Sweet Salone

We are now, since last night, back in Conakry in Guinee -- sadly had to say goodbye to Sierra Leone and re-entered Guinee -- in order to come to Conakry to the Ivory Coast embassy to get visas for that country.

The only place where we could apply for visas. Such are the vagaries of overlanding in Africa -- a lot of time spent on traipsing off to embassies and sweet talking and buttering up consulate officials and making photocopies of passports on dusty street corners and filling out forms etc etc etc. At least on this trip we have not had the horrendous delays of weeks and weeks as we had last year. All round this trip is just so much better organised and planned and even if our fates -- and/or visas are in the hands of the gods, and anything can still happen that can delay or even stop us getting visas, I just have so much more confidence in the way David is handling it all.


You should see us on Visa Days!

We get up extra early, all the guys shave -- sitting under trees, peering into little mirrors the size of a Kruger Rand, scraping at their fuzz and bristle, to get that clean shaven look -- so alien to an overlander. The girls all scratch around the bottoms of their backpacks for that elusive lipstick, now a gooey mush or a dried out bit of colour paste at the bottom of a tube, but still good to put a little colour on lips and cheeks and make us look -- and feel a little more human! Our best clothes -- or what remains of those, are pulled out from the recesses of backpacks and stretched out over a tree branch or on a smooth patch of grass, in a desperate attempt to smooth out the worst creases and to make them look slightly more neat and tidy and fitting for an embassy visit. --- We do what we can -- but I remember well that day last year at the Angola consulate in Pointe Noire in the Congo when the gate security guard (!!) turned us away from the gate and said we would not be allowed inside the embassy building if we did not show the necessary respect -- meaning if the men did not go put on socks and shoes! They were all wearing flipflops and sandals and apparently that was simply not acceptable to the Angolan consul.

  The guys were  a little miffed yesterday when they all had to shave for this morning's sortie as they had all started growing their mo's for Movember, and I suspect they are quite nervous now that there does not remain enough time for them to grow something that will not entirely put them to shame when judgement day arrives -- but it was agreed that the Moustachios for Movember will officially start today and the competition will only end when we finally arrive in Accra in December. I believe there is some serious strategising going on as to designs and styles...

  Anyway --- visa forms are in and if all goes according to plan we will have our passports back on Wednesday afternoon  and ready to be back on the road on Thursday morning. --- So -- a very welcome break for two and a bit days to wash clothes, lick wounds and shower!!!! From Thursday we are going to be heading into the hinterland of the jungles of Guinee -- in search of the forest elephants; the primordial ( well -- very very old..) vine bridges, a few lost tribes, and the kind of thing that makes this trip so different from the proverbial stroll in the park.  The only sure thing I know is that we will probably not have any contact whatsoever with the outside world here we are going -- only bush camping every night, washing in rivers, cooking over fires and probably a fair bit of road building long the way. Move over Marlborough Man -- the true adventurers are on their way!

Now that Sierra Leone is behind us, I am still trying to 'get a handle' on the country. Probably the injury to my foot, the severe bites and the head cold-- in other words the general malaise of the past ten days, has somewhat muddied my impressions of the place. But it has made me, once again,  think about how we perceive things and peoples and places. -- If you think about it-- what are your views of Sierra Leone? What do you know about this country? Freetown -- freed returned slaves? Atrocities? Child soldiers? Civil war and unrest? Blood diamonds? Bauxite and titanium? Do you know much else about the country and its people?

I don't know about you, but somehow those are the things that come to mind when I think of the country. So -- when you arrive there, what is it that one really expects to find? That is where the confusion for me sets in. We drive through the magnificent countryside -- majestic rivers like snakes glistening in the late afternoon sun, green green green forests, giant trees, palms, rice fields, mud villages hiding in the dense undergrowth, massive mountain ranges, a land of such immense beauty and grandeur that it leaves you breathless. We drive into the villages and towns where smiles and waves and singing and dancing and a riot of colour and textures and smells and sounds greet us -- greet us with warmth and openess and interest. We talk to the people we meet and without any hesitation they embrace us, they respond with intelligence to questions and in return question us with sincere interest. We see what seems like every child of this nation dressed so smartly in their washed and ironed school uniforms, hair platted, faces shining, walk to school in the mornings, the littlies trustingly holding the hands of their bigger brothers and sisters. We see a smiling, happy; friendly nation in a beautiful land.

So where are the people who committed those atrocities we know happened here?  Two days ago we were in Kanema -- the diamond mining town -- the furthest east that diamond dealers are willing to come and the
furthest west that diamond miners are willing to come, not too far from the liberian border, where I got about on the back of a moto scooter taxi and we stayed in the grounds of the Catholic pastoral centre there. Surely if there was anything to be seen that even vaguely related to these horror stories we have been reading over the last ten years of Sierra Leone, this would be the place where we were going to see the evidence??

Admittedly, this is  where white men look dodgy and carry arms and could all be the main characters in an action movie about blood diamonds and where black people look -- well, like black people, but are probably far more dodgy and dangerous than their white counterparts... where four young female journalists were stripped and marched through the town only THREE years ago for reporting negatively about the local political leaders... where wheeling and dealing takes places behind pockmarked mouldy walls of colourful old buildings along the main street -- but --- at the end of the day the people you talk to are no different from the people anywhere else -- not even from the people you bumped into yesterday afternoon wherever you find yourself right now.  They are not monsters. They do not make you uneasy or scared or feeling threatened. They are people like you and I, going about their daily business, making a living; going to school; doing the washing; cooking a meal, chatting to neighbours.

 I am not expressing myself well, but what I am trying to say is that it is hard to bring the media image of an entire country into focus with the reality of what we see and experience here. it is hard to allign the two pictures and accept that they are the same -- perhaps just seen from a different angle. It is very hard to talk to people and think that they might be the monsters we have read about when we opened that newspaper or magazine article about Sierra Leone.

The same thing I said about DRC? and about Ruanda? And about Uganda?  Only a month ago we were in Guinea Bissau and I fell in love with the place, the people, the possibilities of the country. People were friendly, warm, seemingly content, talking about how they are enjoying the peace in the country and want o get on with things now.. Last week there was another coup -- or should I say -- yet another coup. Why am I surprised? There seems to be at least one coup a year over the last ten eleven years. Why not another one now? Because the people don't want one? -- but then, we should know by now it is not the people who decide whether there will be a coup, or a civil war, or a period of inhumanity and atrocities committed in the name of some idealogy or another...I also shed a quiet tear hearing about the coming war in Mali -- I think of the people in Djenne and the Dogons and the friends I made there last year -- I remember the smiles and the warmth and the innocence of these people who simply want to get on with their lives...
Yes -- a lot of questions and much research needed and definitely some form of study to try to understand -- even is just a little better, what it is that I am experiencing, seeing, hearing, concluding...
I know -- I am going to have to spend a little time and research to come to some form of conclusion.

What do you think?