The River Beach

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This Sunday I took my first trip out of Kenema since I arrived 2 ½ weeks ago (unless you count walking out from the city into the hills which I do as often as I can). I travelled together with Frans who is a German based out here working on a Cocoa and Coffee project, and Frazer who is another Gola Rainforest NP volunteer from the UK working on Park Operations. Our journey took us only 30 minutes away from the centre of Kenema but the destination felt a complete world away.



We drove out of the city along the same road which I will travel when I make my way out to the forest edge communities we will be working with. This area of Kenema has no tarmac and the roads are very uneven so a sturdy 4x4 was very necessary for the journey. Part way through the drive we crossed over the river Moa and then took a much narrower side path than ran parallel to the river. Either side of this road was lined with crops from a farm. It wasn’t the sort of farmers’ field we are used to in the UK with hedges and neat rows ready to harvest. This farm looked like a jungle and it was filled with cocoa, pineapple, banana, oil palm, coffee and a variety of other fruits and seeds all mixed up together. Through his work Frans has met with some of the farmers in this area to support them to improve their yields and make the most profit they can from the land they have rather than cutting down more forest to plant more crops. It was through this connection that Frans came to find out about the river beach. There are a number of areas along the river where it’s calm enough to swim and a sandy beach will form, I’ve seen a poster for one in Kenema which they call ‘Miami Beach’, but thankfully the beach we went to was hidden away and probably quite unknown.



When we came to the end of the road we were driving on we parked up the car amid towering piles of sand. The car wasn’t in the middle of sand dunes as the area we were in was quite flat, we were in fact surrounded by sand that had been mined from the river and brought up to the road for collection. We walked down a narrow tree lined path which led us to a gentle tributary of the main river which was the site of the mining. There was a small waterfall at the point where the water left the main river and from here it flowed into a large lake before continuing its journey. Around one edge of the lake there were a few people working in the water, surrounded again by piles of sand, taking it in turns to carry the heavy bags back up the path.



We made our way through the mining site and across the shallow lake and then walked a little further through the trees before arriving at the main river. Once the trees were behind us we became completely surrounded by nature with no view of the road or the mining or of any other forms of human life other than each other. The river is quite fast flowing but at the point where we had reached there was an alcove buffered by rocks, which was shallow and calm. I couldn’t swim out into the open water as the pull of the water was clearly felt, but was instead able to go for a long swim without actually travelling anywhere and the water was blissfully cool after three weeks trying to get accustomed to the heat and humidity.



Slightly upstream from the beach we were on the river swept over a collection of rocks churning the water up into thick rapids. Some of the water also found a gentler path weaving through the rocks on either side, and it was a perfect reminder of my childhood to clamber among these rocks like I used to with my brother when we were little.



It was perfectly peaceful on the beach surrounded by gorgeous views of trees and water. It felt completely different from the busy bustling streets of Kenema and gave me a little reminder to keep me going during the week of work of why I love living in Africa.

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