Blogs from Kankan, Guinea, Africa

29/11/15 a drive day through the north of Guinea experiencing not only a definitive change in landscape but climate too, a dryer heat which lends to dusty dirt lifting the orange dust everywhere, it's quite invasive. During the day we travel through a small quite poor looking town district known as kemetae in which from its fort held resistance against the French 7 years after their acquisition of Guinea began. A dryer part of the country with open grassland and Savannah like bush for most with a visible upgrade in agriculture, by that I mean segregated areas for actual cropping and more livestock. We cover 260K and bush camp @ 17:00 road side in what looked to have been an area to muster to / load cows onto transit judging on all the pads. 30/11/15 we ... read more

The rain continued to thunder down as we pulled in to the Guinea border police check point. We jumped out the car and made the dash to the immigration office but our efforts were wasted as we were soaked to the skin within seconds. By now the spray from the rain hitting the road danced up to our knees and we looked fairly pathetic as we entered the dark immigration office looking like drowned rats. Guinea is a desperately poor country with barely functioning infrastructure evidenced by the lack of electricity for up to 20 hours a day. The gruff police officer processed our passports using a feeble torch that barely lit up the huge battered ledger that he was writing our details into. We trudged back into the rain and walked back to the car, ... read more