Freetown – Sierra Leone

Strap yourselves in! 

Every now and then in life there is a moment that feels defining and sat in Malmesbury’s Summer Café with Rut the day before I was flying to Freetown, Sierra Leone – and her to Auckland, New Zealand – felt like one such moment. One week ago, Freetown was alive with gunfire. The current plan is to catch up in Australia in March but neither of us are certain where we will end up in the new year, although we intend to be ‘settled’ one way or another within the next 12 months. But who knows!? What is known, is that the next few months for both of us will be epic. And so now with a heavy but excited heart, it’s time to kick off 80 days in West Africa, the continent that never fails to fill me with what I assume is genuine happiness. 

Landing in Freetown at 1am was always going to prove tricky considering the boat journey required to get from the airport to the city. An attempted coup the week before including an attack on a Freetown army barracks, and the breakout of over 1,500 inmates from a prison brought a nationwide curfew into effect that made the whole process even trickier. Luckily for Amber and me we had booked rooms at an airport hotel months beforehand so as to avoid any late night estuary crossings, deciding it was easier and safer to catch a boat in daylight hours after a good night sleep. The hotel had been in contact and assured us that our transfer would still be meeting us at the airport but with the addition of a military escort. However, getting through the airport was far too easy. We were stamped trough immigration quickly and all our bags arrived soon after in a calm relaxing atmosphere, yet we paid the price by leaving the airport where there were unusually few people, but still chaos thrived in the intense muggy heat, apparently led by ‘The Colonel’ who was trying to assemble a convoy of minibuses that would escort all passengers to a hotel where we would be held until the curfew was lifted at 6am. But these were passengers who had originally planned to cross the estuary and stay at hotels in the city that night, we just needed to find our transfer, a transfer that never turned up. After an hour of waiting and confused negotiations attempting to get us dropped at the hotel we had booked, we finally departed, only to stop soon after until The Colonel then shouted out of our minibus window ‘NOT IN MY LIFE!’ Point made, we left the airport and drove into the night through numerous armed roadblocks, down dirt tracks and past shanty huts. By 3.30am, we had finally made it to the hotel we had booked and were promptly shown to one comfortable, clean, air-conditioned double room. Funnily enough this wasn’t going to work for either Amber or me and the two of us stubbornly waited outside until the hotel provided a solution. That solution ended up requiring one of us to walk out of the hotel into the curfew on the blackest of nights and up the road to another hotel where a second room had been hastily arranged to honour both our bookings. This was enough for Amber to cave and allow me to be the chivalrous hero, soon finding myself on what felt like a long and disorientating trek with all my belongings and £3,000 cash on me. I was greeted at the next hotel with a reasonable bedroom and a shocking bathroom. The aircon was set to 16 degrees but it rattled above a window that didn’t close. The generator roared throughout my three hours of sleep but at least that kept a fan working that was sufficient at keeping the worse of the heat at bay. The bedroom door didn’t lock, but I no longer cared.

I woke feeling like I’d had 10 hours sleep, and when I turned my attention to the window I almost cried when I saw the sun rising outside as it attempted to redefine the very essence of beauty. I was back in Africa, and the previous six hours was just a taste of why it was great to be back, I wouldn’t have it any other way. As it turns out, the ‘trek’ the night before took only 60 seconds as I returned to the original hotel only next-door, warmly greeted by locals and their smiles that makes this country just so damn great. During the melee of the night before we had managed to book the boat transfer to the city for 8am. Unsurprisingly no one arrived to pick us up at 8am but surprisingly an excellent breakfast of omelette, bread, and coffee did turn up. The hotel then went one step further to redeem itself and managed to get us collected by the boat company who promptly boarded us on what was basically a private speedboat, albeit piled up with cargo instead of passengers. Half an hour later, we had finally made it to Freetown, but not our hotel. Queue the taxi driver who wanted $30 to take us 10 minutes down the road. Apparently, fuel is expensive in Freetown. I get more generous as I age but I’m not an idiot, well, maybe I am a little as I still caved and negotiated down to $20 for what was surely no more than a $5 ride at best, with generous tip. The driver couldn’t have been a local as he moaned the entire way that he had been hard done by, even an army checkpoint didn’t knock him off his stride, but it did me. I wasn’t prepared to be asked to get out of the taxi and open up my bag in the boot of the car with two armed soldiers looking over my shoulder. 

It’s never a good moment meeting a group for the first time that have just spent the last month travelling together, but on this occasion, I was especially thankful to have been joining alongside a friend. We were happy. We had made it to the arrival hotel, through curfews, military roadblocks, speedboat crossings, and miserable taxi drivers with all our belongings and cash in tow. Sure, we were sleepy, but nothing a few Star beers during the day hadn’t fixed, prolonging the euphoria of not having buggered it up so far. And then the tour group entered the hotel later that day. They looked completely haggard, miserable, demoralised, like soldiers coming off the frontline for the first time in five weeks. They had nothing good to say, replacing our excitement with a dense fog of melancholy. It made no sense to me. I had already done their leg of the journey back in 2012 and I remembered it as being one of the best things I had ever done. One chap skipped the Guinea highlands altogether (one of the most beautiful regions in Africa), opting to fly to the coast and sit on a beach instead. Someone’s tent had blown into the sea the night before due to a freak gust of wind, everything was saved, but it sounded like the end of the world had attempted to happen. Freak wind tried to blow our tents away in Madagascar once, it was great fun, I got to hold an AK47! Apparently, the roads were terrible, people argued, camping was abysmal, the only way to survive was to fight for an upgrade at the campsites. To cap off all the misery, during the welcome meeting it was stated that Christmas would be optional as many people don’t like Christmas Day, over my dead body will it be cancelled! The next 64 days are going to be intriguing to say the least. 

4^th December 2023