One of the very last spots I went to while we were in Sierra Leone was the Peace Museum.

I think the primacy of this connection is fading, but I would guess that if someone knew one thing about Sierra Leone, it would be that there was a civil war. The civil war ended in 2002 and in its wake the government of Sierra Leone asked the UN for help in setting up the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Special Court was replaced in 2013 by the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Peace Museum is associated with the Residual Special Court and housed on its grounds (there is also downtown the “Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument” which is related but different; the Peace Museum is here).

I visited on a weekday morning. I took a few pictures before seeing a sign asking one not to though I think the photo at the top is okay. If you won’t be able to go to Sierra Leone soon there is a virtual tour on the Residual Court’s website as well. When I first arrived I was alone but eventually a person running the place realized I was there and began to take me on a tour.

I learned a lot. When we first moved to Sierra Leone I sort of avoided learning about the war. I didn’t actively avoid it, but focused instead on other parts of history. Colonial-era history is more my specialty anyway but this was also my way of avoiding stereotyping Sierra Leone as merely a place where a civil war happened. If you look up Sierra Leone it seems as though all the recent scholarship is about the war. There is also of course Blood Diamond. But it is a wide and beautiful place where more happens than a war.

I was especially interested in the efforts towards justice. Besides the court there was also the Truth and Reconciliation commission, documenting what the people went through. During the tour we saw the archives which are well cared for and I believe in the process of being digitized. Much of the museum focuses on these efforts along with those of the Special Court, since the museum is on the premises. The bulk of the tour was about the function of the Court and its workings. The most surprising thing I learned is that the Special Court “only” ever indicted 13 people for war crimes and convicted 9 (of the other four, three died before their conviction and one was or still is a fugitive). The Court focused only on “those who bear the greatest responsibility” for the war, which is why they focused on so few. But still I was stunned that all the work of the court, and all the pains of the war, and yet it took only these few convictions for justice to be served. That is a result I am still considering.

For what else the museum comprises of, the largest physical collection (besides the archives) were a lot of samples of the “juju” (as it was labelled) that the fighters thought would protect them. These are all carefully catalogued and on display, some with more explanation than others. Some you can see on the virtual tour. These were interesting to see for all the influences they contain, and illuminating as to one way that people can come to do the things they do in war. There was also a room dedicated to mass graves, which thankfully only had pictures of the memorials, and another room about the Mongolian contingent of the peacekeeping force who had guarded the court facility. Furthermore on the walls are the testimonies of the victims of the war, with what they went through and how they are surviving now.

And after about an hour the tour was over and I departed the museum. Achieving a sense of justice after such a cataclysmic event is hard. In Sierra Leone it seems, as far as I could tell, to have been successful. The scars of war are still evident but where Sierra Leone could rebuild they have rebuilt and where they couldn’t they have remembered. I suppose the evidence of the Special Court is that it isn’t the number of convictions which make for justice but the care with which those convictions were reached and the opportunity for people to be heard.

Reading this week:

• Steve Martin Writes the Written Word by Steve Martin

As promised, here I am writing about the book Vistas of the Heritage of Sierra Leone. It is surprisingly hard to get one’s hands on and it was a veritable obsession of mine for a while. Being hard to get one’s hands on is not a universal trait of Sierra Leonean books, for example I found a copy of the (I think) relatively obscure Sierra Leonean Heroes: Fifty Great Men and Women Who Helped Build Our Nation for sale as soon as I looked for it. Though for Vistas large chunks of it are actually not that hard to get your hands on. For example there are many pages on SierraLeoneHeritage.com have excerpts from Vistas, like here’s the page for Old City Boundary Guns. That website is where I first found out about the book, but the taste of the excerpted morsels just left me hungry for more.

There are places I wish I looked more carefully but just never got around to, like the Sierra Leone Library Board. I have been led to believe that they should have a copy, but I only managed to get there once as they were about to close and I just never made it back. At one point I paid a guy on Craigslist $20 to go to the University of Indiana library and scan their copy of the book for me, which worked pretty great except he didn’t get all the pages leaving me thoroughly unsatisfied. Google Books refused to help. Where did I eventually find it? That’s right, the good ole’ Library of Congress. Which, you know, is sad, the lengths I had to go to find the book while I was sitting in the country where it was written and which it is about.

But why were those lengths worth going? Because it is a pretty remarkable book. First off, its really the only convenient source of information for a lot of the sites therein described (that’s why Sierra Leone Heritage is running around excerpting it). You just wish they described more of them. Many of the sites are the national monuments of Sierra Leone, though the book has more than just the monuments, and there are several monuments that aren’t in the book.

For the second off, it is a very particular snapshot. The book was written in 2002 as Sierra Leone was coming out of the civil war. Some of the buildings described in the book as burned-out husks are back in business today, though likewise some of the sites show their age even more than then. The book was written to preserve the history of these sites and to preserve the sites themselves, both as a textual exercise and in reality by promoting them as places to go and places worthy of the effort of conservation. Also worthy is to ponder though how much the list reflects the list of sites that were declared monuments in 1948 under a colonial regime, and then enshrined in a book written in the wake of an even bloodier struggle. A new edition would surely be a good thing in this day and age; there is so much more history to write about.

This is another post where I ponder some historical mysteries of Sierra Leone. Mysteries to me, anyway, I am sure someone out there could figure this all out immediately.

There are two sort of related things in this post. The first is the piece of artillery pictured right above. I noticed it pretty quickly in our time in Sierra Leone, as it is located right out front of the Freetown city offices. That also puts it out right in front of the The View restaurant, which is what we were visiting, so maybe you can get lunch while you’re checking it out. Unfortunately the gun does not come with an explanatory plaque, at least as far I saw, which leaves us with a bit of a mystery of why and how it wound up in the middle of the street and cared for enough at least to be painted.

Thanks to Reddit we can identify the gun as a British mid-1800’s Armstrong RML gun. That initial identification surprised me as I had guessed was that it would have been brought to Freetown during World War I, but Christopher Fyfe in A History of Sierra Leone reminds us that Sierra Leone was the United Kingdom’s only non-foreign coaling station on the Atlantic coast until South Africa, and worth protecting in case the French ever decided to capture it. I wasn’t able to ever measure the muzzle diameter of the gun directly (it would have been weird for me to be standing in the middle of the street with a tape measure), but based on the carriage looking exactly like the carriage for this gun, I am inclined to think that it is specifically a RML 10-inch 18-ton gun. Wikipedia tells us that the guns were in service from 1868-1904? [sic] (note it isn’t listed on Wikipedia’s list of surviving examples, so we may have made a discovery here).

The other mystery I wanted to solve was the origin of some gun emplacements at Fourah Bay College. These are here. These too I spotted early in our time and they too remained somewhat mysterious. I say only “somewhat” because I knew early on that the location of Fourah Bay College on top of Mount Aureal was originally a military barracks and/or military hospital. It is definitely a great location for defensive artillery, with a commanding view over the harbor.

Despite the clear connection between the base on Mount Aureol and the gun emplacements, I wanted more detail though, like when they were built, and for what threat, and if the gun downtown was related. Some more clues came from Vistas of the Heritage of Sierra Leone (published in 2002, and I will write more about it, probably in the next post):

Again, until recently, the topography of Mount Aureol had physical evidence of a strong military presence, which was inaugurated in 1879 when the War Office acquired the property. Before the Colonial military forces left Mount Aureol in 1945, making way for students of Fourah Bay College returning to Freetown from Mabang, to which place they had been evacuated during World War II, to occupy this beautiful location, it had variously been a rifle range, a sanatorium, a garrison for soldiers with a gun emplacement at a strategic spot, below which an underground passage wended its way into the city, some say, right under State House. The Nissen Huts, where, as students at Fourah Bay College in the 1960s, we had our first residence, have disappeared. In their places were erected modern blocs for students’ hostels, science laboratories, functional buildings like the Administrative building, and the 9 storied “sky scraper,” the Kennedy building, easily the tallest building in Sierra Leone, constructed with money received from the United States of America during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy.

At the risk of pulling a Herodotus, that bit about the underground I can’t really believe. That would be a remarkable engineering feat, and I’m not sure of the tactical necessity. However, once I finally managed to actually take some pictures of the emplacements, I can see why you would think that maybe they led to a tunnel:

This expedition at least cleared up when exactly the emplacements were built: 1903. That plaque says specifically “E.H. 1903,” and what the E.H. could stand for I have no clue, though I am sure specialists will know immediately.

Going back to Fyfe, it turns out that in 1879 the British authorities were looking at how to beef up Freetown’s defensives, which included replacing the unusable guns at Falconbridge battery, which at that point was Freetown’s main defensive work. Those replacements happened apparently in 1884, which I think clears up the mystery of the gun downtown. That year is squarely in the middle of the RML 10-inch 18-ton gun years of operation, and Falconbridge battery is only 1000 feet from the gun’s current location. You can see on this map (page with other maps here) that Falconbridge point was the eastern edge of downtown Freetown. So I bet that the gun downtown originally came from Falconbridge battery and was moved to its current location at some point as a monument, maybe the next time the defenses needed beefing up I assume during WWI. This does open up a whole new mystery I won’t be able to solve, namely that this is the first time I have read about Falconbridge battery. I wonder if anything is left? I can’t find a picture of what it would have looked like, but I wonder if there are old plans somewhere in the British archives.

Back to the Mount Aureol gun emplacements. No definitive answers there, beyond our 1903 date, but what I would hazard to guess is that they were put up as part of the British solidifying their control over the Protectorate of Sierra Leone. Although Freetown had been a colony for a century, the British only laid firm claim to the hinterlands in 1896, extending a protectorate and a tax that broke out into the Hut Tax War of 1898. The British used their military might to crush the rebellion, and then their industrial might to extend control. They built Hill Station starting in 1902, and the railway reached Rotifunk in 1900 before making it to Liberia in 1908. I would hazard a guess that improvements to the military defenses of Freetown were wrapped up in that project of cementing imperial control, and included the building of new and improved gun emplacements.

In conclusion, we started off this post with two mysteries: where the gun downtown came from, and where the gun emplacements on Mount Aureol came from. And at the end of this blog post, I think we are left with something like three mysteries: what did Falconbridge battery look like (and relatedly, what did the other defenses of Freetown look like), was there a previous version of the Mount Aureol battery before the 1903 version was built, and what guns were used at the Mount Aureol battery (and when)? And maybe: did the underground tunnel from the Mount Aureol battery ever actually exist? Perhaps someone out there will know.

Our adventure to and from Kenema continues from last week…

The next morning I woke up early mostly to get back home, but while I was out and about early I cruised around the streets of Kenema devoid of most of the crowds. The most surprising thing I saw was a no joke blacksmith shop, annoyingly just past where I had walked the previous day. Annoying because taking a picture would have been more plausible on foot, but I saw that man standing there pounding on his anvil, phenomenal. After that I cruised on by Kenema’s most notable tourist attraction, the Palm Tree Park, and then through the outskirts of town and broad rice fields spilling out from either side of the road.

Having completed my early-morning tour, I left Kenema where the next stop was Bo so I could take a picture of that clocktower as well. Among the other sights I wrote down to mention were toilets cast of concrete instead of porcelain, and more strikingly a woman walking back from her bath at the stream, wrapped in a lappa as though she was returning from an onsen.

The next stop was a surprise. I had spotted an older bridge from the newer one passing by Taiama, and decided to see what was on the other side. I was very surprised to find a historical marker! It was right on the side of the road, but low down, and hopping out of the car to take a look it read “On this rock the American Missionaries Rev. L.A. McGrew & His Wife Clara McGrew were massacred May 9, 1898.” There are not, on the whole, a lot of historical markers in Sierra Leone, and this one didn’t really give an indication of who put it up. As I was standing there a nice man came up to discuss it, and told me that the rock where the missionaries had been killed was actually a different one he pointed at down the hill and slightly upstream.

Later investigation (just today) has provided more detail than the plaque did. This is mostly from Mission Work in Sierra Leone, West Africa by the Rev. J.S. Mills, but Rev. Lowery Allen McGrew and his wife Clara B. (née McCoy) landed in Sierra Leone in 1896. They were sent by the Woman’s Missionary Board, which as far as I can tell was a Methodist missionary organization. Both Lowery and Clara were from Ohio. They wound up settling in Taiama, which seems to have been a bit of an outpost from their organization’s main station at Rotifunk. Trouble came in 1898 during the Hut Tax War. The rebels against the recent British colonial imposition killed the McGrews along with most of the other missionaries in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, the local evangelists, and their followers. A few more details are here and here.

But I didn’t know that yet. Having taken some photos of the monument I head back to the car and kept on going back to Freetown. Knowing it was my last trip I tried to take as many pictures of the landscape as I felt reasonably appropriate. I am just such a sucker for a rice field, which is why I have mentioned it three times now, but there were also some entertaining signs, and the local traffic was always a hoot. Over glade and dale, through palm tree and elephant grass, across rivers and up hills eventually brought me back on home to Freetown. In the end driving to Kenema and back was a great weekend trip, for me, though do consult your guidebook before heading out to figure out where the waterfall hike starts.

Reading this week:

• Witness to Witchcraft by Harry B. Wright

For the next Sierra Leonean adventure, I went to Kenema for the night!

There is not really a big draw in Kenema if you’re just a tourist, to be honest. I hope the Kenema tourist board does not criticize me too harshly for that statement. But my time in Sierra Leone was drawing to a close (and has drawn to a close, by the time I am writing this), and I wanted to try to see at least one more part of the country. I wish I could have seen more of it, but in the meantime Kenema would do in a pinch.

Once I was on the road about 10am I drove pretty much straight there. I had contemplated stopping for lunch, but I had prepared myself in my usual manner for long trips to the unknown by boiling a number of eggs. The road system in Sierra Leone is gorgeous (between the major cities at least) so I flew on down the road snacking on my eggs along the way. The single most surprising thing I spotted was several different people selling, unfortunately, bush meat, in the form of two monkeys and at least one duiker. When that wasn’t happening the landscape was gorgeous, this time on the far end of the rainy season so everything was green and lush as I rolled over the hills.

Upon arrival in Kenema I checked in directly to the hotel and then turned around to hit the town. I was very excited just to see what was happening on the streets. Even if a city doesn’t have a major tourist draw there is still always something to see. People live there after all, and what they do and what they buy and what they eat is always of interest. If I had remembered to consult the guidebook we had before I left, I could have also maybe seen a waterfall, but blissful in ignorance my main destination was the famous Kenema clocktower.

Along the way I enjoyed the sights, including the clocktower (as evidenced by the photo at the top). I spotted a number of cocoa cooperatives and many signs for diamond traders, though I laid eyes on neither cocoa farms nor gems on this trip. People watching, I saw two women walking down the street in identical pink dresses, one holding a pink box, and at a gas station some men were taking advantage of the fuel truck being parked there by climbing on top and painting the gas station canopy. The standard greeting from kids as I walked about town seemed to be a thumbs up, and I enjoyed seeing sheep and goats and cows in various places. As for chickens, I saw at least one woman operating a grill with sauce-covered chicken feet, and rounding out the culinary endeavors where there was enough room next to streams people had nearly always planted rice.

In a win for the arts, at one point I passed a stand of a dude making statues and paintings. I had noticed the paint at first and then noticed the statues and then the paintings. Unfortunately I wasn’t in the particular market for any of the things he was selling right then, but it was very encouraging to see an artisan at work. But shortly after that my feet had brought me back to the hotel and, very sweaty, I decided to head in for the night. A dinner at the hotel restaurant (peri-peri chicken), served by the side of an empty pool across from a projector showing a football game and amidst a crown evidently pre-gaming a party elsewhere, topped off finally with some reading, rounded out the evening.

The adventure continues next week!

Reading this week:

• The Histories by Herodotus, translated by Tom Holland

Last weekend (less than a year ago now as I am writing this), I went off to go visit Madam Yoko‘s gravesite!

Madam Yoko is in the pantheon of Sierra Leonean heroes. I mean that roughly literally; she is in the book Sierra Leonean Heroes: Fifty Great Men and Women who Helped to Build Our Nation. That book was published in 1988 during the presidency of Major-General Dr. J.S. Momoh (as he signed the foreword to the book) in order to bolster national pride. You can read Madam Yoko’s entry in the book here. Potentially a controversial figure to be exalted as at least some of her power derived from a cozy relationship with the British (the exact opposite of Bai Bureh, also on the above-linked page), but hey we are not here to debate that, we are here to take a road trip.

Speaking of Bai Bureh, I had initially contemplated going off to visit his gravesite, but I think it is in fact in a sacred grove that takes some arranging to enter. Plus it is up in Port Loko, one of the few general areas I had at least driven through, and going down to Moyamba gave me a chance to check out someplace new. I still have not travelled nearly as much as I would have liked within the country, and the rainy season is fast approaching (again, as I write this), so I had to go out and see things while I had the chance. Madam Yoko’s gravesite, as far as I could tell, was accessible, even if no one had been kind enough to pinpoint the exact location. Until now, anyway, because it is exactly here: 8°09’28.2″N 12°25’46.9″W.

Also, a quick note that whenever you see a photo of Madam Yoko, it is the one taken in W.J. Johnson’s studio and published as a postcard c. 1906. It is the one used in Sierra Leonean Heroes, for example, and also the German Wikipedia page (though not the English one). But there is another photo! The British Museum has it (surprise surprise). It is right here and depicts Madam Yoko in 1889, which was the Hut Tax War and so was before Queen Victoria gave her the medal she’s depicted with in the post card:

Anyways so to go find the gravesite I set off relatively early in the morning and had a very lovely drive. Driving up-country in Sierra Leone, between major cities anyways, is a pleasant experience as they have very nice roads and very little traffic and the sites are just stunning and gorgeous. I took several opportunities to hop out of the car and just take photos of the landscape, which the camera can never capture, but here is my try nonetheless:

All in all from Freetown the trip to Moyamba took about three hours. I only made one wrong turn, because I hadn’t noticed that the town of Moyamba Junction is the junction for Moyamba and you need to make a right there, but I noticed my error pretty quickly and turned around and made what was now a left turn instead of a right turn. And then I pretty quickly came to Moyamba and started my hunt. I had pictures of the grave itself and a brief video courtesy of Gary Schulze, but neither gave a great amount of context clues. I knew though it was in “the market,” so I started off by driving around the town to spot “the market.” My plan was to park somewhere likely and go around on foot, but I was somewhat quickly thwarted by rain. So that kept me stuck in my car for a while because despite the looming rainy season I hadn’t thought to like, bring any rain gear. I tried to tool around in the car for a while looking closely for the gravesite and eventually became paranoid that I was looking suspicious.

So then I tried to ask some people. The nice man at the gas station, Olu, told me he was familiar with the place (I showed him the photos), but his directions didn’t quite pinpoint it. I was briefly led astray when a nice lady I asked thought I was just looking for the graveyard and pointed me to the edge of town. The graveyard was there but Madam Yoko wasn’t. By this time I was starting to despair a bit; I would have to start making the drive back home soon. I finally decided to make one last go and pulled into a place that I thought was a closed government building but turned out to be an operating car wash. This however was a stroke of luck because when I showed the two kids who wanted to wash my car the picture, they knew exactly what it was. I asked if they could take me there instead of washing the car, they were game, and so off we went!

Turns out I had driven past the gravesite a few times. As I eventually divined from the pictures, the gravesite had a low wall around it which obscured it. But the kids took me right up into the market there and led me to it. And uh yeah that was it. I took some photos, happy to have reached my destination:

And um yeah with that there wasn’t a whole lot else for me to do in Moyamba. I gave the kids some cash for their troubles and we head on back to the car. I contemplated lunch but the weather was turning a bit and I thought I should start the drive home, so off I went. I wasn’t in so much of a hurry that I didn’t stop to take more landscape photos:

This country really is just so gorgeous. And especially with the rains starting a bit and things starting to get green the forests and hills are just dazzling, and the views from even just the road monumental. There is also shopping to do. I picked up a mortar (which did not come with a pestle, so now I don’t know where to get one of those) and later on closer to Freetown picked up some rather large baskets my super amazing wife especially liked. So that all was pretty successful. I did also run into some traffic on the way back:

A thrilling conclusion to a very fun adventure. I just enjoyed having a reason to go out on a drive in Sierra Leone, and I always like pinpointing monuments and landmarks that haven’t yet made it onto easily accessible maps. And I met some very friendly kids who were willing to play tour guide, so that is a bonus. If you’re ever in Sierra Leone I can’t say that the gravesite itself is worth the drive from Freetown, but seeing the countryside certainly is.

In the last entry my super amazing wife and I had just finished the journey across rivers and hills to arrive at Outamba-Kilimi National Park (OKNP) in Sierra Leone, on the border with Guinea. And now it was time to set up camp.

Sierra Leone has potential as a tourist destination. Perhaps they don’t want it but there is certainly potential, as there is any place. It could definitely be a world-class birdwatching spot. But so far it is not really set up for it at all. This was evident in OKNP as we pulled up to the campsite. There was not really much there. As I am writing this Wikipedia has a picture of a nice-looking miniature cabin but by the time we visited it more closely resembled a termite mound than tourist hut. The remains of the bathroom facilities were still usable, though that is only because a drop toilet doesn’t require all that much upkeep. Some low walls provided privacy and the lack of roof kept any bats from residing there.

But of course this is why we had arranged the trip with VSL. Upon arrival the guides quickly worked to set up camp. Our sleeping arrangement was a small tent with another to store the stuff we had brought. They provided bedding though if I were to do it again I would bring my own pillow. I think an enterprising visitor could arrange to stay in some of the park rangers’ accommodations and procure food locally but a tent and buying supplies in Makeni is probably indeed the way to go. Be also sure to bring plenty of water.

As everything was getting set up and unloaded our guides sent us off on our first park experience, a forest walk with the park rangers. This was pretty short. The park entrance and campsite I think are not actually quite in the park, but instead across the Kaba river. We never actually wound up setting foot in the park itself. I’m not sure if it was just inconvenient or if there was a deeper reason. Instead we skirted along the river to see what we could see. It was late afternoon and I think the rangers were worried about it getting dark. We spotted several monkeys traversing the trees. The rangers identified them as Colobus monkeys but having done some googling here I think they were actually Green monkeys. The most adventuresome part of the walk was crossing a stream via log (“local bridge,” the rangers said) but we survived dry and intact.

And from there it was a relatively relaxing time in camp. On safaris I do appreciate the large amount of down time and on this one we had down time in droves. As we were hanging out the same green monkeys we had seen on our walk came through the treetops over camp, giving us a good look but making it seem a little silly we had gone off to find them just before. Later in the evening, having been served a massive dinner we settled down with flashlights to do some reading. This we did outside, as the tent was much too hot still to relax in.

One interesting part of living in Sierra Leone is that I feel like I have learned a lot more about what all these Victorian-era African explorers and missionaries I like to read about went through. Like you read about palm wine all the time but I never had any until we went to Banana Island (we chose to not bring any alcohol on our trip to OKNP, but on our second night, shortly after I was lamenting to my super amazing wife the lack of sundowners, our guide appeared with some poyo he had procured in the neighboring village and poured us each a mug out of the cooking oil bottle it had been stored in; from God to man indeed). For this trip, our experience was bugs. The most bothersome of these in the moment was what I think were the stingless bees that Livingstone wrote about. I can confirm that indeed “the bees are easily known from their habit of buzzing about the eyes, and tickling the skin by sucking it as common flies do.” They broke skin if you didn’t get them soon enough. Though the following week we would find ourselves itching from a hundred bug bites that we hadn’t even noticed we were accumulating. We used bug spray but we should have used much much more.

Finally tired enough that the heat was no longer so bothersome, we settled in to sleep.

To be continued…

I have not been able to spend much time outside of Freetown during our time here in Sierra Leone. This has been for reasons both specific to my situation and more general to Sierra Leone. I was however determined to at least see something of the country and so with the help once again of Visit Sierra Leone (VSL) I booked my super amazing wife and I a trip to Outamba-Kilimi National Park. I chose OKNP, as the cool kids call it, for two reasons: 1) it is there, and 2) VSL had a trip outline we could do over a three-day weekend.

Getting there went very smoothly. Our guide and driver picked us up at our house and off we went for the approximately six-hour drive to the park. Along the way our guide tried to give us a bit of a tour of the country, in large part consisting charmingly of driving directions to various other cities. The main road network in Sierra Leone is both paved and seems to see little traffic (little traffic outside Freetown anyway), so on the first part of the trip we positively flew. I spent the whole time just looking out the window.

I am tempted to be reductive and say Sierra Leone is gorgeous but every landscape has its intricate charms if you embrace them. In Freetown you get used to living in and on the hills but as you depart Freetown you are traversing the broad plains that comprise most of the western half of the country. There are big skies and low forests. I enjoyed particularly looking at all the various agricultural research and demonstration centers we passed. You see some interesting stuff on the road, which included for us a single motorcycle carrying five people; the man in charge was scootched all the way up on the fuel tank with his four companions stacked behind him. This got an impressed whistle even from our driver and guide. As we moved upcountry we also saw lots and lots of goats and excitingly even some cows.

Along the way we pulled over briefly to pick up plantains but our main mid-journey break was at Makeni. This was our lunch stop but our guide’s main goal was to do all the shopping necessary for our weekend in the park. That could have been interesting to join but we were also happy to relax at a nice restaurant where we ate on the patio and watched the traffic go by. The guides probably also got better prices without us hovering around. In addition to the food the guides also picked up the chef which would join us for the weekend. She was phenomenal and the only flaw with the food on the trip was that it was too much and too good. Three gigantic meals a day that I felt terrible to not be able to finish. The menu was Sierra Leonean, with chicken and fish in peanut sauce the first night and cassava leaves the second. Lunch was pasta with hotdogs, which I understand is a slightly more recent import, but the breakfasts were also heaping and we did not do enough physical activity to justify all these calories. And she whipped this up on camp stoves, to boot.

But that was still slightly in the future as first we had to get from Makeni to the park. As we went along this part the road would proceed to get worse and worse, as is the wont of roads as you extend farther from city centers and the corridors between them in this part of the world. It was also outside Makeni that the hills started, which made the landscape remind me so much of Mbala district in Zambia. It was harmattan when we visited, which meant the distant parts of the landscape faded into blue dust, bolstered by smoke from the occasional brush burning. It was also dry which meant the landscape could have been greener, but I don’t know how far we could have possibly gotten in muddy roads.

The final barrier to the park was the Little Scarcies River, which we had to cross by ferry. I thoroughly enjoyed this experience. I don’t know how old the ferry is or who built it, but it is a pretty nice system. It is attached to either bank by cable though it is entirely person-powered. The ferry was at the far side as we pulled up so we watched as it was pulled across to our side. On either end of the ferry there are ramps, and as another fun feature they are balanced so as one side goes down the other goes up. We drove onboard and were joined by a motorcycle and smattering of other people looking to cross. After boarding the man slowly pulled us across, and we had a very peaceful time floating over the river. Having not sunk, we drove the last few miles to the park entrance.

To be continued…