Freetown

Now Freetown is cool. We’re back in a city with a vibe. The city centre is one of the biggest and coolest markets I’ve seen. It is huge, and you can buy anything… the strawberry maidens have been replaced by these muscular guys with barrows full of coconuts. He hacks open a cold coconut brimming with milk, mothers milk. You walk around, drinking your cool refreshing coconut, checking out about an acre of shoe merchants. Sneakers, trainers, soccer shoes, glittery stripper heels, sandals, work shoes..you name the brand, the model, rip off, original..this is the place to be! Its really colourful, people all over, singing, shouting milling down the street. Cars edge along, walking pace, the speed governed by the shopping rate of local women. You can get anything there, the range is tremendous, and everyone wants to do business, we haggled over green converse shoes  (didn’t have my size), we checked out the belt buckles. Electronics, clothes, food… its all there, spread on the streets, being moved for cars, making cars move for it. The call to prayer breaks the noise only momentarily, the crowd continuing to edge along the road. Freetown is cool.

They have cool bars and clubs to. We went partying with our new best friend Jo, a rather amusing Englishman we had met on Tiwai. Off we went to hit the clubs and check the local scene. Too much fun, riding around on motorbike taxis from club to club. Checking out the nightlife, music, people, dancing. Sierra Leone has its own sound I really enjoyed Freetown.

I did spend most of my time in Freetown in the police station. You see at the one beach we had a bunch of our stuff lifted from us. Being anal retentive I keep all my stuff together in a few bags, so when one of them is taken they get quite a lot. Unfortunately there was a heap of MAPA money in the bag too. So I had to spend some time at the police station, greasing palms along the way to lubricate the machine that is the Sierra Leone police. I need a statement for insurance you see, just a statement. Its pretty cool, once you have been there for 4 hours in a day you become part of the furniture, I saw the ends of a fight in the holding cell. I started running errands for the big guy, calling people for him. I pretty much met every person and went to every office. I’d sit and watch Cbaz down below as he fixed the roof-rack, contemplating how much I would not like to be incarcerated here! But it got it done and after lifting the one police lady to the other station, paying a beer drinking typist to type up a document for me and then getting the police lady to take it to the big cheese and getting all the official stamps etc, 2 days later, fourty thousand of the local currency and two days later, I had the report.

We moved on and are in the middle of Guinea somewhere.

-Chris-

Beaches

Man, does Sierra Leone have some beaches they are by far the most beautiful I've ever seen. Green forest, white, white sand and azure blue ocean. Just like the Sierra Leone flag. It is unbelievable. No people, just miles of beach. We drank cold beer, ate crayfish and barracuda kebabs. We chatted to local guys, we slept on the beach... we met a guy Jo, an English reporter at Tiwai and were giving him a lift back to Freetown. He is one hilarious chap. Really good night, drinking Pina coladas with local rum, sitting chatting to local guys about the war, it sounded horrible, the ten years since it ended, the fifty years of peace. Chatting about politics and the country, it's a spectacular place. I did get a whole lot of my stuff stolen at this beach, and Cbaz lost some shorts and Jo a pair of sandals. But stuff is stuff, the place is still beautiful, and its the first hassle we've had this trip. We're moving to Senegal now, via Freetown checking out the parks and forest reserves as we go.

Tiwai Island

So we’re in Sierra Leone, this place is super friendly and really picturesque.

There is a problem with traveling through landscapes like this, and seeing places with this kind of beauty. One runs the risk of failing to describe the beauty adequately without being guilty of gross hyperbole. Not everything can be incredible, not everything can be unbelievable, exclamations are not cumulative marks to be added as a degree of emphasis. But, Tiwai island begs special mention.

Rather than shower the concept in adjectives, using the thesaurus function of my computer to try and distinguish this place from the umpteen others we have seen; I will simply try and describe the scene.

It’s a 12km² island in the middle of a river, home to eleven species of primates, Pygmy hippos and untold numbers of birds. But, its more than that, it’s the place that little boys imaginations conjure up, a place of dark water rivers, crocodiles and tool using chimpanzees. Its a place where in the evening you sit, in a raphia hammock watching the African wilderness around you. The river is dark from the tannins of forest decomposition. Oily almost, it oozes its way through the thick walled jungle, the raphia palms bend, overhanging, dipping, tasting.  Every now and then, the treetops dance in the light. A sudden glow as red colobus dive, arms outstretched, sunlight catching the red fur, fire-balls in the sky. I took myself for a little forest walk, by myself, barefoot in the forest, just me, shorts and a vest… Magic! I saw black and white colobus, Diana monkeys and Sooty mangabeys (The original vector of SIV and subsequently HIV subtype C, according to Dr S. Barichievy who knows everything). I saw red colobus, Cusimans, a massive cobra, untold numbers of birds, untold species of butterflies, all new to me. A plethora… that’s the word, a plethora of new!

For the nerds reading, mainly Nic, Marco , Bryan, Graeme Ellis and Don…the people who care about birds… on one beach, just sitting in the water I saw among others; palmnut vultures, Egyption plovers, rock pratincoles and African skimmers. There are blue headed beaters, and numerous unidentifiable and therefore obviously very rare waders. Hordes of forest birds with their little flickers of color and haunting calls abound in the dense green. At night I sat alone, in the silence of the river noise, for hours in the moonlight, watching the river, obsidian in the night. Thinking the things that now grown little boys imaginations think of; I’m on an island in a river, the forest areas of Sierra Leone all around…man, life is good.

I do think that Tiwai island is a very beautiful place in the world, a definite place to go and see. Spend a day or two, get Lahai the body-builder look alike chef to whip you up something delicious, go for a walk with the guides who know every tree and bird. Stroll around in the green or laze in the river. There are people researching pygmy hippos and camera trap pictures reveal their presence, every now and then you see their sign in the jungle, just a munched plant here and there. It’s a special place this.

Liberia Sleeping

So, I can’t really comment much on Liberia. We were there for three days and I spent most of it asleep. I’d managed to get the old Malaria, and so was man down. Wrapping myself in a down sleeping bag in the forests of Liberia was a dead giveaway that something was wrong. So, the doctor took charge and we went to the local clinic for a test.  Then, drugged-up on the best quality medicine German taxpayers money can buy, I dazed and slept and Cbaz drove, pretty much all the way to the coast in Greenville. The roads in the East are pretty incredible, just as I pictured it, one road, big potholes and just a wall of green on each side. Its spectacular. The roads take their tolls and are littered with broken down vehicles, people fixing, people waiting to be fixed. We joined them; a severed fuel line left us motionless in the heat and mud. Cbaz doctored the severed tube, while I sweated under the vehicle and got it in and out of place, half an hour no problem. I must say, we’re becoming experts on diesel fuel line systems. The rest of our time was a daze to me, but it seemed to be good. Monrovia streets at night, expensive hotel, Getting visas and then we moved on… I basically slept through Liberia.

We went through to check out SAPO, which is somewhere I definitely intent to go back to. No road access, you hike into this one. 6hr hike in from the one entrance, 45 mins from the other. You take all your own kit and food, take a guide and off you go. Now that sounds like a good time. Highest mammal diversity in the world, and they have some incredible species lists. Yellow backed Duikers, Jentiks duikers, heaps of others including Giant Pangolin (but pangolins don’t really exist so I don’t believe them) Anyone keen?

So that is what a day should be like….

Now that was a days of days; one of the best I can remember in a long long time. Sitting with my back in Cote de Ivoire, feet in Guinea ...gazing down a sheer rock face at the untouched forest hundreds of meters below. All you can hear is the sound of wind in the grass and the screeches of wild chimpanzees floating on the wind. A mate of mine Graeme Ellis talks about the “Cosmic Mind Fuck”, when a moment is just too much to take in…I got you Graeme, I got you!

I’ve been harping on about Mount Nimba for as long as I can remember, after reading about it in a book on mammals of Africa, and seeing it’s got a insanely high diversity, things like otter shrews and Goliath frogs. It’s the single most important thing I came on this trip to see and was worth it, many fold. It’s a cashew nut shaped range of hills that rise up out of Cote De Ivoire and border Guinea and Liberia. The landscape is beautiful…ridiculously so.

We spent the night huddled in our tents, heavens open and rain bucketing down. It turns out that being in one of the wettest areas in Africa means rain, and it doesn’t mess around. It was incredible, lighting, storm, and in the lulls between thunder the shrieks of chimps in the forest not far away… then I knew it was going to be good ( wild chimps, not sanctuary chimps, not released chimps, truly wild populations… incredible). Our day started at five, and by sunrise we were hiking up through the farmlands and banana fields with our guides, sun rising up over the hills, before we plunged headlong into the thick of it. Our guide “Dhana” expertly cut his way along a path I battled to see, weaving between trees too tall to see the top of. We were immediately immersed in Lianas, a plethora of different mushrooms and wood fungus. The call of louries, the repeating whistles of the Klaas’s Cuckoo, Robins, Flycatchers and a hundred other calls, the forests hiding their owners in a thicket of green. Tree falls fascinated me, tree bowls 6 meters in diameter, with a tree five times that height, smashed through the forest, opening up a gap and the survivors racing for the light. You can almost see the race! Massive pink moths and leaf litter crawling with goodies. You could spend your life in there, just catching, looking learning. Everywhere you turn something new, everywhere you look fascinating. Doing a biodiversity survey here must be like winning the lottery, incredible. The walk was long and hard and C-baz and I were drenched in sweat, but what a day. Breaking clear of the forest, the major climb is across a grassland blanketed by clouds that rise vertically up the face from Cote de Ivoire. You barely see the world below, then Hollywood movie like, the clouds part and stretched out before you is one of last remaining pieces of Primary Forest in Africa, man, what a sight!

At one point the ridge is only about five meter wide, almost straight down on both sides, Forest forest forest. Unfortunately the perspective gained with the altitude also shows how precarious the position is. The forest is an island in a landscape of slash and burn; encroaching people, hungry people. Looking into Liberia, the perfect smile of the mountains arc is marred by the deep V cut into it by a mine. A rotten tooth in a perfect smile, necrosis edged, the rot spreading. The thing is, this place is no longer that hard to get too, the road are good, the war is gone, the people are so very friendly. Guinea is great, inexpensive and has landscapes, wow does it have some landscapes. People need to come here, climb the mountain, see the chimps, research the trees, put the landscape on the map again. I’m not a Greenpeace activist or anything, but while the worlds not watching this place will disappear.

Off into Liberia tomorrow, to Sapo which is rumoured to have the highest mammal diversity in the world… I’ll blog sometime.

Peace

-Chris-

Pushing our luck

On the way to Ziamma we got stopped at one of the weirder roadblocks I’ve ever been stopped at… Again a few drunken guys, all with knives and shotguns, they’d pulled trees into the road and many were in traditional dress. Mudcloth and these cool tri–point hats that we’d seen in Mali in the Dogon area. Friendly enough we were told by the one guy that he was an official, as he slurred his accusation and that we owe him a toll. So we entered into negotiations with the five guys now surrounding the car and in a mixture of French, Krio Na d English set about arguing our way through. Anyway they were a bit of a push over really, we didn’t pay him the toll and the guys laughing let us through. It’s the first time we’ve heard Krio spoken, an almost gansta slang from further in Liberia. It’s a really cool dialect…”BossMan… HowdaBodee?”, its great

Ok, so C-baz and I do get a little cocky with roadblocks sometimes. The next one we overdid a bit, but we are learning!

So we left Faranah and headed to Macenta… the place that the forest zone of Guinea officially starts. Now having read up about these places since I was a kid, I’m very excited to see the real forests of West Africa. I expect rolling hills of closed canopy forest, red river hogs and buffalo with Pygmy hippos and Colobus monkeys to be abounding. I know I’m only really going to see logging, cassava plantations, rubber plantations and goats. But every now and then I expect to see a piece of heaven, nestled in amongst the exploitation. Or at the very least I can remedy the myopia of my naïve minds eye.

So we made it to Kissidougou, the frontier town to the Forest zone. And we noticed a heap of military vehicles, men dangling off the back driving around, racing down the road we were to go. Coming back. Sometimes with guns, other times with riot gear. As we drove down the road we encountered the furious waving of military. Now negotiating with military is always tricky because they are used to chain of command, and we aren’t. So we chatted and they were pretty helpful. Eventually we got the story, there was a little unrest down the road but it was aimed at the military by the military school, a big-brother little brother scenario…ok good. So we thought we'd chance it…we aren’t military.

Maybe not the best idea we’ve ever had but, off we drove passed the waving arms of taxi drivers also blockaded in and passed the last few military guys, all saying, "return! return!" and we ambled down the road to see what the fuss was about.

So the fires burning the shops and schools had died down, but there were some blockades in the road, trees, concrete, tyres, that kind of thing…nothing hectic. And there were a few guys in the road, refusing us entry. So we stopped and had a chat. I think we were lucky that we were greeted by the sober guys, who quite politely and quickly asked us to please go back as it was not a good idea what we were trying to do…and then we saw why. It was like a scene from a Frankenstein movie. Students armed with bricks, rocks, the occasional axe type thing started appearing from everywhere, hundreds of them, the mob appearing over the hilltop. I looked for a pitch fork, but I didn’t see one. Then they were around us.

Hasty discussions turned into drunk guys with half bricks shouting, drunk-stoned shirtless guys swearing and challenging us and an uncertain look from their sober leader telling us that he can’t control them. So when we looked behind and saw the mob circling, we were all smiles and farewells and beat a hasty retreat, back up the road. Our tail between our legs, not a good idea guys…but we tried.

But the guys sorted it out that evening and the next morning we were back on the road C-baz chatted to the military guys got the full story and they explained how the big brother had made sure the little brother knew its place. Cool people and the military guys went out of their way to help us. Thanks

-Chris-

Bamako to Guinea; the rules have changed

So we made it to Bamako, via Segou… where we didn’t find the cultural hotspot we were expecting. But the Niger river is rather spectacular there. Pirogues floating on the turquoise water, lined by green. Colourful boats in the harbour, moving stocks and fish and what-not.

Bamako itself is pretty funky, we camped atop the ablution block of a local backpackers, it's a Libyan tent vibe with no chairs. The cushions and stools are littered with an eclectic bunch, French hippies smoking pot and German motorbike overlanders selling their gear, local students using the cheap wifi, and expats looking for a party. We were there to get our Guinea visas and catch up on some reading, reading up on Ivory Coast, reading up on ways to get Visas to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Reading the news and working out what’s next. The Arab world is burning, Cote de Ivoire is in turmoil, and catch up on the world beyond the four car windows and procession of amazing landscapes that is our home. And of course, try out the local nightlife. First night in Bamako we hit a reggae club owned by a local legend, really good vibe, weird party, Canadian girls searching out the BBC. It was an open mike night, with Hip hop mixed with reggae beats and cool refreshing beer, it wasn’t too bad a warm up. The next night, Friday I think, we hit it hard.

Playing my broken French wing man position for C-baz we hit a club where I found my new favourite music. I have no idea what the genre is called. The only word to describe the heavy angry rhythm is hectic, and the dancing even more so. On the dance floor I felt well out of place as the local chaps tore it up, ladies going crazy, these people know how to kick it….hectic. We were told that these hard core primal party beats are from Cote de Ivoire, they’re intense, they’re almost angry, they’re awesome. Needless to say we have searched some out, along with a whole host of other music and there's a party in Jhb in a few months time, bring your west African rhythm.

Within a few days we had our Visas and it was time to move. C-baz had reset his clock to Cameroonian time, and so was a bit late in getting back to the hostel in the morning. But, as always, he was there, immaculately dressed, smile on his face and we made our way southward to the Guinea border. No hassles, no problems, just an incredible change in landscape as you move away from the arid and the savannahs become thicker and more wooded. Mali receded and Guinea came into view… and then the fun started.

We’ve seen our fair share of borders, borders that don’t exist, borders that are manned. Officious officials are a game now and we know all the rules, or so we thought. But not here, this one was different. This one wasn’t anything more than a police roadblock, about 100m before the border and they wanted money. We refused, we threatened, we cajoled. We strong armed, we sat and tried to wait them out. We realized when the answer to the question of “who is this for?” was “well me, who else” that the rules had changed. It’s a beautiful thing in is own right; gone are all the pretence and crap that we’ve had so far, gone are people trying to find something wrong with the car, or accusations of invalid documents. Gone are the tricks and tests, showing papers and making sure signatures are correct, of me bullshitting and C-baz out-arguing them. I have to give this guy respect, he is beautifully honest. “No pay, no go, and this money is mine”. So we entered the world where its no longer a matter of if you pay or not, now its a world of negotiating how much you pay… its great.

We got fleeced 3 times in four roadblocks all within 400m. The customs guy stamped us in , but then issued us a fee for stamping us in. Handed our documents to his friend who searched the car, all its contents and then simply said, “Pay me”. No, discussion or anything, just, “pay me or I don’t let you go”. Beautifully done sir, well played! So we negotiated and payed him a euro or two and made our way. Right to the next roadblock. Now we have passports stamped, a $130US visa, have been searched and all is fine, we’ve paid customs and some other guy. But then there is a roadblock, 10m from the customs post and they simply say “pay us”. C-baz got us through that one with references to Michael Ballack the German footballer… its all about playing the game, the beautiful game.

And then …it was done, and Guinea opened up to us. Beautiful landscapes, truly friendly people. The border has been a once off and to be honest it was pretty impressive. In our few days here we have had nothing but a great and beautiful time. We've slept in fields, we've camped in forests, we've shared in Hotels, we've had car break downs and eaten testicles and Cane rats. We've pushed out luck at road blocks and we've driven through village after village. We mapped Haute Niger and Ziama, the people in charge so happy to help they accompanied us and even sent a guy on a motorbike down the last road when our vehicle failed. Guinea is a really interesting place, its a place of contrasts, its colourful, its poor but people are proud and will give you the shirt off their back. You don't get hassled, everyone waves and is truly interested to see you. I've enjoyed my time here. Granted we've not finished the trip and are in the rural east, we'll see if my opinion changes in a few weeks when we drive the west. But at the moment, come to Guinea, its super cool.

thanks Guinea,

-Chris-

Djene

I was completely unprepared for the depth of culture and history that I have been exposed to in the last 24 hours. I feel ignorant of an entire section of the world. It's incredible, I’m just scooping bucketfuls of stories and tales and pouring them into my brain. I just hope that some of it survives the overload. Djene is famous for the mud mosque and its trade route to Timbuktu, the last frontier before the Sahara crossing through to Morocco and beyond. The entire town is mud, mud houses of mud bricks, mud mortar and mud plaster. Mud roads and mud tombs, mud schools teaching children the scripts of Koran on tablets coated in mud. Constantly reconstructed, you sit at night and listen to the call to prayer and prayer song, on the mud roof of the local hotel, it was a truly beautiful evening last night.

There is a market in Djene on Mondays, a market to rival any other market I have been in. This market has been happening for hundreds of years. Knee deep piles of chillies next to waist deep piles of dried fish. The entire piece of ground outside the mosque and most of the surrounding streets is just people. People selling, people buying, woman in bright yellow, green , blue. Head turbans of local Perl people, shouts and screams and noise. There are dogs, sheep, goats and donkeys. Gears for cars, stirrups for horses. Food and drinks, trinkets and cloth. Shirts with Ronaldinho print. Barrack Obama promotional memorabilia. Its complete sensory overload…its bloody fantastic. You edge your way through the higgeldy piggeldy of the wizened old woman selling bathfulls of tamarind seeds. Snacking on a few you check out the bag fulls of okra, walk past huge bags of rice and millet. Looking for stuff you want, learning about things you never even knew existed. At points in the heat of the day there are so many people you simply cannot get in and the crowd grinds to sand-in-the gearbox type pace. Boys on donkeys thread there way through, boys pulling cars and the occasional man on a motorbike, hooting constantly, Djene is a truly fantastic place!

We spent the morning with our guide who enthralled us with half-French half-English stories of the early explorers. Told us of Rene Caillier, who came here to learn Islam before reaching Timbuktu by boat, the first European to make it alive. Stories of Europeans who didn’t make it, some slaughtered by Toureg Bandits in the desert, some washed over the Nigerian Busa falls in their boats. We went to a library, where the nerd in me was astounded by 17th century scripts on Maths, astronomy, history. Passed down through the family, you can hold a book that was hand written before the printing press was made, before Van Riebeek found the cape and when the Bantu were still fighting it out for the land in South Africa. You just want to read them, but they are all in Arabic script, inaccessible to me.

This is our fist, “day off” in the 6 weeks we’ve been going. When I say “day off” we’re not traveling today so it’s a good time to do some planning, read up for the next leg and take in some sights and sounds. We’re in transit around Ivory Coast we weren’t even supposed to come here. But C-baz had read about it and so we fitted it in our way to Bamako, on route to Guinea. We’ve had 2 days in Mali, I feel like I’ve had a week of experiences already. We stumbled upon a festival and suddenly there were stilt dancers, purple-tasseled and white-masked shouting and drumming their 30 strong line through the crowd. Children screaming, people running, and then poof, they were gone… I was just looking at Indigo cloth at the time, but man it was cool.

So I've sat on a mud balcony, caught up on the blogs I lost somewhere, written my mails…I’m off to haggle for some stuff. Maybe try and find Nikki Stevens her jewelry order amidst the chaos.

Peace
-Chris-