Freetown, Sierra Leone
July 2011
I am soooo tired. My neck is stiffening up. Took some Advil, I hope it works. We left the hotel around 1 because it rained all morning and there was a mix up with cars. There were huge puddles all over the roads. In S.L. the percentage of paved roads is pretty damn small! We were off pavement pretty fast, jerking along in ruts and rocks and puddles…deep huge muddy ruts. People walking and on bikes – the poor things, getting swamped by cars plowing through it all. Lines of people walking by the side. We could NOT go fast, it would have killed us. About 30 minutes in and we came to a stop on a steep muddy road, with cliff drop on one side of us and jungle on the other, and around a curve we came upon a crowd of people standing around like a truck and a crane, and off the cliff side of the road, a car stuck in the mud and trees….we sat there for a while, and I got a bit worried – us in the car, two white girls alone, with crowds of strange people around. They pulled the car out, and we maneuvered our way around it, looking down into a ravine that pretty much went straight down….down to the river. Thank god he got pulled out, no way he would have survived it. Beefy white guy, in a wife beater, shorts and wide brimmed hat. Looked Aussie or Brit or S. African, because he came over to apologize and say he’d be out soon.
By the time we got to the beach we had gone all the way around the city really – but we got a little bit of highway near the end. Village of Tokek was very small and crowded with shanty type houses, people milling around…. Finally found the road and turned off to the “resort” – used to be a hotel there that was burnt down by rebels during the war. New owner had rebuilt a simple kitchen, a handful (18 I think) of rooms with shared bath and maybe 3 cottages (all concrete), with their own baths and then a few “rustic” huts with no bath that were straight on the beach. Gorgeous white beach. Water was nice, but not blue clear. Mountains drifted by clouds. A few fishing boats in the distance. Basically a beach and nothing else, but there was beer, and food and fresh juice. We hung out for a few hours on the beach pretty much by ourselves, but I had the strange sense we were being observed the whole time by bored locals.