South for the Winter

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…