Sierra Leone

So, after a couple hours of Mark and Steve being detained for a money changing mishap and Sam and Natalie being hounded during that interval by a crazy man named Barack Obama who wanted to give them some of his incredibly valuable diamonds and make them both his wives, we were in Sierra Leone. The only catch was we had no visas. Predictably, we all had a long, uncomfortable sit down with an immigration officer who we ended up giving a gift for a temporary stamp in our passports. We would have to proceed to immigration later to pay the full visa price under penalty of arrest. Having already been arrested enough for one day, we promised we would do so and then moved on. We were in.
We hung out in Freetown, another powerless capitol city, for about five days to get that straightened out. It was quite nice. While it was too dangerous to stray far form our hotel at night, there was no need. The street sellers had the world's best fried chicken. Sam had chicken every night while Mark ate his bean, hot dog, omelette sandwiches. Delicious! We also hit a really cool and surprisingly well run chimpanzee sanctuary in the hills above Freetown.











We finally got our visas and moved on to the point of the trip: the beach. We went down the peninsula to the town of Tokeh and found that the beach was completely deserted.
Just up the road was the touristy priced River no. 2 beach, also deserted. We stayed in the functioning fishing village near River no. 1 and were rewarded with better prices and great fresh seafood.

It was the life. We just hung out for days eating petite barracuda, crabs and beer, playing cards and taking walks along one of the nicest beaches on the planet. No complaints. Well, maybe a larger hole on the latrine would have been nice but...

After that we headed inland in search of monkeys. We found them at the Tiwai Island wildlife santuary in the middle of the Moa river. It was a cool little eco-tourist spot. We did a dawn walking safari and were rewarded by finding monkeys crashing through the forest canopy above our heads. Alas, we did not, however, spot the rare and elusive pygmy hippos which live around the island.



Afterwards, we were off deeper into the jungle on any and all manner of rediculous transport. We were headed through diamond country for the Guinean border again. This was a slightly unnerving tour through areas truely devastated by the war. Shells of buildings and towns left behind, amputee and war wounded housing complexes started by NGOs. We made it to the river border near dusk and had to not just bribe our way back into Guinea's but bribe our way out of Sierra Leone. Fabulous part of the world!


We crossed the forest region of Guinea and it was on to Cote d'Ivoire.