Into the Next Unknown: Crossing the Border from Liberia to Ivory Coast

We ate our last breakfast at the guesthouse in Monrovia to the sound of a rattan cane swishing through the air and kids crying. There’s a man who works at the Lamb’s Kingdom school next door, or possibly just volunteers, and his job is to stand at the door and whip latecomers. There’s a way around it though – kids who are late can bribe the man to look the other way. Nobody seems to think there is anything unacceptable about this arrangement, besides us and possibly the kids. But a lot of unusual activities take place at or around Lamb’s Kingdom. When I arrived it was playing host to a sort of crusades. One popular topic I’ve seen advertised: ‘Family Deliverance – Dealing With Satanic Exchange’.

Back in the capital for a day, we needed to pick up the visas we’d applied for at the Cote d’Ivoire Embassy and top up our cash reserves. Outside the city ATMs are not that easy to find. Even in Monrovia finding one that can and will actually dispense money can be difficult. Plus, we really wanted to eat more hummus at Diana’s, a Lebanese restaurant we’d gotten attached to. Outside the city it’s rice, fish, and more rice.

Border-bound, we stopped off in Buchanan and stayed in a little round hut on the riverbank.

There’s a rambling wooden deck built over the river and around a pool.

Eating breakfast at sunrise on the deck we realised we were the only guests.

It’s not surprising. Tourism is just really not a thing in Liberia. After ten days in the country we’d only met three other travelers.

A few nights later we sat in the restaurant at our hotel in Ganta, eating collared greens and rice with our fingers. Ganta is a long, dusty, noisy strip of a town, about eighty kilometers from the border post. This place didn’t seem to have any guests either, but that didn’t stop them setting up a sound system out front and playing music so loudly the windowpanes reverberated. It was nearly Christmas, after all. We’d almost forgotten, but the overly-enthusiastic DJ’s festive t-shirt reminded us.

As usual the prospect of an upcoming border-crossing prompted a lot of discussion. Sometimes I get the feeling that the things we talk about might not be the sort of things most people consider just a regular part of their holiday planning. You know: current security situations; corrupt officials out after bribes; obscure frontier towns we’ve never heard of before but will shortly be visiting (and possibly stranded in); landmines – things like that. This type of conversation usually stems from my reading old articles entitled ‘Death and Chaos at the Liberian-Ivory Coast Border’ or similar.

Unsettling articles aside, border crossings are one of our favourite things on these trips. There’s something exciting about leaving behind a country that’s become familiar, walking across a border, and finding out what’s on the other side.

The road out of Ganta to the border deteriorates swiftly into a rutted dirt track and the best way to travel it is by motorcycle so we hired two bikes and drivers. It’s the dry season and we flew down the road in a choking cloud of dust.

Three hours later when we climbed stiffly off our bikes at the immigration checkpoint we were coated in red dirt.

We answered questions, filled out forms, and dodged money-changers. Waving goodbye to the last Liberian soldier we crossed the border and repeated the process on Cote d’Ivoire’s side.

There’s a health-check there and a notice that shots will be administered on the spot. The official at the desk looked at our vaccination records. Raising his eyebrows at the long history therein, he waved us past. A random border-post in West Africa is pretty much the very last place I’d like to get a yellow fever shot.

So we’d arrived in the next unknown: a muddy field in the middle of nowhere. We’d come prepared, sort of – I was carrying 200 000 CFAs (a common West African currency – about 350 USD) from Senegal. And, we had ‘my French’. It was comfortable, back there in English-speaking Liberia. A couple of steps over an invisible line and just like that – we were back to relying on whatever language skills I could dredge up from highschool.

There weren’t a lot of people around but we found two moto-drivers to take us to the next town.

Nearly two hours and numerous checkpoints later, they dropped us off: at the police station. We walked into the station covered in dirt from head to toe, but the officer in charge didn’t bat an eye. In addition to re-registering our entry into the country, he sent someone out to buy us water and paid for our next moto-ride across town to the bus stand, where we caught a bus to Man.

We’d been travelling to Man for ten long hours, all the way from Liberia. Our guidebook listed the hotel we’d picked as having a pool and an on-site restaurant. But the pool was empty – from the looks of it for a long time. The restaurant was closed. And it wasn’t just the pool that was out of water: there was no running water on the property at all. The sulky woman at the desk communicated this crucial fact to us in French and with a lot of pointing at the buckets of water assembled in the courtyard.

We were dirty and hungry and tired and kind of sore. Out in the street we bought some baguettes and Laughing Cow cheese (this is France, after all!). Standing in our big bathroom and splashing around in the buckets of chilly water, rivulets of reddish-brown water ran off us and down the drain. We were in a new country, and correspondingly high-spirited. Sometimes a baguette and a cold bucket shower is what you get – and all you need – when you wander across a border and into the next unknown.

Read More

Planning something similar yourself? Take a look at our guide for important practical details: How to Cross the Border from Liberia to Ivory Coast

And check out the rest of my stories from the road, for more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Ivory Coast and Liberia.