of this trip back in Senegal, we saw a stone gateway at a slaving fortress on Ile de Goree; it symbolised the last glimpse of home for many captive Africans.

So it was only fitting that here at the end of our trip in Freetown, we visited the Old Wharf Steps. To us, they are just a worn down flight of stairs, but they have a powerful significance. Leading up from the port and into the city, these steps were the first that most newly liberated slaves took on African soil.

A huge cotton tree stands at a roundabout in the centre of Freetown. It’s a famous landmark: it was here that the first settlers cleared land and hacked roads out of the jungle, and the city began.

Despite all of its problems – Sierra Leone is an amazing place to visit, with so much fascinating history and potential for beauty and peace. But for now and maybe forever, it’s definitely a diamond in the rough.

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For more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Sierra Leone, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

The post Sierra Leone: Diamond in the Rough appeared first on WhirledAway.

We’d been staying at a strange hotel near Kindia, in Guinea. That hotel and all the other hotels in town are outside the centre and purpose-built around tacky nightclubs. Kids come from Conakry, the nearby capital city, to party. It’s a bit of a grim scene. We flicked on the aircon unit and a dead lizard fell out of it and landed on the floor with a cold splat.

We had signal on one of our phones, and no internet access at all – there are no internet cafes and wifi is virtually non-existent. Zipping into the city on the back of a moto-taxi, we sat at the table in a dark chop-shop – a local restaurant serving the ubiquitous rice-and-sauce mainstay of the West African diet. Eating our plate of rice and sauce, we talked about what to do next. There is little information available on Guinea (even if we could get online), and even less on how to get from Guinea to Sierra Leone, so we were going to have to wing it.

We were around three hours away from a village called Medina Oula, where there is a small and remote crossing point. Some distance beyond that on the other side is Outamba-Kilimi, Sierra Leone’s oldest national park. We decided we’d leave Kindia and its nightclubs behind early in the morning. We’d get to Medina Oula by yet another crowded sept-place (share-taxi) and then hopefully find motorcycles to take us from there. We didn’t know what awaited us on the other side of the border, but we were keen to find out.

So, we went to the market and bought rice, onions, tomato paste, garlic and some chunks of pumpkin to make our own rice and sauce; and we sought out a money changer who swapped a couple hundred Euros into Leones for us. We wanted to arrive in the next country prepared, although prepared for what, we weren’t exactly sure.

Medina Oula is indeed a small remote village, with customs and immigration formalities carried out in a little station in the middle. Once the police officer had stamped us out, I pointed down a long red dirt road disappearing into the distance and said ‘To Sierra Leone?’ The officer laughed and said ‘Oui, Sierra Leone.’

Since the no-man’s land here is around 10 kilometers long we needed a ride to the Sierra Leone border post. So we went around the corner and entered into lengthy negotiations with a pack of moto-drivers and other interested bystanders.

Eventually, backpacks strapped to the bikes and bribes paid by the drivers to the soldiers at the frontier, we were racing down the long red dirt road between two countries.

The Sierra Leoneans welcomed us heartily on the other side, which was nothing more than a couple of cinderblock huts in a clearing with a tree branch placed across the road. They let the Guinean moto-drivers take us to the next village.

It was Christmas Eve, and the villagers there were full-swing in party mode.

We blazed through the market on our bikes and quickly drew a curious crowd. Two more moto-drivers here agreed to take us the rest of the way to the national park.

And so with the involvement of pretty much an entire village on either side of the border, we went from Guinea to Sierra Leone the hard way, through the jungle on the backs of two bikes.

We arrived at Outamba-Kilimi, filthy from two hours’ travel on the red dirt trails.

The staff informed us immediately that the (only) other guest in the park was a Canadian here to research chimps. He was the first in a series of expat aid workers or researchers we’ve met here in Sierra Leone. The conversation goes the same way every time:

Aid Worker: ‘So, which NGO (Non Governmental Organisation) are you with?’
Us: ‘Oh, none…we’re travelling.’
Aid Worker (eyes widening in disbelief): ‘You’re tourists? Here? In Sierra Leone?’
Us (glancing sidelong at either a panorama of stunning nature or a pile of smoldering rubbish, whichever the case might be): ‘Sure, we came by road from Dakar.’
Aid Worker (after a short silence): ‘You’re on holidays in West Africa? How did you get here?’
Us (grinning in slightly unhinged manner): ‘You know, public transport.’
Aid Worker: (chokes on beer)

We stayed in a hut in Outamba-Kilimi’s tiny camp on the banks of the Little Scarcies river. We washed up in the river, and Oyv made us a fire.

On Christmas day we chipped in on a goat with our fellow-camper.

The park staff did all the…’prep-work’…and we ate Christmas dinner together.

The camp is definitely rustic. In lieu of a chicken coop, the camp staff file the chickens away in this old cabinet at night:

And of course, nothing goes to waste:

While we were in the park we also did some hiking. One day a guide took us out on the river in a leaky canoe (what other kind would there be?) to do some hippo-spotting.

On motorbikes again, we tore off to Kamakwie and then caught a poda-poda (mini-bus) on to Makeni. Here’s Oyv helping to pull a ferry across the river:

The various modes of transport may have different names in different places, but some things never change. Just like anywhere else in the region, the drivers pack every vehicle so full that the conductor uses a couple of attempts to forcibly slam the doors shut on passenger’ legs, and then has to climb back in through the window – or else ride outside.

As we travel through busy towns and small villages, we’ve met with interest and friendliness from the local people.

With one exception: we scare some of the smaller kids in more remote areas to death. They’ll burst into tears, scream at the sight of us, and run away. White people don’t pass through these areas that often. When we do, parents find great entertainment in their kids’ reactions to us. They’ll go as far as to point us out and then drag their screaming offspring over to say hello. But most kids love us and want to play.

It’s true that we have met only a few other travellers during this entire trip. We certainly draw looks from every local person we pass when we clunk by in an overcrowded sept-place or whip past on the back of a moto. The foreigners we’ve met here in Sierra Leone are always aid workers or researchers of some sort. We met a Frenchman on the beach one day, working for a European Union aid program. We talked about our travels here and the total dearth of tourists. He called us ‘Pioneers’ and that struck us as pretty fitting, here in Africa’s Wild West.

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Check out the rest of my stories from the road, for more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Guinea and Sierra Leone.

The post Africa’s Wild West: The Road to Sierra Leone appeared first on WhirledAway.

While we were at it, we fortified ourselves with fabulous three course fish and seafood dinners. One night we saw another couple served an enormous fish whole, on a platter. It was huge.

We assumed that they pre-ordered it and the hotel staff had swum out specially and harpooned it. But as it turned out, the giant fish was the regular main course that night and I had in fact ordered it as well.

These kind of misunderstandings are just a regular part of our days here. We cycle through repetitions of the same words until we land on the right translation. For example, we want milk for our coffee:

Oyv: Can we have some leche por favour?
Server: (looks vaguely mystified)
Oyv (realising that was Spanish): I mean lait of course.
Sar: No….that’s French.
Oyv: What is it in Portuguese? (Shrugs, mimes milking a cow.)
Sar: Grazie.
Server: (looks vaguely offended)

One morning as we ate our breakfast on a stilted platform overlooking the beach, we noticed three soldiers grouped around a table nearby and a police boat floating not far from shore. They were there to keep an eye on the elegant group of locals in national costume we’d seen the night before having drinks by the pool – an envoy of the President’s, scoping out the islands. This group did not of course come by the public boat – I am pretty sure we are the first visitors to this hotel ever, to have come by the public boat judging by the reaction we got from the entire staff and several expats when we said so – and we watched as two of the dignitaries were carried from the shore to the boat by the waiter.

It was definitely a T.I.A (This Is Africa) moment.

Done with the lazing around, we were rested and ready to move on. We went to Gabu, the last major town before the border where we planned to cross into Guinea and carry on to a town there called Labe. As I’ve mentioned before, travelling in Guinea-Bissau is complicated, and getting out of Guinea-Bissau is no exception. We asked around in Gabu’s busy market and heard a lot of differing opinions as to when – or if – any vehicle would leave for Labe. It sounded like we’d need to patch the trip together by changing cars at the border and in several other towns along the way. It sounded like a huge pain, even to us.

Dejected at the idea of being stranded in Gabu for life, we sat down for a beer and met two Nigerians named Eik and Mohammed (‘My name is Mohammed, but I am not Boko Haram’). We spent the evening having drinks with these two and several of their friends at a sort of by-the-hour hotel and they assured us that we’d find direct transport to Labe in the morning.

So, we decided on a plan of action. Or rather, inaction: we’d wait at the station for the ‘direct’ sept-place meant to go all the way to Labe. So we got up at 6 am and went back to the empty marketplace. We watched as it slowly came alive and filled with people cooking and selling food; men hawking tickets and loading luggage; and women threading their way through the crowds, selling hardboiled eggs and bananas from the heaped platters balanced on their heads, children playing underfoot.

We waited…and we waited some more, as the car slowly filled up with passengers and luggage.

Since we’d be crossing the border into Guinea the driver was not waiting for just the ‘standard’ seven passengers. No, we learned that in Guinea there are no rules governing transport – anything goes – and so the driver was not satisfied until he had the car packed with ten adults and four kids. At about 1pm, we finally set off and crossed the border. But not without a minor breakdown within the first half hour, of course.

We have a few rules for travelling in Africa that we generally stick to, like riding inside of a vehicle as opposed to clinging to the roof, and our cardinal rule is to try and avoid the roads at night. It was 6pm and darkness was closing in around us slowly. But with only about 250 kilometers remaining, as we pulled out onto a smooth paved road our spirits lifted and we thought, if we keep this speed, we’ll be in Labe in just a few hours. And then the driver pulled over and detoured into the bush.

In a decomposing station wagon carrying 14 people with an unlikely assortment of luggage including a rolled-up mattress tied to the roof, we proceeded to off-road rally for 250 kilometers on the worst road either of us has ever seen, anywhere. All the windows were open (we were just glad there was actually a windscreen, we’d seen cars without) and red dust from the road flooded in, matting our hair and choking us all.

We arrived at a deserted station in Labe eight and a half hours later. It was late, and the town was asleep, so the driver ordered us to sleep ‘dans la voiture’ (in the car), along with his loudly snoring assistant. As far as I know, the driver slept on a bench nearby.

We woke up stiff and chilly at dawn.

I blew something black out of my nose. Oyv rubbed the red grime around his eyes and peeled them open. He blinked a few times and then said to me, ‘This is ‘special interest travel’.’

We staggered out of the car and up the road, where we found a clutch of motos (motorcycles operating as taxis). Hopping on the backs of two bikes we went to a guesthouse we’d read about in an ancient Lonely Planet.

We spent half a day recovering here and then went to explore the town.

The next day we hired two moto-drivers to take us to Chutes de Saala, a gorgeous waterfall where we sat on the rocks and watched the water tumble over the cliffs, breathing the clean green air after all the smog and fumes of town and travel.

There are very few travellers in Guinea. We didn’t find a guidebook on the country. Lonely Planet didn’t even include a few pages on it in its latest West Africa compilation guide. Back in the 1950s France offered all of its colonies the choice of independence, or to form part of a Franco-African community. Guinea was the only one that chose to go it alone. France granted independence with a vengeance. They pulled out all colonial administration and infrastructure almost overnight, leaving the fledgling nation in crisis. It has been plagued by inept leadership, corruption and poverty ever since.

Road travel here is nothing short of ridiculous. Chickens are a vital travel accessory – almost no one leaves home without at least one in hand. Multiple passengers ride on the roofs of decrepit vehicles already overflowing with human cargo.

Goats and sheep are regularly lashed down with nets on the roof racks. Chickens tied at the feet dangle from windshield wipers.

We saw a live, nearly full-grown cow in the trunk of a hatchback.

Our motive in going to Guinea was basically that it stood between us and Sierra Leone. To fly from Guinea-Bissau was convoluted and expensive. And we love the adventure of overland travel – even in Guinea. But it is definitely a special interest.

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Check out the rest of my stories from the road, for more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Guinea-Bissau and Guinea.

The post Special Interest Holidays: Travels in Guinea appeared first on WhirledAway.

After 45 minutes of waiting and wondering if we should just stroll down the road a few more metres and cross illegally into Guinea-Bissau, a metal door around the corner of the building clanged open and the locals rushed it, and so did we.

There began a somewhat confusing sequence of queues and being waved around and dismissed by various officials and soldiers. An officer called out ‘Toubab!’ and pointed to my bag. I unpacked almost the entire contents before he was satisfied that I wasn’t carrying anything he could possibly demand a bribe for. A customs official pointed at a pair of handcuffs hanging on the wall, crossed his wrists tightly and then pantomimed being hauled off crying.

This is all probably fine if you speak French, Spanish, Portuguese or any other colonial European language, but Norway didn’t colonise anybody, and the Brits weren’t meddling (much) in this neck of the woods so it’s all Greek to us.

Back on the road our bus crawled slowly to the capital, Bissau. It was a beautiful drive, and my favourite kind – there are very few vehicles and the disastrous condition of the roads prevents drivers from otherwise driving much like a kamikaze pilot would fly a plane.

The old part of Bissau is a ghost town, an abandoned relic of the Portuguese colonial days left to disintegrate in the hot sun.

The streets are cracked and sandy and hulking vultures pick over piles of rubbish.

The new town is a bustling marketplace maze and a transport hub.

There may not be much to do in Bissau, but you can cross the road without being mown down, and roam the streets in peace and stay in a dingy dive without feeling nervous, and that makes it my new favourite city.

Travel to Guinea-Bissau is not totally straightforward. ATMs won’t accept our cards outside of Bissau or can’t be relied on, so we’d brought cash in both USD and Euro. Quite a bit, in fact:

No ATMs means there’s no shortage of black market money-changers wandering around muttering ‘Cambio – Change – Dollars – Euros?’ when we pass by. So we took 1000 Euros from our stash and went for a walk. We huddled with a few money-changers and their interested friends, calculators out. We had too much cash to handle in the street so the lead broker escorted us into a shop selling men’s jeans in big stacks. We arranged the money in piles on the stack of jeans and counted it, shook hands all around and Oyv and I departed with our new thick bundle of local cash.

We needed to figure out how to get to the Bijagos Archipelago, but when we asked the owner at our guesthouse when the public boat goes out to the main island, he answered ‘They don’t know. They should know, but they don’t.’ Our only option was to go to the port and ask around.

On the appointed day we watched from the dock as they loaded the pirogue – a long shallow wooden boat – with sacks of cement, ice, random freight, and a Unicef motorbike.

We climbed onto a fishing boat, then clambered onto the roof of the pirogue, wobbled our way forward to the bow and dropped from there to the deck.

We took our seats: me wedged partially underneath a bag of ice and Oyv perched on top of a sack of oranges.

Nearly 5 slow hours later we scaled a rusty barnacle encrusted ladder up onto the dock on the main island, Bubaque.

We’d read about a local place in the village serving, of all things, really good pizza. Since the village was a dusty rubbish-strewn strip lined with shacks, pigs and goats snuffling in the dirt, we were happily surprised when we opened the gate and found ourselves in a quiet beautiful garden overlooking the ocean. This oasis was decorated with strings of shells and wooden beads, and filled with the soft tinkling of wind chimes swinging in the breeze.

We hadn’t eaten since breakfast (a regular occurrence on these long-haul days) and we told the Spanish owner so. He pulled a face and informed us that getting food on the island ‘is complicated’. He’d have some fish by dinner time, he hoped, and he was almost ecstatic over finding 5 tomatoes in the market earlier that day.

T.I.A (This Is Africa) and all that, but hey, we love a good pizza or at least, we love not starving. We stared at each other in mutual horror when we thought of going hungry all night or worse, eating soggy biscuits for dinner.

On the islands, it’s not just tricky to get food – we quickly found out everything is complicated.

That night as we ate our fish at the Spaniard’s, a highly excited villager raced in and accosted our host who ran out the gate brandishing a fire extinguisher – so we jumped up and followed them down the road. The town’s museum was on fire, the only defence some hoses the locals were struggling to hook up and the fire extinguisher, which was exhausted completely after one ineffectual blast. We stood with the villagers and watched the building burn. The passports, documents, money, and worst of all – two months of footage, photos and interviews belonging to some French students making a documentary went up in flames.

We met a UN police officer dealing with drug- and human-trafficking, and some French expats trying to promote responsible tourism. They told us that the President has fired the Prime Minister and the entire Cabinet 5 times in two years – most recently just a few days ago – despite the protests of the international community. Guinea-Bissau has been plagued by one military coup and presidential assassination after another; ruined buildings serve as reminders of devastating conflict, and the fledgling democracy remains ever unstable, neatly highlighted by our guidebook’s casual reference that it’s safe to visit here ‘unless the country has descended into war’. As it is right now, it seems the biggest problem for visitors is the regular blackouts that plunge entire towns into darkness, and the ever-present possibility of falling into a hole in a disintegrating street.

To go the long beach on the other side of the island, we travelled 18 kms through the forest in a trailer attached to a motorcycle, kids running behind screaming ‘Branco, branco!!’ (‘White’, in Portuguese).

We stayed at a wildly overpriced beach camp but …it’s complicated. Nearly everything needs to be imported here, many things shipped in from as far away as Portugal.

It’s beautiful, the most deserted of desert islands I’ve ever seen:

Walking for kilometers up the beach every day we only ran into a few locals and a couple of cows.

Of course, travelling in this archipelago is complicated so island hopping is not really an option – the public boats run rarely if ever and we lost track of the number of times we heard that a boat doesn’t work, or is broken, or stopped.

We did get to the next island, Rubane, by speedboat. When it was time to go back to the mainland, the hotel sent us by private plane from a dirt airstrip fringed with palms:

None of this comes cheaply and so the islands don’t tend to draw many backpackers, and the poor infrastructure and lack of development seem to limit tourism all around. For us, that’s fine – we had the beaches and forests to ourselves. For the locals trying to run businesses, it’s another story.

But what is travel without complications; it’s just that much more rewarding when you do arrive at one of West Africa’s best-kept secrets.

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Check out the rest of my stories from the road, for more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Guinea-Bissau and Senegal.

The post Guinea Bissau: It’s Complicated appeared first on WhirledAway.

We wanted to go to Cap Skirring, a town on the beach, and every tout in the vicinity knew it too. They swarmed us instantly with persistent offers of transport, accommodation, food, currency exchange and so on. We shook them off, but despite our best efforts it seems nearly impossible to do anything at all without inadvertently engaging the services of at least one. So, our latest new friend and his ‘assistant’ close on our heels, we set about arranging the next leg of our journey.

We tried to change some money without his assistance – but he was there with his calculator briskly tapping the buttons. We tried to buy some water, but the ‘assistant’ materialised beside us at the market stall, helpfully repeating the price after the shopkeeper. We looked for the mini busses heading to Cap Skirring but he was there, waving tickets and tugging our packs off our backs, shepherding us towards the bus. Even as we settled into our seats he was there, leaning through the window asking for a payment for his services. We didn’t ask for his help (quite the opposite in fact) and all of us knew perfectly well he’d already made money off us via commission on the money changing and on the bus tickets. As for the assistant, he’d done nothing more than follow us to the stall and back. This all may sound like a nuisance but it’s just the way these kind of transactions work. There seems to be some kind of complicit understanding that travellers like us are fair game, and the bus drivers and others working there in an official capacity turn a blind eye and leave us to negotiate the totally arbitrary cost of bringing our backpacks along with us on the trip.

We were now travelling in Senegal’s once-troubled Cassamance region. Like an incision on the map, The Gambia cuts the Cassamance off from the rest of the country and there has long been a separatist movement here, bringing fighting and unrest. Bouncing down the roads in our rusty sept-place we passed through one military checkpoint after another, getting out to show our passports to the soldiers hunkering down behind sandbags.

The local people have resisted outside influence and authority starting with France’s colonial administration and in more recent years, that of the Senegalese government. This eventually led to a cycle of civil wars and shaky ceasefires until a successful peace agreement was reached in 2004.

The conflict and then the sporadic road banditry that followed of course took its due toll on tourism, and for a time foreign governments warned their citizens against visiting the Cassamance. For many local people the collapse of the tourist industry they depended on was as bad as the fighting itself. The French expat running our guesthouse said that as if the political difficulties in the Cassamance weren’t enough of a problem, when followed by the Ebola outbreak – a faraway phenomenon here – businesses like his slowed nearly to a stop. But the tourists and travellers are returning, not to mention the guesthouses, restaurants and services to support them.

We were happy. It’s a beautiful spot, we had a friendly guesthouse to stay at and a long beach to lounge on.

Tourism is back but there’s still a rough edge to the place that makes it interesting. We spent time wandering up and down the beach and Oyv managed to get himself into – and win – a pushup contest.

We quickly got used to being addressed as ‘toubab’ – shouts of ‘toubab, toubab’ accompany us wherever we go. It’s a more or less friendly term for a (white) person of European descent. We met several Gambians here, instantly recognisable to us since they could speak English well and seem to like befriending travellers – sorry, toubabs – for no other reason than to speak it.

One day we hired a motorbike and set off to do some exploring. Hiring the bike was a feat in and of itself and only accomplished at all thanks to ‘My French’ which was good enough to argue down an inflated price, at least. The bike came with two helmets but these were just a token to make the police happy. They were not in any way meant to protect us – there were no chin straps so we just perched them ineffectually on our heads, and took off. In just a few moments, we’d left Cap Skirring – more or less a one-street town anyway – behind.

And we were all by ourselves in the Cassamance.

Our bike was in no better shape than any other vehicle we’d been in so far, and we chugged along on sandy roads and forest trails, getting off to push sometimes on the climb back up from long empty beaches. For such a small vehicle the bike turned out to be real gas guzzler and we sputtered into a little town on fumes. Soon enough two local teenagers understood our problem and led us through the village to a house where we bought this litre of fuel in a gin bottle:

…from these kids:

They seemed happy to make the sale – I’m sure they made a great profit selling gasoline in a gin bottle to two toubabs.

We walked back to the bike and filled the tank, then returned the bottle to the kids.

Then we punctured the tire and ended up taking it to this garage where the mechanic (once we tracked him down after his prayers and a lengthy lunch) patched the tire for 2000 CFAs (3 Euros).

And that was not the end of our vehicular problems either. The next day we decided to leave Cap Skirring. A sept-place driver tried hard to convince us to come with him but his car was still empty. We knew that meant waiting for it to fill up with passengers – there is no set schedule for departures. We spied a transport-misto (literally, ‘Mixed Transport’ – whatever that means) nearly full and we got on it instead. The mini bus made it out of town and over the bridge and then with an ominous thump and a shudder it coasted to a permanent stop and we all abandoned ship (the roadsides are littered with the rusted out carcasses of vehicles which have met a similar fate). We sat on the embankment, waiting. The sept-place sailed by – rather triumphantly I felt – leaving us in the dust. Eventually we were shunted onto another bus, stopped to pick not a person but a single, live chicken, and we were on our way again.

Back in Ziguinchor, our old friend the helpful tout and his youthful sidekick greeted us exuberantly. We were happy to see them both, in a way, but employed our favourite tactic of refusing to reveal our destination and instead saying only, ‘it’s a secret’.

Another tout took it upon himself to point us to the front seat and demanded money. I was ready for another breakdown, this time of the nervous variety. I asked the tout if his job was to harass passengers at the bus station. Either he misunderstood me, or he was overcome by a fit of honesty – because he answered ‘Yes’.

Leaving the country seemed like the only way to escape this tout for once and for all. And as it happens, we were doing just that – the bus (if it ever started) would take us to the border with Guinea-Bissau and we’d make our next move into the unknown.

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Senegal, check out the rest of my stories from the road. To help you out with the details, I’ve also written a travel guide about Senegal.

The post Toubabs on the Road: Hiring a Motorbike in the Casamance appeared first on WhirledAway.

Arriving in Senegal, we found the immigration officer napping under his desk. He crawled out to stamp everybody in, and so our trip began.

Dakar, the capital, turned out to be a pleasant surprise. We’d expected another overwhelming African city but once we’d dropped our backpacks off at a hotel and ventured out, we found it anything but. The streets were relatively quiet, dusty and scruffy, and traffic was thankfully low-key. In search of something to eat, we noticed that Norwegian cuisine has (believe it or not) had some kind of influence here:

We ordered hummus and baba ganouj, but it’s good to know Norwegian visitors to Senegal won’t have to starve.

But many of the visitors to this former French colony are from France, and the local people speak French, and it wasn’t long before we started to wonder if in all of our travels it has ever been this hard for us to communicate. We are relying almost entirely on vague hand gestures and ‘My French’ – which consists of a few greetings, days of the week, numbers, kinds of food (that’s pretty vital, actually) and some other random and totally useless words I can recall, such as ‘vernis a ongles’ (nail polish). ‘Oyv’s French’ is strictly limited to ‘Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir’, so that’s not really coming in handy.

One of the things we did in Dakar was visit Ile de Goree, a small island just 20 minutes from the city by ferry. There are no cars there, only a little beach and sandy streets, and pretty colourful buildings slowly crumbling under the weight of trailing bougainvillea.

This peaceful, sunny island has a dark past: under the Europeans it was a slaving station during the 18th and 19th centuries. The most famous building is the Maison des Esclaves, where captives brought from all over Africa were kept in dungeon-like storerooms on the ground floor. A door in the back of the house opens directly onto the rocky shore and the ocean beyond.

Although it’s unlikely that any people were actually loaded onto the slave ships from this door – the rocks would have prevented any ship coming close – the empty doorway now symbolises the haunting point of no return for the desperate people who caught their last glimpse of home through it, from the crowded ships delivering them into a life of slavery.

The next day, we cabbed to the chaotic bus station. Before letting us loose in the crowds, our considerate cabbie pantomimed a security briefing. He dramatically patted all his pockets several times and looked around in exaggerated alarm and confusion. He stared grimly at me to make sure this message was received, and waved us cheerily on our way.

We were looking for the sept-places bound for Banjul. A sept-place is an old (and I mean really, really old) station wagon, unfit for the road in every possible way.

We piled into one with 5 other passengers: surprisingly, the name sept-place – seven seater – is more or less respected, if you don’t count the driver and 3 kids also in the car. With a heap of luggage tied to the roof, we set off at a fast clip and zoomed down the highway. Oyv and I were the only passengers digging down under the seats hoping for seatbelts (a totally futile exercise) and lavishly applying sunscreen.

We were heading for Senegal’s Cassamance region and we figured the fastest way to get there meant cutting straight across The Gambia, a sliver of a country sometimes no more than 35 km across, surrounded entirely by Senegal. We’d read that The Gambia is ‘a splinter in Senegal’s side, or the tongue that makes it speak’, depending on who you talk to. We talked to a lot of Gambians and for us, it’s definitely the latter. In The Gambia, once a British colony, they speak English and life instantly became a lot easier for us.

We went looking for a place to stay in Banjul, the tiny capital city. A man lying on a mattress in the street out front of the Princess Diana Hotel did not get up, yet nevertheless welcomed us with a regal sweep of his arm towards the door, and so we checked in.

We were soon befriended by the local hangers-on outside. Tommy and Bobby pulled up chairs for us, made us tea, and shared their dinner. We sat around for a couple of hours, talking and laughing, and quickly learned Bobby’s favourite – and The Gambia’s famous – phrase ‘It’s nice to be nice’.

The ‘Smiling Coast’ of every tourist advert, The Gambia does a booming trade in mass market tourism, focused around the Senegambia Strip. Big hotels, restaurants and bars clutter the long beach. Musicians drum and dance, and hawkers flog horse rides and wooden souvenirs.

Along with cheap drinks and questionable food, we saw the darker side to The Gambia’s tourist industry: the ‘Bumsters’. Counterparts to the young local girls seen hand-in-hand with old western men in many parts of Southeast Asia, Bumsters are young local guys with middle-aged European sugar mamas. When they haven’t got a lady friend on the go, Bumsters lurk outside hotels and try persistently to attach themselves as guides – wanted, needed, or not – to any passing tourist. Apparently, women visiting alone can expect steady attention and dedicated pursuit from these guys who, on the other hand, are only responding to an apparently significant demand.

But, ‘It’s nice to be nice’ is definitely The Gambia’s slogan. Besides our friendly acquaintances at the Princess Di, everywhere we go we find a smiling person who will help us out or just pass the day with a bit of chit chat. And hey, the Bumsters and hustlers are pretty nice too, after all.

Our main motive in travelling through the Gambia was to visit the two very casual embassies of Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau. Embassies tend to move around here, and so they were not at the last known addresses we’d found online. Determining the actual locations involved a lengthy chat with the guy at the shop where we ate breakfast who consulted a police officer, a few taxi drivers and some pedestrians in the street. We are used to this sort of thing: we don’t have any business to mind anymore because everyone else minds it for us. Finding the embassies was the hard part; our visas processed surprisingly fast, given the amount of fuss when we tried to apply in advance from home. It seems the closer you get to the country in question , the more lax the rules become. No one demanded references, invitations, plane tickets, proposed itineraries, or proof of funds. One consular officer dismissed my proffered yellow fever vaccination certificate with a bored wave of his hand. We aren’t the only ones looking for visas either…I’m now penpals with a police officer working at one of the embassies who is at least as keen on my country as I am on his.

Happy with these two new visa labels in our passports, we were ready to carry on. The owner of the Princess Diana hotel spontaneously volunteered to drive us two towns over and dropped us off at the market, wishing us a safe journey – because, you know, it’s nice to be nice. We wrestled our backpacks into yet another crowded sept-place, and set off to the next border with Senegal.

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Senegal, check out the rest of my stories from the road.  To help you out with the details, I’ve also written a travel guide about Senegal.

The post West Africa: It’s Nice to be Nice appeared first on WhirledAway.