Keepin' on keepin' on

So far, my view of Freetown has been largely divided between embassies and internet cafes! So it is when you roll into the big city after time in the sticks; in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and I expect likewise in Liberia, there is almost no internet access upcountry, and what little you might find, rarely works. So it was for me, and so I have about a billion things to do, and umpteen issue-centric blog posts I’d like to put up. Before I let my passions for ranting get ahead of me, though, I think I ought to give y’all a bit of a narrative on where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, and all that other stuff that travel blogs are supposed to be about.

So, where did we leave off? I believe, other than my babble about Conakry, the tale left the rails at the end of my Senegalese sojurn. So, join me on the road to Kedougou, the little city at the centre of Bassari Country in the far Southeast of Senegal. The road there took me through the biggest national park in Senegal, Niakolo-Kioba (I think), and we had some fine roadsight boar sightings, as well as sending a good many monkeys and baboons running from the dust of our bush taxi.

It was for that beautiful drive that I had chosen the Kedougou route into Guinea, knowing full well that it was a tad less traveled than the others. There’s really little to distinguish the few roads, though. They all suck. On all of them, the 200 kms or so takes a minimum of 24 hours to cover. In my case, I waited about 36 hours at the taxi park for the passengers to accumulate. This was frustrating, but not as bad as you might think – taxi parks are good place for cheap food and long chats, so that’s what I did. Still, I was pretty happy when we accumulated the requisite 18 passengers (!) that were to be shoved into the Land cruiser (plus, of course, 5 more riding the luggage on the roof) . I was glad to snag the front seat, though I shared it with a fellow wracked by malaria, who kept passing out in my lap. And so it goes.

The journey was epic. Like passing 26 hours (we made good time) in a land cruiser commercial, fording rivers, climbing rocks, skirting cliffs, and fairly often getting out to walk. With a few hours sleep on the floor of a village mosque, we made Labe in Guinea by late afternoon the next day. Labe is a pleasant enough town, a busy busy market town and administrative centre for the Futa Djalon, the highland area of Guinea. We were already up almost 1000m from the Senegal plains, and it felt glorious. Even more glorious was the profusion of tasty fruit and veg in the markets, the explosion of cheap brochettes on the street, and the Guinean habit for Café Noir, little cups brewed strong in those silver stovetop espresso thingers. Glorious.

My first night in Labe, I actually found the limits of my iron stomach! Here’s how to make Josh do a lot of toilet dashes: take 27 hours exhausting travel. Add one empty stomach. Fill that stomach with 2 cups strong black coffee, a pile of spicy brochettes, 2 big beers, and a whole fresh pineapple. Shake, and wait for Josh to get served. Oi. This was made more amusing by the horror-movie aura of this particular cheapie. Such things are common enough in Guinea, where the nicer hotels are generally placed for quiet (and privacy – officials come with mistresses) out in the outskirts. Josh no likey that sort of thing, so I was often chasing the most basic brothel rooms close to the market.

It was no worries, and I was right as rain the next day. I went and visited a pretty neat environmental education garden, run by a little man named Alpha Bah, who has been practicing and teaching sustainable organic gardening, useful medicinal plants, and environmental stewardship to local schoolkids for something like 25 years. You think the environmental movement has it bad in Canada? Try Guinea, where the government just wants the resources, and most local people see a beautiful mountain and say to you “all we need to do is cut down those trees and we could farm it!.” Knowing full well that the soil would wash away in a couple years, you sigh. And discuss. And understand that for people on the edge of starvation, foresight can be a luxury.

And starvation – or at least hardship – it often is, especially during this time of year, the rains. The verdant lushness of everything disguises the fact that most food plants are still in the ground, drinking up the rains. It’s the farthest point from the last harvest, and poor families on marginal land have tough times about now. You wouldn’t know it to see it though – you have to ask, as I did when having a beer the other week with some agricultural development folk.

From Labe, I headed even higher up to Mali-ville, the highest town in Guinea at about 1300 metres, sitting right near the edge of the escarpment that falls down to Senegal. What loveliness. I stayed at a great little lodge funded by Finland (and with an odd stash of books in Finnish, as well as, to my joy, English novels). It was basically like a cottage – I had a bedroom, and since I was the only guest I had the use of the kitchen to myself. It even smelled like a cottage. What wonderful nights sleeps I had there. When not sleeping, I hiked out to the edge of the escarpment and dangled my feet over the edge of the drop, looked at cool rock formations, took in amazing views, and cruised the town drinking beer, watching local soccer matches, and slurping coffee in the rain in the company of the gregarious fellow who managed the hotel. Perhaps to my greatest joy, I raided the market for veggies, oil, and vinegar, and took advantage of having a kitchen to make the biggest salad you’ve ever seen, washed down with a plastic bottle of horrid, $2 French “wine”. Bliss.

After a couple of days in Mali-ville, I headed back to Labe and onwards to the town of Pita, where I passed an afternoon watching French soaps with 10 cent coffees and 20 cent cones of soft-serve. Classic Guinean entertainment, that. I spent the night there so as to catch an early bush taxi down the bumpy but gorgeous road (that’s generally true of every road in Guinea) towards the little village of Doucki, famed throughout traveler-land and visited by our own Mike Brown not too long ago. After hours in the bush taxi in which we were outpaced by a friend on a bicycle, and another couple kilometers on foot into the pouring rain, I had my feet up in a hammock in the compound of the illustrious Hassan Bah.

Hassan is a ball of quirks. About 5 feet tall, he leads you on incredible hikes through “Guinea’s Grand Canyon” (for once, not hyperbolic) while chain-smoking cheap cigarettes and striking absurd tough-guy poses for pictures. You pay him 20 bucks a day, and you get a traditional hut, 3 solid meals, and all the hikes you can stand. And what hikes they are – it’s wonderful to be in a country not so paranoid about safety! Some of them involved climbing up or down cliffs inside waterfalls, or up wood “ladders” (read:bundles of sticks) up other roaring falls. In the rainy season, everything is gorgeous, the countless falls spectacular, and everything very slippery (Hassan calling “go softly” was almost a mantra on our walks.) I stayed 4 days, covering all his routes, and it was some of the best hiking I’ve ever done. I swam in waterfalls at the edges of cliffs, swung from vines in the rainforest, and somehow avoided even the slightest injury. Glorious – be sure to check out my pictures, when I get them up. I’ll link them here, because it’s hard to do justice to Guinean scenery in words.

After my sojurn at Hassan’s ended (just in time to miss the naming ceremony of his gorgeous new son, unfortunately), I meandered down to Conakry, crashing the night in a town halfway along the road. I’ve written about my Conakry experiences, so I’ll skip for the sake of brevity and jump ahead a week, when I hopped back into a bush taxi (or was shoved – the Guinean variety always carries around 12 people in a seven-seater station wagon). After a nice days drive down a good road, I roared into the old French hill station of Dalaba, and had my feet comfily up in the sunroom of a cheap hotel, sipping tea and watching the sun go down and the rain descend over the mountains. Gorgeousness.

In Dalaba, I took advantage of there being a tiny tourist office to get hooked up with a guide, with whom I hiked out through the hills (carpeted by imported pine forests, surreally), looking at natural bridges and other such pretty things. It’s quite strange to come upon a stand of trees where French pines, Chinese bamboo, and local plants are fighting it out for supremacy. The next day, I hired a motorbike to take me out on a long round trip to one of the best waterfalls in the country. No messing around with bouncing down rocks with this one. It’s just river, meet cliff. Fall. On rainy roads it was an epic effort to get there – I’m always impressed by the ability of cheap Chinese motorbikes to keep moving when up to their engines in a puddle! We got mighty wet and messy, I half-fell into a river, I was covered in blood from thorn scratches, and I was happy. I was even still amused a couple hours later, when we slid out the motorbike twice in about 100 metres of ultra-slick track. We were moving slow enough that my only injuries were from the bike landing on me – and unlike some friends of mine, I was wearing pants and didn’t get fried by the exhaust!

I figure at least one moto crash was inevitable, so I’m glad I got a mild one. Indeed, I think it made me less paranoid about riding on them for long distances, which is good – I’ve had to do quite a bit of it lately. It’s actually rather good practice in controlling your fear. You see, if you see a slippery section ahead and tense up too much or shift around getting ready to bail, you make it way harder for the driver, and the crash way more likely. I’ve gotten used to it enough by now, although sometimes I’m completely sure I’ll take a tumble. I still don’t actually like long distances by motorbike – the view is nice, but your ass gets mega-sore, and you can’t relax and zone out the way you can on even a packed bush taxi. Still, they’re a necessary part of travel, especially in the rainy season when so many roads are impassable or just not bothered with by bigger cars.

Onwards from Dalaba, I made a stop in Kankan, Guinea’s second city. Nothing special, but a nice university town with very nice accommodations at the Catholic mission. Say what you will about organized religion (and I say a lot), but they do a mean job of providing tidy, cheap, central places to stay all over this region. I would later stay in the one in Nzerekore, and in some random town in the middle of the night, and both were lovely. I was stuck in Kankan a while with transport complications, but eventually made my way down to the town of Kissidougou, and from thence far south to Macenta, and finally along the GLORIOUS paved highway into N’zerekore, capital of the Forest Region.

The Region Forestiere is a bit misnamed. Almost all of it has been cut down by now, but it does have a few draws. After marshalling myself in N’zerekore for a day, I made my way to the little town of Bossou to go track the group of habituated chimpanzees in the patch of protected forest there. It was a hell of a job to find them – we hiked through thick bush up and down steep hills for about 3 hours. Just as I was getting tuckered out and tired of falling down muddy slopes, we were reenergized by some serious chimp yellin’. It still took another hour of slogging before, lo and behold, there was a chimp chomping happily on some leaves in a tree. We heard the others nearby, and suddenly we were walking down the path about 2 metres behind the chief of the group, who led us quite cheerfully through the forest until he found a good tree, which he banged on for a while, and then settled into. We settled in and got to watch the chimps for an hour or so. It was a gas.

Chimps are amusing, especially ones habituated to people. They knew we were there, but most of the time ignored us, just casting a disdainful glance now and again if I made too much noise. We sat beneath the big boss’s tree and watched the parade of chimps coming to pay their respects by grooming him and being groomed. I had a laugh when one of these grooming sessions turned into a loud and enthusiastic bit of mutual masturbation between the two fellows (chimps have a lot of sex for pleasure, and are not fussy about the sex of their partner). It went on and on, louder and louder, until they were interrupted by one of their moms! How embarrassing… Though I think this less of a faux pas in Chimp society, I fancy I saw a sheepish look on their faces as they went back to grooming, erections raging.

After returning to N’zerekore, I set out again for the forest. This time, I stopped for the night at the Forest Classe du Ziama, the last bit of virgin rainforest left in the country. Theoretically, there were elephants to be found, but with increased poaching and decreased food, they had buggered off to the other side of the forest at the time. Still, a day hiking through the rainforest is always almost a spiritual experience for me, and so it was. Passing the evening with a couple beers in the little clearing where I was staying, as dusk descended over the mountains, was also a big plus.

By this time, though, it was getting past a month in Guinea, and my feet were itching once again. I needed to head up to Faranah to take the road down to Kabala in Sierra Leone. What followed was the mother of all bush taxi rides. What should have taken 9 hours took 36 after we dropped an axle (!) on a bump in the road. The driver fixed it with a seatbelt (!!) and managed to get the car to the next village and fix it. That fix, though, only lasted another 30 kms, along which our muffler and bumper fell off (!!!). Finally, we just walked into the next village, while the car somehow limped in. After many hours of repairs (and no real chance to catch another car), we finally rehabilitated the thing, to much rejoicing.

Finally, after spending the night in Faranah, I tracked down “Salone Boy”, the one moto-driver with the permits and the gumption to brave the Kabala road. No cars run in the rains, and trucks just bog down, for good reason. The 90 kms to Kabala took us 5 hours, which involved taking the bike through waist-deep water a number of times. By early afternoon, though, I rolled into Kabala, Sierra Leone, just over a week ago.

That, though, is another country, and another story. This entry is long enough already! Thanks for reading, if you made it this far.
Peace
Josh