SIERRA LEONE (nicknamed Salone)

We’re not the fastest travellers, but it still felt like we’d been moving quite a lot since landing on the continent last September. As soon as we arrived in Sierra Leone, we pretty much ground to a halt. Not just to have a rest and regroup, but to see through some busy work periods for both of us, and do some time-consuming admin like organising visas for the countries ahead – Liberia and Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire).

It’s not always easy to find the right place to stop and base yourself, where you can feel comfortable, focus on work and reach the amenities you need. The frenetic capital, Freetown, sits at the northern point of a roughly 50km-long peninsula – its core is mountainous and thickly forested, its edges lined with lots of lovely beaches and busy market towns. We were seeking tranquillity – we decided to try a beach guesthouse with camping at the far south of the peninsula, Yankai lodge, to see if it would do for a few days while we made some decisions.

It obviously did the job because four weeks later we were still there.

Our office at the beach was simple and beautiful. There was nothing around and nowhere to go out on foot, other than the onsite restaurant that was a few steps from our parking spot. Most weekdays we had the entire place to ourselves.

Staying still has its merits. It gives you the chance to get a feel for a place. You learn more about where things are, how things work; dare I say you can even start to develop some semblance of a routine.

Our long stay at Yankai was made so easy due to the lovely owners, Mem and Abdul, and the staff. We felt secure and at home. And it was so peaceful – no loud music, no bothersome people, no garbage strewn everywhere. We value this enormously as beach places (the world over) are too often spoiled by these things.

When we’re still, we spend more time examining things in the markets, working out what things are, trying to cook different foods, finding chances to eat out ultra-locally. I’d been reading a West African food blog and soon after spotted some little balls of a type of ogiri in a market near Freetown. This little stink bomb of fermented sesame seeds packs a punch and is used in lots of soups, sauces and soups to add a delicious umami flavour that defies description.

Next time we shopped, we set out to find some fermented locust beans, which have a similar purpose. We saw a bucketful and bought one. Strange smell and texture though; I hesitated before bunging it in the stew. We asked Mem, ‘is this like another type of ogiri?’

‘No’, she said, ‘it’s black soap!’ Oh well, can’t win them all.

We became regular buyers of huge bunches of potato leaves, cassava leaves and ‘krain krain’ – all extremely popular for making sauce for rice. On our first attempt, Mem intercepted me as I was heading to the communal standpipe to dangle the bunch under the water. She tsk-ed and took them from me, showing me how they pick the leaves and bathe them like laundry in a bucket (‘at least three times, Paula!’) to get the dirt off.

Occasionally we let Mem take the strain and splashed out on her delicious seafood cooking.

Staying still also gave us more opportunities to meet other overlanders. You need a certain amount of luck to run into each other en route and we hadn’t coincided with many for a while. But if you camp at the beach for long enough, they come to you.

We had an entertaining few days with Dani, a whirling dervish from Barcelona who’s travelling solo on his motorbike.

One Sunday, a local lad ‘guided’ the three of us up the nearby Pickett Hill, a tremendously hot climb through steamy, dense forest. Mohammed set off on the 7-8 hour trip with flip flops, a machete and no food or water. And when he got lost at one point and was just hacking his way in circles through the trees, it was Dani who came to the rescue with his GPS app.

For the first time, we met travellers heading north – Ana and Elias had driven up from southern Africa and were heading back to Austria. We swapped tips, tales, currencies, and SIM cards, and off they went towards Guinea.

We had to make regular trips to Freetown – embassy visits for visas, the immigration office for a Sierra Leone visa extension, and re-stocking food and cash supplies. At times, driving, parking and navigating in the city was so stressful, just trying to get our chores done and get out of there without having a meltdown. As time went on, we got better at it, even started to feel some familiarity and affection for the place.

I immediately wrote some notes about one of the bad days, as these memories usually quickly fade into the ether. I’ve put them at the end of this post, for those people who really enjoy hearing someone whining (I know you’re out there).

Some of the markets were just bonkers. You needed to gather your energy just to go food shopping. They’re usually spilling onto the road while traffic tries to inch through. I mostly didn’t dare get my phone out as it was so crammed. Anyway, here’s some footage of Jeremy’s t-shirt as we try to find what we need while not getting flattened by a truck.

Freetown is so named because freed slaves were settled here from the late 1700s onwards. Britain, a major player in the enslavement of Africans, colonised Sierra Leone in 1808, and – after the abolition of slavery – brought more settlers to the area whom its navy had liberated from illegal slave ships. As you can imagine, it’s way more complicated that these two sentences might suggest...

There are many signs of British connections, and it feels so strange to drive around the peninsula seeing familiar place names like Hastings, Kent and Aberdeen.

One day we walked to our neighbouring village of York, settled in the early 1800s by freed slaves, which still has many of the old-style board houses, reminiscent of the southern US.

In this tiny Krio village, there were three or four shacks showing English Premier League football. It was bizarre to be walking along the dusty main street while hearing the familiar sounds of football manager David Moyes being interviewed during the pre-match build-up.

On the way home we got around to trying one of Salone’s many local ‘cookry shops’ (sic) – simple family-run huts with wooden benches where people can have a quick, cheap home-made meal. This one doubled as a communal phone-charging point. We ate fiery cassava leaf and dried fish with rice, for about €0.40 a plate.

We were hardly short of beach time, but for a change of scene one day we took a moto taxi to another famously beautiful local beach, Bureh.

Believe it or not, we spent a lot of time working too. Six weeks are compressed into this post; there were plenty of routiney laptop days.

Our time in Yankai was over (for now). We had one last Mem shellfish special – delicious crab – and said our goodbyes. I think they were beginning to wonder if we were moving in.

We’d booked an Airbnb in the Freetown suburb of Aberdeen for the busiest, most data-heavy, phase of my work. We were in a house with a couple from France and Guinea, their baby, house staff and other lodgers. Our time there was another insight into life in Freetown. There were daily power cuts of up to 20 hours, and our hosts had to run a huge diesel generator to fill in the gaps, usually for the whole night and much of the day. We got used to the noise (mostly) and valued the air conditioning, wifi, and a quiet room with en suite, which all helped with focusing on work.

Being in a busy community made it easier to run errands and meant we could wander to local restaurants and bars. We were frequent visitors to this little place after becoming addicted to the groundnut soup.

While I was working, Jeremy braved the kekehs (tuk-tuks) and took a couple of trips across town to see some local football matches. The ground wasn’t fully built, and you had to grab and pay for a chair on the way in.

We also visited the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, which rehabilitates rescued and orphaned chimps at a beautiful national park in the mountains near Freetown. It is a genuinely excellent project, but it’s bittersweet because no one ever wants to see wild animals behind fences. Although the chimps are trained for living in the wild (there’s even a forest school for the little ones) there is currently no feasible location for their safe release. In the meantime, one of the focuses is on community outreach programmes that aim to reduce the risks of poaching and deforestation.

It had been a good and productive time in the Freetown area, but our feet were itching like mad. Finally, everything was done. The work was complete. The visas for Liberia and Ivory Coast were in our passports. Ivy had had a thorough deep clean. We popped out to a local Turkish restaurant for a celebratory meal.

As we left the city we opted for the familiar, though slightly longer, route down the peninsula as we set out for the east of the country to explore some new territory and start heading towards Liberia. We were chatting about how many times we’d been up and down that road in the last six weeks. We felt a tiny bit like locals! We were tempted to call into Yankai as we passed the turning, but pushed on.

Little did we know that we’d be back within hours.

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Notes on a fun day in Freetown (not)

I hated today in the city. Some days it’s so fun and interesting to be in a crazy, vibrant African town, and on others - usually when we are trying to get things done - it’s exasperating and mood-wrecking.

When people grow up with such chaos and cacophony it seems like they hardly notice it. Or do they? I guess there are usually bigger worries to think about.

Today, we drove for an hour and a half from Yankai. There was heavy traffic in Freetown and the slower we moved, the hotter we became. At one point a guy climbs onto the truck to ‘chat’ and fist-bump Jeremy while we’re inching through the zig-zagging cars, motos and kekehs. People are frequently calling out to us, ‘I love your truck’, ‘give me your truck’, ‘sell me your truck’, ‘take me back to Belgium with you’, and/or ‘give me money’. It’s all normal stuff here, but I’m not in the mood for people in my face today.

We drive right across the city to the downtown area, which is packed. After a long faff at the immigration department we wait for more than 3 hours at the bank for one visa payment receipt, as their system is down. Loads of people are waiting for hours, wordlessly. They are inured to the fact that nothing functions properly here. Luckily, I have my laptop and get on with some work. We’re already hot, tired, and hungry. We drop off the receipt back at immigration and then we both need to pee. I mention it to the security guard and she makes a face, saying ‘go downstairs’. We head to a waiting area under the building and it’s horrendous – dark, filthy and packed with people, who are staring at the tourists who surely must be lost. I ask someone about the toilet – they make a face and point. In the corner it’s flooded with water and piss and someone has made a bridge to the loo with wobbly bricks. It’s a revolting toilet with no door but I have to go. Jeremy is on watch. When he goes, I wait. A man makes hissing noises to get my attention and asks how I am. I’m not up for small talk.

We snack on the driest pastry on the planet as we walk back to Ivy. There’s a group of men by our parking space which also reeks of urine. They freelance as space-finders and vehicle-minders. Some of them are off their heads on drugs (there’s a massive ‘kush’ crisis here - a cheap, synthetic, deadly drug). The main guy is nice – we recognise each other from our previous visit. They are invaluable to us when it comes to parking in this mayhem. We tip him and manoeuvre out of the tight hilly space, blocking the traffic as we do so, the sweat turning to a flood.

Then the shopping starts. First, an easy Indian supermarket run, but it’s so expensive we have to choose carefully. I’m unloading some shopping inside the van, which is about seventy squillion degrees inside, and moving heavy things around to reach the safe and lock my laptop away. A drugged-up bloke is whacking Ivy with his hand and shouting, and then starts hurling abuse at the police when they appear. Jeremy’s stressing out about where this is heading and wants us to get out of there – he suggests I hurry up with what I’m doing, and I lose my shit at Jeremy.

They don’t sell fruit and veg in the supermarkets so then it’s on to the street market. As soon as we appear, multiple women are shouting ‘what do you want? what do you want?’ I don’t know yet; I need to look at what there is. While trying to talk to Jeremy about what we will eat – in a post-argument, gritted teeth kind of way – someone is thrusting carrots and tomatoes in my face. ‘Here, buy these, buy these, buy these. What about apples, a cabbage?’ I can’t think straight. We’re right in the sun and sweat is running down by back, legs, everywhere. When did I start sweating from my eyelids? I ask how much for the pineapple, and we begin to negotiate from her ridiculous starting price. Meanwhile carrot lady is still working hard on my right ear and pineapple lady is making myriad suggestions about what else I can buy. ‘Why don’t you want a watermelon, they’re nice?!’ I can’t hear Jeremy, nor be heard, for the shouting and the traffic. Cars are virtually brushing against our backs. People from other stalls are calling out. I start to sound impatient and tell someone, ‘WAIT, I’m thinking’.

One woman calls out: ‘What’s wrong with you?!’.

And I think she is genuinely wondering why I look so harassed.

It’s another hour and a half back home to Yankai. Ivy is playing up a bit in the traffic, with intermittent power issues. We silently pray to the Iveco gods that this day won’t end with a breakdown half way along the peninsula highway. We make it back without incident, park, unpack, organise our camp, and flop into our chairs, physically and mentally drained.

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