My
Senegalese adventure was cut short as I found work in Sierra Leone and the
beginning of 2013 saw me head off to pastures new. The first stop was in the
opposite direction as I went up to Dakar, firstly playing the tourist guide to
my parents for a few days and, having seen them off back to Europe, organising
visas for the trip down. The Sierra Leonean embassy was slated in for Friday
and, having initially struggled to find the door, I wandered in to find absolutely no one aside from one other guy who seemed to have been waiting for quite a while for something to happen. About an hour later people emerged into the room explaining that they had been in a meeting, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that we could have cleared the office of everything of value including computers, handbags and so on. They then explained to me that they didn’t take care of visas on Fridays and I would have to come back on Monday. So I came back on Monday, handed in all of my papers and was then asked to wait. Four hours of waiting later, I was told that the embassy had run out of visa stickers. Quite why they hadn’t realised this earlier I’m not sure but in any case the result was that for 15€ I got a little letter addressed to the border guards asking that they issue a visa to me there. The Guinean embassy was more forthcoming and the next day I packed up my stuff and heading back down for the long trek south.
Big statue, Dakar.
The men are very impressed
Final family portrait, Gorée Island
Dakar to
Ziguinchor went as it usually does – I got shafted for my bags at the taxi
station in Dakar, got stuck in the most uncomfortable seat in the bush taxi and
rolled into Zig 10 hours later to spend my last night and say goodbyes to the
gang. It was sad to leave a town I’d come to call home and people who I’d come
to consider good friends but I was sure I’d see them again. The goodbyes went
on long into the night and I left Zig with a smile on my face and a pounding
headache without much of a plan. I got to Bissau and got into a car headed for
Quebo, the Guinea-Bissau border town where I hoped to find transport down to
Guinea. This hope was based on the fact that I’d seen a road go over the border
on maps but little more than that. As we pulled into a non-descript one street
town under cover of darkness, the driver announced that this was the end of the
road. I had arrived in Quebo, it would seem. In an awkward mishmash of French,
Spanish and Portuguese I asked the driver if he knew where I could spend the
night and this seemed to cause more trouble than I thought. A long discussion
erupted involving several passers-by, none of whom seemed to think there was
anywhere to stay the night until one said he thought I could go to the customs
building and find something from there. The driver bundled me back into the car
and drove back the way we’d come to the other end of town. Here, more
discussions ensued; one of the customs guys disappeared and came back with a
kid of about 16 years old who took me into the bushes behind the customs house
and to a small house. I had found Quebo’s only hotel, and 5000cfa got me a
mattress, a lamp, a bucket of cold water and the company of several
cockroaches. These were quickly dispatched with and before I knew it an army of
ants were charging across the room, dissecting the corpses and lugging them
back towards the corridor. The final aim of the night was the find food and
water and the kid in charge took me down the road to another guy who sold me a
lump of goat in a plastic bag and I settled in to sleep.
The tools at my disposal...
Next
morning my new friend the hotel manager, unfazed by the fact that my Portuguese
language skills didn’t amount to much, patiently explained my transport options
to get to Guinea over and over and hence I ended up sat in the back of an old
French military truck and was informed that we would leave in the morning and
arrive at 4pm. It was only at the end of the day that I realised that this
meant 4pm the next day and so began my 33 hours on top of a peanut truck.
Roommates, Quebo
The first
stop after leaving was Quebo market, around 1km from where we started. I’m not
completely sure of the point of this stop and no one seemed to do much and
nothing was loaded onto the truck but, believing that I would arrive in my
destination of Boké that afternoon I bought a couple of bottles of water and
waited. After a couple of hours we eventually pulled out and stopped at the
next village where sacks of peanuts were loaded onto the truck. This pattern
was repeated until we got to the border post where another inexplicable 3 hour
wait took place. I was stamped out of Guinea-Bissau, we pulled off the main
road and rattled our way down an increasingly unlikely looking road. This road
occasionally disappeared and we drove along rivers, stopped off at more
villages, loaded up with more peanuts and eventually the assembled passengers
were teetering on top, holding on for dear life on the spectacularly uneven
track and ducking to avoid overhanging branches. I’m quite proud that for the
entire ride I was only hit in the face once by these branches even after,
eventually, one of the passengers started feeling sorry for the truck’s only
tourist and invited me forward to sit on top of the cab. Up until this point I
had been making contingency plans for where to jump in case the truck toppled
over, which seemed very likely on quite a few occasions, and I decided that
being on top of the cab would mean a decreased chance of my life coming to an
abrupt end underneath several tons of peanuts. We eventually got to the Guinean
entry post where two rather bored looking policemen decided to have some fun
with us and with me in particular, I presume in an attempt to extract as much
cash as they could from this rare vehicle passing through their post.
"THE TRUCK", pre-peanuts
Their first
attempt was to persuade me that I didn’t have a visa, an accusation which I
easily disproved by showing them said visa. After staring at it for a strangely
long time, they asked for my yellow fever vaccination certificate, which I told
them was in my bag on the truck, and was sent to fetch it. Having scrutinised
this, they then asked for my declaration
de mission, effectively a letter from the person who sent me to Guinea with
an explanation of what I was doing there. The fact that I was on a tourist visa
and had told them I was in transit to Sierra Leone didn’t cut the mustard and
flickers of a smile appeared on their faces as they realised they may have
caught me out. “I have a letter from the embassy…” I ventured, and was
instructed to get that. Back onto the truck and into my bag, back down to the
guards. The letter which I’d got from the Sierra Leonean embassy in Dakar
absolutely did not explain why I was in Guinea, nor did it contain any kind of
mission statement but it was written in English, which the guys didn’t
understand. Instead, they went through my name and passport number letter by
letter to check for any discrepancies. Sadly for them, they found none and
stamped my passport. Then, naturally, they told me that I had to pay for the
stamp.
No ambiguity there - what else can we sting him for...?
“I’ve
already paid for the visa ! I don’t pay for the stamp !” I told them.
“Ah, and
where does it say that you have paid for the visa ?”
I’m
honestly not sure if these guys were stupid, playing stupid or a combination of
the two but I didn’t know how to explain to them that visas cost money without
being patronising. Fortunately, I didn’t need to do this as, for some reason,
Guinean visas have the price written on them. I showed them the visa again.
“OK… and
have you paid for this stamp ?”
This stamp
was my Guinea-Bissau exit stamp. I told them it wasn’t from their country and
asked them why they would care if I’d paid or not. This argument got nowhere so
I showed them my Guinea-Bissau visa. They stared at it for a while and then
announced sadly that it appears I had paid for everything. I got back on the
truck and after a bit more waiting around we trundled off.
By 6pm we
hadn’t covered many of the 160km between Quebo and Boké although we had picked
up quite a lot of peanuts. We pulled over in a village where everyone hopped
off and one of the passengers told me that we were near a military camp and
would have to wait until morning before leaving again. Another passenger bought
me a couple of bottles of water as I’d run out a long time ago and had no
Guinean francs, and one of the driver’s assistants made me a makeshift bed from
the peanut sacks. I chatted with some of the others for a while before everyone
turned in to sleep, the peanut sacks transformed into a crowded dormitory, and
a tarpaulin was hauled over the top of us. At 2am I woke up with an unfamiliar
feeling – I was cold ! Condensation had formed on the inside of the tarpaulin and
was dripping off it and onto the people huddled underneath. For some reason no
one else seemed to be bothered by this and so I clambered over a row of bodies
to my bag to get some extra clothes and my sleeping bag. One of the guys woke
up and when news got around that the toubab
was cold, laughter erupted.
We were up
and off again at 5.30am and managed about a kilometre before we got to a big
river. The way across was on a diesel powered floating platform and a few of us
went across on a very sorry looking canoe which took water by the bucket load,
leaving us to frantically bail it out with our flipflops. We got the the other
side where an old military guy was waiting and he regaled me with tales of
working for French and German companies in the 1960s and 1970s and was the
first Guinean in uniform I’d met who didn’t seem interested in extracting any
money from me. He would have had ample opportunity as we waited for 4 hours in
this village, firstly for the river level to rise and then as the diesel engine
on the floating platform broke down, but instead shook my hand and wished me a
pleasant trip, instructing me to come and say hello if I ever come through the
village again. We then stopped in the next village and picked up more peanuts.
The
promised moment eventually came and after 33 bone-rattling hours we hit tarmac
and rolled into Boké where I picked up my bags and headed off to the market to
pick up a car to Conakry.
Nearly there !
Fellow passengers
In sharp contrast to the peanut truck, the white
knuckle ride on a flawless road took me twice the distance in just 3 hours.
Here, my world changed as I stayed with Mark, a friend of Ross’s who lived in a
sumptuous house with a swimming pool, wifi, air conditioning, a pool table and
various other things that I could have easily forgotten existed over the last
few days. His hospitality was second to none and I left Conakry refreshed
despite the fact that the town itself was a dump. I generally like big African
cities but Conakry did very little to endear itself to me save one of the best
chawarmas I’ve had in a long time.
The trip
down to Makeni, my new home, was smooth and before I knew it I was settling in
and ready to start a new chapter of life and discover a new country, a new way
of life…