Bicycles and Rifles

From Dakar we have now covered about 2000 km on our bicycles, crossed Senegal, Gambia and Guinea, and now we would like to reach the ocean and perhaps treat ourselves to a week of relaxation on the beaches. For some time now we have been travelling through the border area between Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Here everyone is armed, from old muzzle-loading blunderbusses to modern machine guns and other weapons of war. Civil war has already broken out in Liberia and refugees are piling up in the camps at Gueckedou. Several times we have met people who, facing journeys of hundreds of kilometres, were going in search of their relatives in Guinea, Sierra Leone or Ivory Coast. From Gueckedou we head for the Sierra Leone border. The border is formed by the Makona river, but there is no bridge and no road, so we have no choice but to look for a canoe to take us across.

Another problem is the entry visa, which unfortunately we don't have, but as always in Africa a solution can always be found. Having found the canoe we cross the river and are on Sierra Leone territory; we take a track that will lead us to Koindu, where we will find the first police post. They tell us we cannot stay in Sierra Leone because we don't have a visa, and they hold on to our passports. For the moment there's no question of going back to Guinea; we have only an hour of daylight and so we cannot move. We settle into Mr Kamara's little guesthouse, not bad by the standards we had grown used to. We sleep on top of it and tomorrow we'll think about the passport question. In the morning it takes us a couple of hours to count the Leones (the currency of Sierra Leone) that they brought us in a plastic bag against the 100 USD we changed.

After a hearty breakfast we go to the police about the passports and manage to get by with a provisional 48-hour visa, while waiting for the definitive visa to be requested in Freetown. Freetown is about 500 km away, impossible to reach in 48 hours by bicycle - what to do?? It's Mr Kamara who finds us a lift on a truck loaded with sacks of cocoa: 26 hours of travel crammed in with 40 other people on a truck already overloaded with cocoa. But that's Africa. So we treat ourselves to our week on the magnificent beaches of Freetown, a shame that only a few months later one of the most violent civil wars, which so excessively afflicts these African countries, broke out here too! and the situation is still unresolved!