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Published: January 30th 2007
A few days after Christmas , I left Conakry with Michelle, Tony, Camilo, and Jen. We left the PC house at 6 am to walk to the main road where we could find a taxi. The taxi took us to the Freetown gare in Matam, where we reserved five seats in a 9-place taxi (a station wagon: three in the back row, four in the middle, two in the passenger’s seat). We changed money to Leones while we waited for the taxi to fill. The driver had three family members he said we’d be picking up, and it did not take long for the other seat to fill. Yet for some reason it took a while to get going and when we left the gare the driver followed a roundabout route to a distant neighborhood to pick up his family members. H then parked the car and chatted with friends awhile before finding the other passengers. The chauffeur’s friends were almost ready to leave, but had to eat first. We sat in the car and watched them eat a large plate of rice and sauce while chatting with friends before considering getting in the cab. We got gas and finally left Conakry around 9 am.
The taxi ride was long, hot, and dusty. A bandana and sunglasses were imperative; all clothing and exposed skin developed a thick coating of red dust.
We crossed the boarder with surprisingly little hassle and minimal bribe money. The boarder does not seem to have a defined location; rather there is a stretch of road with several checkpoints. The car stopped at each and we climbed out to fill out a form in an office, talk to guards in a thatched hut, or pass through a gate guarded by officials who occasionally demanded “Christmas presents.” Slipping them a little cash or a pack of cigarettes is standard and obviates a great deal of hassle. We were held up in the Sierra Leonean customs office for only 45 minutes. Based on stories from previous travelers, we had expected to be harassed and hassled into paying large bribes here. But in fact the officials we dealt with were friendly and good-natured, and we were allowed to pass with little hassle and no bribe demands. One even talked about the PCV who worked in his village when he was growing up, and many officials expressed to us that they wanted Peace Corps to come back to Sierra Leone. (PC pulled out of Sierra Leone before the civil war there, which ended about five years ago. I understand they are currently working on setting up another program there.)
The first part of Sierra Leone looked a lot like Guinea. The dirt road was dotted with small, poor villages, which our driver liked to stop in for no apparent reason. When a car stops in a village, local women and children immediately surround it, selling bananas, oranges, fried plantains, or just asking for money. The only differences were that the vending and begging was done in broken English, and the vendors only reluctantly accepted the weaker Guinean currency (“I take Guinea money!”).
Closer to Freetown the dirt road became a paved highway, with lanes pained on it, and the lanes were actually observed by drivers. (I know two sections of road in all of Guinea that have lanes, but the strange lines are meaningless to chauffeurs.)
As we approached the city the traffic became worse and worse until it became practical to turn the engine off whenever the car stopped. We crept along and were eventually dropped off on a narrow, congested street. The sides of the road bustled with foot traffic and vendors, often leaving enough room for only one car to pass where traffic needed to flow in both directions. We found a taxi driver who agreed to take us to the YMCA, although it is illegal in Freetown to have more than four passengers in a taxi there. Apparently Sierra Leoneans enjoy the luxury of having one’s own seat. In Guinea, the law is 6 passengers plus the driver, but many more people and animals are often crammed in.
It took nearly an hour to get across town with the traffic, but the Y was cheap and the rooms were nice. (Yet the Lonely Planet gave this place a bad review - have our standards really become that low?). We finally got settled in around 7 pm - thirteen hours to travel a distance that is comparable to the hour-and-a-half drive from the Detroit area to MSU. After getting cleaned up, we set out to find some Sierra Leonean street food for dinner. As in Guinea, local people set up tables and small grills along the streets where they sell prepared rice, manioc, or other foods. In Freetown, fried chicken seems to be a popular local dish, and it is delicious. Though the Health Inspector may not approve, street food like this is usually tasty, cheap, and fast.
We spent the next couple of days exploring the city. One of the major landmarks in Freetown is the Cotton Tree, a giant fromaggier tree in the center of a large traffic cirle downtown. It has very few leaves this time of year, but it still houses a large population of bats. During the day, most are sleeping, closely packed and coating the surface of the great tree’s trunk and branches. When something startles them awake, thousands of bats the size of large birds darken the sky as they scatter and return.
Sierra Leone’s official language is English, but most people speak a Creole that incorporates words from English, French, and local languages. It is unintelligible and disorienting to the pure English speaker. In fact it was somewhat difficult to get around speaking just English or French. Getting a message across to a taxi driver often required a translator or lots of repetition and speaking…….very……..slowly.
In traveling from the Guinean capital to the capital of Sierra Leone, one unavoidably sees a great deal of poverty in both regions. Neither has reliable electricity and many families live in slums of haphazard, scrap-tin shacks. Yet in Freetown there are some signs that Sierra Leone is a step ahead in development. Streets have names, buildings have addresses, traffic laws exist and are sometimes enforced. In the markets and shops, more products are available and prices are more reasonable to the average resident. More businesses have sprung up - retail stores, restaurants, beach resorts, internet cafes. Some streets even had garbage cans and were reasonably free of scattered trash. Tourism exists and the population is more diverse, rendering our white skin less of an oddity.
Sierra Leone’s advances over Guinea in development exist despite the civil war there, which ended only a few years ago. Damage from the war is still visible in many of Freetown’s buildings, including the bombed-out shell of a City Hall that stands downtown. The recent fighting is also evidenced by the strong military presence in the capital. Now and then a truck would pass through busy areas, full of heavily-armed soldiers or police, just to remind everyone of who’s in charge.
After a couple of days of exploring Freetown, we took a taxi to Sussex beach, south of the city. As soon as we left the capital we were on a rutted dirt road reminiscent of Guinea. We passed a few small villages before we turned toward Sussex, where we found a lovely hotel and restaurant owned by an Italian couple. Beyond the restaurant there were acres of sand, partially covered by shallow tidal pools. We waded across these to where the huge beach finally met the ocean. There were very few people at the resort and we were surrounded only by soft sand, blue water, and green mountains. After a few hours of sun, we enjoyed a fine meal at the open-air Italian restaurant. OK, really we ordered some of the cheapest things on the menu and split them.
We had planned to head back to Freetown early that afternoon, and we’d made a deal with our taxi driver to take us back. When we came in from the beach, ready to go, we found the decrepit taxi with its hood propped open and several men peering inside. The driver said that he needed to fix something before we could leave. We would have to wait, but it was almost ready. After three hours of the car being “almost ready” we gave up, gathered our things, and hiked out to the main road to thumb a ride.
The main road was not very busy; a car passed us about every five or ten minutes. We dropped our things alongside the dusty route and waited. We were accompanied by some local kids who enjoyed staring at us and by a drunk Englishman who had somehow found his way to Sierra Leone years ago, married a local woman, and had been living in a crumbling house on that dusty road ever since. Eventually we stopped a full taxi whose driver agreed to come back for us. He kept his word and we were back in Freetown for dinner.
That night was New Year’s Eve, and we celebrated with a great dinner of Indian food at Paddy’s, a popular Irish pub. Paddy’s is a spacious, open-air restaurant/bar/dance club right on the ocean in Freetown. Though we ate dinner late on New Year’s Eve, we were some of the only people in the place. We returned closer to midnight to find only a few more patrons, but most people showed up well after midnight. Turns out the whole countdown thing isn’t so big over here, and the evening of New Year’s Day is celebrated more than that of New Year’s Eve.
We spent the next three days at River No. 2, a beach about an hour south of Freetown on the same rutted, dusty road. The resort there offers a few small rooms located directly on the expansive beach. The water was warm, the people were friendly, and the sand was the whitest sand I’ve ever seen. The beach was bustling with tourists and expats on New Year’s Day, and was nearly deserted the day after. We spent the daytime in the sun and the water and the evenings around a bonfire. It was nice to relax for a while before returning to Guinea and our jobs, or so we thought…
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Dalia
non-member comment
u mest up
you mest up on the part that says on your eighth paraghrph:ONE OF THE MAJOR LANDMARKS IN FREETOWN IS THE COTTON TREE,GIANT FROMMAGGIER TREE IN THE CENTER OF A LARGE TRAFFIC AND THEN YOU WROTE CIRLE WHEN ITS SOPOSE TO BE CIRCLE DOWN TOWN.