Slone: Rainy Season is Party Season

Well, I just got back from y vacation in Sierra Leone, or Slone to those in the know, to celebrate the 4^th of July and my actually being allowed to leave.  I know what you’re thinking: isn’t that where Blood Diamond took place? So, to answer the inevitable question: No, I did not see Leonardo Dicaprio there.

As with most out of country trips, my vacation started with four days in Conakry waiting for my visa to get processed.  Why it takes 72 hours to fill out a piece of paper I will never know.  Especially since I think we were the only ones applying for a visa from the Sierra Leonean Embassy in Guinea.  This fact was confirmed when the consulate referred to us simply as the “visa people”.  The wait did give me a chance to explore Conakry and enjoy our headquarters’ AC and hot showers. 

I had only been in Conakry when I first got to Guinea and during swearing-in, both times only having the opportunity to leave the compound for yogurt and beer.  Based on this, I really didn’t like Conakry and was planning on going as little as possible (also because it is a 2-day trip from Kankan).  It turns out Conakry actually has a lot to offer.  The Marche Niger is as clean as a supermarket and the produce much fresher.  They even sell couscous and frozen chickens from normal market booths.  We visited the artisanal fishing port/market and bought crabs for a crab bake back at HQ.  There are a fair amount of nice Western/ American style restaurants considering the relatively small expat population.  I even had Chinese and Korean food, although the latter was in a karaoke bar/brothel. 

Besides the culinary adventures, what makes Conakry most different from Kankan is the cars.  Someone once told me that having a motorcycle, or at least a bike, is your identity in Kankan and having a car is your identity in Conakry, and I would say most Conakry residents buy into this idea.  Motorcycle taxis are banned and there are few personal ones.  Because Conakry is a peninsula, most things are too far to walk, so you must take a car.  Also because Conakry is a peninsula, traffic is a nightmare.  At one point, the peninsula gets very thin and there are only two main lanes going each way.  That’s two lanes for a city of 4 million (I’m guessing, I don’t know Conakry’s population) leaving downtown at the end of the workday.  One day, it took three hours to go less than six kilometers.  I definitely appreciate how bike-able Kankan is now.

After a week of waiting, we got our visas and took the surprisingly quick trip (only 6 hours!) to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone.  Our only definite plan was to stay at the PC house the first three nights, so we headed there.  While the Conakry house is bigger and better equipped (see amenities listed above), the Sierra Leone house I beautifully situated on the top of a hill overlooking the city and beach.  There’s even a porch to watch the sun set over the ocean.

The first difference we noticed was the street food.  While Guinea has rather tasteless fried dough and tiny meat skewers, Sierra Leone has fried chicken and hotdogs.  One lady selling chicken even called it KFC.  Because it is a partly Christian country, alcohol is more prevalent, which has its pros and cons, but does mean we got to celebrate our first night in Freetown drinking hard cider and Beck’s in a gas station.  To be clear, this was something we wanted to do and were genuinely excited about.  After 3 months at site, our standards are low.

We spent the next two days exploring the city.  As with most capitals of developing countries, there wasn’t much in the way of tourism, but it was nice to have a change of scenery.  In the market, we found a man selling frozen cow hearts out of cooler, which a friend and I hypothesized were either shark fins or baby hippo legs before getting up the nerve to ask the vendor.  There is also a giant cotton tree (Freetown’s claim to fame) and really interesting colonial architecture.

There were two things I was most excited about for Freetown: the food (as always) and the beaches.  Our first experience with real/Western-style food was at a restaurant called Ringo’s.  Luckily we were the only patrons at the time, so we didn’t make complete fools of ourselves.  We arrived straight from the beach, salty and leaving a light dusting of sand in our wake.  And this was a nice restaurant, the kind with leather-backed menus.  We then proceeded to get overly excited over objects that would be considered commonplace in any American restaurant (i.e. napkins, salt shakers, complete and matching sets of silverware).  Once the food arrived, all social norms went out the window.  I literally had a photo shoot with my sandwich.  The waitressed, who had undoubtedly never seen such a scruffy group of expats act so ridiculous, found our charades terribly amusing and stood in the corner giggling the whole meal.  Again, we were lucky the restaurant was empty, because our next nice meal was at Crown Bakery downtown, during the lunch rush, when all the expats come out of the woodwork, or walled-off compounds rather.

The beaches were magnificent.  Freetown is nestled in mountains/tall hills that come down to meet the water.  The view from the beach is of a town amidst the clouds (especially during rainy season).  The beaches themselves are clean, white sand and relatively deserted.  By far the most beautiful was River No. 2, about 15 km down the peninsula from Freetown.  There we stayed in bungalows right on the beach, next to a lagoon that was a scene right out of Jurassic Park (minus the man-eating dinosaurs).  The waves were the perfect strength so we were only getting bowled over 20% of the time, and we had a great time frolicking in them and then later eating fresh-caught barracuda from fishermen who were docked in the aforementioned lagoon.

When we finally headed back to Conakry, eating some last roasted cashews at the border, I was happy to be back.  Freetown is nice and has many of the “luxuries” that I don’t have at site, but Guinea feels more like my home.  I missed being able to communicate.  While English is the “official” language of Sierra Leone, everyone speaks Krio, which might as well be another language.  Also ‘white boy’ just doesn’t have the same ring as ‘toubabou’.  I also missed my family and my community, who I’ve become really close with.  I was even craving a good old-fashioned bowl of rice and sauce.