Paperwork enthusiast seeking new frontiers of paperwork. Former submariner, former Peace Corps Volunteer. Opinions, thoughts, and comments reflect no actual persons, living or in the Navy.
Yesterday, (as of writing this), I hiked on up Sugar Loaf Mountain! It was fun and I am still exhausted. My super amazing wife was out of town and a group of people were going hiking up the mountain and invited people along. I was expecting a big crowd but there was not a big crowd instead there was a relatively small group of people who were all much much fitter than me and I spent the whole time struggling to keep up.
The trailhead.
The hike starts in Regent. If you want to do the hike yourself, the trailhead starts here. Follow what Google Maps displays as a road until the end and then keep going along the waterpipes and on up the trail. The picture above is the trailhead, at least how it looked the day we hiked it (at least two years ago as you are reading this), but Freetown keeps expanding its borders so who knows what it will look like when you give it a go.
According to the Visit Sierra Leone site, you are supposed to get a local guide and pay a small donation to hike on up the trail. As far as I could tell we didn’t do that and no one really approached us about it (not clear where one would ask for a guide), but it might be helpful to try to figure it out if you’re not going with someone who already knows what they are doing. The trail is supposedly marked, which is sort of true. It has definitely been marked many times. Hiking up we passed by arrows painted on rocks, paint on trees, and ribbons tied to branches. The trail itself was also usually pretty visible, though people have taken multiple paths around various obstructions, and it seems there are plenty of stories of people taking a wrong fork and winding up on the wrong mountain. If you haven’t seen a discarded water bottle in a bit, you’re probably on the wrong path.
Two guides were engaged, and about eleven o’clock I started, and was one and a half hours making the ascent. No one had been up for a long time, and the path was much overgrown, so that my guides missed their way twice. I never saw any thing like it. It was like going up a ladder, from rock to rock, up, up, at every step – at times pulling ourselves up by the bushes; at other places walking on an extended bare rock, with the inclination of a steep roof, while precipices of thousands of feet lay beneath. It was a very wearying effort, but we reached the top.
It hasn’t changed much (the trail was less overgrown than he described like I said above, but I think he did it closer to the rainy season). Since the internet said it was a marked trail I had expected, like, switchbacks. The straight-line distance for the trail is not even a mile, and before the hike I had been worried about how long a reasonably curvy trail up the mountain would be. Turns out the trail goes pretty much straight up from the trail head to the tippy-top, gaining (again as far as I can tell from Google Maps) 1000 feet of elevation in about 3000 feet of walking. Steep! I don’t think it would be too too bad if you were taking your time instead of running after people way more in shape than you, but there are definitely some slippery leaves and tricky bits. On the descent I resorted to crabwalking a few times. In the picture above you can see the rock faces our dear man George was talking about, but those were actually easy sections; the rock was grippy enough that you could just (“just”) walk up, though in the rainy season it might be much more hairy.
Further down in the paragraph quoted above George describes wondrous sights but unfortunately on the day we hiked up it was more than a bit hazy with the tail end of the Harmattan. What we did see was still rather pretty, but given how pretty it was I can only imagine the sights when the skies are clear. The photo at the top was about 3/4 of the way up and was the best view of Freetown itself, while the photo right above this paragraph was at the summit (I tried smiling I promise but I guess this is the best I could muster so exhausted) looking south into the forest preserve. It’s a gorgeous landscape, so unlike the port side of Freetown which really isn’t far at all, and must be unlike anything else in Sierra Leone until you cross the lowland plateau and hit the hills 100 miles inland. Worth the walk even if it is a doozy!
This is the story of me trying to find Heddle’s Farm. Why did I go looking for it? Because it is there. Maybe.
Early on in our Sierra Leone journey I of course discovered the list of national monuments. In Zambia, it was a book about various national monuments published by their National Monuments Commission that had me out looking at a lot of stuff and then trying to document it on the internet so it was more accessible to other people. I wanted to recreate that here in Sierra Leone because it is fun. These sorts of things have just the right amount of mystery. The places are usually documented enough that you can find them but not documented enough where it’s easy. I should point out that this is about documentation. Someone knows where all these things are; they are written down in government archives somewhere or someone is in charge of going and looking at the things every so often. That someone probably works for the Sierra Leone Monuments and Relics Commission and I really need to get down there and talk to them but I usually have to work when they are open and I just haven’t made it yet. So when I am looking for things there are easier answers but the handicap makes it fun. This brings me to Heddle’s Farm.
Right away I wanted to go look at Heddle’s Farm. Probably what intrigued me the most was that, according to the Sierra Leone Heritage page I just linked to, it eventually became part of the botanical garden of Fourah Bay College. I like botanical gardens so once you find out one exists, you like gotta go. And maybe they sell saplings that I could plant. It also meant I thought it would make it easy to find Heddle’s Farm, I mean, I know where Fourah Bay College is and it’s easy to drive to and botanical gardens are large and easy to spot. Not so. I dragged my super amazing wife out one weekend to drive around the college (through and then back through again that is) to see if we could spot the garden. We couldn’t. Later that week I had her ask some local colleagues about it and they were vaguely aware a botanical garden existed but were not really sure where it would be. So that was a bit of a dead end.
Back on the Sierra Leone Heritage page it recommends that for further reading you turn to A Residence at Sierra Leone. So I did. I bought the book in hardcopy and had it shipped here and read the whole thing for clues to the location of Heddle’s Farm. The book itself is what it says on the cover, a series of letters and journal entries edited together into a day-by-day narrative of the author’s time living in Sierra Leone. During most of the time she stayed in the house that later became known as Heddle’s Farm, after Charles Heddle, who owned it for a while and was very successful. Not to detract from Charles Heddle, who has a significant amount of stuff written about him online, but after reading A Residence in Sierra Leone I wanted to know more about the author. Her name was Elizabeth Melville. She originally published her book as “By a Lady” (edited by the Hon. Mrs. Norton), I assume to avoid anyone featured in the book thinking she was gossiping about them. But googling around I can’t really find anything much about her, though like so many things in Sierra Leone clearly someone knows a significant amount about her, I just don’t know who and I don’t know where they wrote it down. So in an attempt to be helpful to future googlers, I present, based on everything I could find online about her,
A Biography of Elizabeth Melville:
Elizabeth Helen Callender Melville was born in Dunipace, Scotland, on March 14, 1818. In 1840 she moved with her husband and baby to Sierra Leone. Her husband was a judge on the Mixed Commission Court which examined whether seized ships had been part of the slave trade. The family had at least one furlough in England but returned there permanently in 1846. She published her book in 1849.
…and that’s it. Elucidating. Anyways out of reading the book there were a couple of clues. One is that she describes the house as being “at the formidable distance of half an hour’s ride” from Freetown, which I figured put it about a mile from what is now downtown. Another is that she describes looking over at Mount Aureol from the house (she spells it “Oriel”). She says “The hill to our right rises up very abruptly, shutting out the view of both river and opposite shore. It is much higher and still more difficult of access than this; although were a plank (could we find one long enough) flung across from our windows to the corresponding height on the other side, I think I could run across in five minutes.” From that clue her house is not on Mount Aureol, but next to it. When I looked at Google Maps for where Mount Aureol was, it showed me what I interpreted to be the area next to Fourah Bay College (at this point where I still thought a botanical garden was), so I wrongly took this as evidence the house was somewhere on the grounds of college. But since I already had been thwarted looking for a botanical garden on the grounds of the college, I searched for other sources.
One interesting thing I found was the above picture, via the Library of Congress. I figured there could only be so many botanical gardens in Freetown, so that house pictured might be Heddle House itself. I was further encouraged when I noticed the house in the photo looks a lot like the house in the painting that graces the Sierra Leone Heritage webpage. I also, upon re-reading that webpage, noted that Heddle’s Farm is described as being “on the old Leicester Road.” I managed to figure out that the old Leicester Road is the that the Leicester Police Post sits on. I had also come across this Government of Sierra Leone Integrated GIS Portal, and you’ll have to do the zooming yourself but if you zoom in along that road there is a section labelled “Tree Planting” and ah ha! I thought. Botanical garden, trees, tree planting, Old Leicester Road, maybe I have found it, and with a picture of the location and of the house itself in hand maybe I could go find it. So I went out for another drive to hunt the place down, assured of success!
I was unsuccessful. I could discern no tree planting along the road, except for a sign that said “tree planting.” There were no old buildings or anything that looked botanical garden-like, and as I went down the road it got dicier and dicier to the point where I cut my losses and turned around, defeated.
Once I returned home, I puttered around and realized that although my idea of looking at a map for the location of Leicester Road was pretty brilliant, it was not brilliant enough. Between being the home of Elizabeth Melville and the current day, Heddle House spent some time as the home of the Forest Commissioner. I figured the Forest Commissioner’s house, being a government facility, would be on old maps, and I had already found some old maps of Freetown. Specifically, I had found a 1947 map of Freetown from here. Looking down at the area around Fourah Bay College, I discovered two things: one, that Mount Aureol is the hill that Fourah Bay College is located on, and two, a little marker labelled “Heddle’s.” Well! That settled it! This was the location of Heddle House, on the hill next to Fourah Bay College. For your handy reference, I think it is where this marker is on Google Maps. Now all I had to do was go look at it.
This was not as easy as I thought it would be. I knew from my Leicester Road experience that the driving in that area was not so fun, so what I really wanted to do was park at Fourah Bay College and walk over. Mrs. Melville describes riding up Mount Aureol from Heddle House, and I wanted to essentially do the opposite. I made the mistake of picking a Sunday for this adventure and found a rather large church gathering at Fourah Bay College that I was too embarrassed to try to sneak around so I could muck off into the woods. So I drove down the hill and drove back up the adjoining hill, where I thought Heddle House lay. This was encouraging, actually, because I found a stretch of road that seemed to have once been paved, perhaps in the colonial era, like you would presumably do so the forest commissioner can get up to his house. Eventually though I could go no further without (I felt) significant risk of the car tumbling over the side of the cliff, so I parked in front of a shop after asking the proprietor if it was okay. She was very friendly.
View of Fourah Bay College from what I think is the location of Heddle’s Farm.
From my parking spot it was still a bit of a hike up the hill and the most impressive part of the whole adventure is that there are very nice houses up there built with what look like very heavy building materials and I am stunned someone hiked all that concrete and building materials up there. A very nice view though! The picture at the very top of this post is from near the shop I parked at and was pretty encouraging that this was the spot. The tallest building in the right third of the photo is the Freetown City Council building, right smack in the middle of downtown and the oldest part of the city. At one point in her book Mrs. Melville describes being able to see Freetown from her window as if laid out in miniature, and yeah that is exactly what I saw from that vantage point.
What I had hoped to find at the top of the hill was some sort of historical marker. There are historical markers next to some of the other historical sites I have seen in Sierra Leone, so I was hoping that along one of the paths up there I would find one and it would confirm I was in the right spot. I never did. I was also hoping to find the remains of the house, and I didn’t find those either. For quite a number of years the house had been reduced to just its foundations, and I think even those are gone these days. If you look at the Google Maps link from before, in the area there is a large dirt patch which currently serves as a soccer field and a source of clay for bricks. Nearby is a trash pile and all around the area are homes that have sprung up on the hill as Freetown expands. There is also a communications tower on top of the hill. Various friendly people saw me wandering around and asked what I was up to. I showed them pictures of other historical markers and asked if they knew of something similar up there, to no avail. Some suggested I look over at the college and I went down that path a little ways but didn’t see anything. I also poked around the hill but the only historic-looking thing I found was a geographical survey marker:
Eventually I decided I wasn’t going to see any artifacts that confirmed this was the location of Heddle House but I walked away satisfied anyway. The area clearly matches the description, given the saddle-like nature of the hill, the view of Mount Aureol, and the stunning vista of Freetown laid out in miniature. It’s a beautiful spot and despite the fact I have no idea how people get building materials up there, as a living location it is certainly charming. I don’t think there are any remnants of the botanical garden left, which is a bit sad, but there are other things for Freetown and Fourah Bay College to devote their resources to. The people on top of the hill were very friendly and tried to help. If you’re ever in the area it is probably much more straightforward to go to Fourah Bay College or Leicester Mountain for the views, but if you do get up there they are very nice.
One final note while I’m talking about A Residence in Sierra Leone. At one point in the book Mrs. Melville is relating the story of the 1794 French attack on Freetown, as told to her by various eyewitnesses. Melville is recording this in a letter she wrote in 1846, a half century after the event. Relating the story, she describes how the French “scoured the town in search of stock, which they kept shooting at… books, plants, seeds, dried birds and insects, were torn, trampled upon, and scattered about; telescopes, barometers, thermometers, and an electrical machine shared the same fate…” A mystery (to me anyway) is what the heck she was referring to when she said “an electrical machine?” I mentioned the whole half century thing because the eyewitnesses must have been relatively young when they witnessed the attack, their memory could have been influenced by subsequent events, and Mrs. Melville might have interpreted something they said anachronistically. But with all that being said what 1790s “electrical machine” is existing in a colony that hadn’t been around for a decade at this point? What is this thing she’s referring to? Electrical thingies existed at this point and were popular (Ben Franklin flew his kite in 1752), but what would have been in the colony? It’s listed with weather-related equipment so maybe something to do with that? Or just a scientific novelty? If you know what they are talking about please let me know.
Future Boy by Michael J. Fox and Nelle Fortenberry
Like I warned last week, oops, I have become a train guy. I mean not quite but almost. I complained a few weeks ago about how the history of Sierra Leone wasn’t so obvious to me like it had become in northern Zambia, but things are clicking into place. To the point where, as of writing this (early 2024), I am worried about drifting away from my dream of writing a book about the Central Africa Mission of the London Missionary Society (which I am totally going to do, as soon as I 1) spend weeks in the archives in London, 2) gain journalistic training and travel to Mbala for weeks to gather reflections on the current impact of the mission, and 3) achieve a sort of self-starting discipline I can’t even keep up to keep this blog updated). But things are clicking into place. As I’m starting to find some of the colonial history of Sierra Leone that shape the physical and societal patterns of the place you can spot the remnants of history. Like Hill Station.
So we have been living here (again as of writing) in Hill Station the neighborhood. It was upon visit to the train museum and reading the little pamphlet we bought in the gift shop that I realized that comes from like, Hill Train Station (a little more research later I’m unclear if that is true, this Hill Station was patterned off a Hill Station in India so the technical etymology of the name might not be a literal train station). Since I like looking at the remnants of history, I wanted to figure out where the actual Hill Station was. I spent a little bit of time looking around on Google Maps satellite view for anything that looked like an old train station or a train right-of-way, but I pretty quickly deemed that as unlikely to yield results. Luckily though I thought of looking at old maps and hit the jackpot right away.
In the top right corner of this map, if you zoom in, you can see a little traffic island sorta thing labelled “Old Hill Stn (Railway).” Well that solved that mystery. It also pointed out where “Hill Station” (the neighborhood) actually was. When I was zooming around Google Maps I was looking too far up the hill. Another thing looking at the old maps is that it is remarkable (to me, I am remarking on it) how much more developed the area is than it was at the tail end of colonialism. These hills are now covered in neighborhoods and houses whereas before Hill Station was an isolated little enclave in a sea of forest.
Speaking of which, what was Hill Station, the neighborhood? Like I just said, an isolated little enclave. Around the turn of the century the British administrators decided that living up on a hill would be a lot better idea than living down in Freetown where their offices were. This was ostensibly for health reasons, to get up into the breezes which hopefully would mean there were far fewer mosquitoes. However, as explained in this excerpt fromThe Creoles of Sierra Leone by Leo Spitzer, in implementation it was a bit more racist than that. Not only would the neighborhood be mosquito-free, but it would also be largely free of anyone non-white, except for the adult servants of the white administrators living there. They put signs up a mile out to keep anyone from even planting a garden. Leo Spitzer’s book is about how Sierra Leonean society split from the British colonialists, and Spitzer credits this spatial separation of administrator and administrated for part of that.
Anyway the other thing about Hill Station is the old houses. Sierra Leone is known for old houses but these old houses are different. The Hill Station neighborhood was not only racist but also expensive. To get all the way up to the hill they had to build a whole railroad, hence the creation of the Station of Hill Station. The neighborhood and railway were built roundabout 1902-1904. The houses they built were referred to as “Harrods Houses,” because they were ordered from Harrods (as in the department store), shipped to Sierra Leone, and constructed on the spot from the kits. So scattered around the hill are apparently 12 of the original 24 or so Harrods Houses with their distinctive look. Not too bad for some pre-World War I kit houses (here is a site with some interior shots).
Circling back to trains, once I figured out where the Hill Station Railway station was, I wanted to figure out where the old railway line was. There was not conveniently wonderful old maps of the railway line that I could find easily. The line only ran until 1929 when there was a nice enough road and enough of the administrators had cars to make it no longer necessary. So any maps I found would have had to be made in that era. One map I did find (via this blog) was on this wonderful website all about post offices that existed on trains and ships, which is a wonderfully niche hobby that I am in real danger of falling into the very moment I turn 40 (check out their committee page). It is not a very exact map but I started to try to trace the route which led me to discover the road with the extremely convenient name Old Railway Line so there’s another mystery in the bag.
But the whole point of this blog post is that after all this research on the Hill Station railway line and hill station itself I went over there and checked it out. It was a lovely little walk on a Sunday morning (to try to make sure it was relatively quiet). First I went to the spot of the old railway line hoping to find some evidence of its existence, but alas not really:
There used to be a train station here.
Then I walked up the hill to check out the Harrods Houses. I had spotted them before on the way to the Country Lodge Hotel and thought to myself they had looked colonial, so I was pleased in the course of all this research to discover they really were. They are popular houses to photograph (and, for the artist Frédéric Lère who I found via Google Maps of all things, to paint) though I tried to be a little discreet.
A pre-World War I Harrods House, intact and still in use.
So the point is, history is cool, trains are cool, and going on walks is cool.
A Fortune-Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani (not quite the book I remember)
The same weekend that we were resting and relaxing at Banana Island we also went to the world-famous Sierra Leone Railway Museum. It was really great! I had been itching to go to a museum in Sierra Leone (there are three), but they are typically only open on weekdays which makes it tough to go unless we have a holiday Monday or Friday off. So when we had the chance I insisted we leap at it.
The Railway Museum is pretty nice and is a labor of love for all involved. It was started in the aftermath of the civil war when noted Train Guy Steve Davies found that some engines and rolling stock were laying forlorn in the former Cline Town railway works. They managed to get a railway museum up and running and have since managed to visually restore the items on display.
When we visited we were the only visitors and they were pretty excited to have us. I think most of the traffic at the museum is school groups and it looks like they do a really great job teaching all the kids about trains and stuff. We paid our entry fee and were taken around on a guided tour. We managed to briefly visit the national museum and also got taken on a guided tour, so it seems on-your-own museum browsing isn’t really a thing around here. The first part of the tour focused on the history of the museum itself before going into the history of railways in Sierra Leone. The purpose of the railways was of course colonial-era extraction but hey I suppose we can’t hold that against the trains themselves. The railway eventually folded up shop at the behest of the IMF told the government in the ‘70s. According to the group of train enthusiasts that run the museum, this was due to the evil machinations of the car lobby. This tracks with most train vs. car experience in history, so once again boo stupid car lobby.
For train cars, one of the ones they are most proud of is the train car that was supposed to be used by Queen Elizabeth II when she visited Sierra Leone. I guess the train ride never happened and the train car wound up fairly derelict but the museum has restored the exterior. The interior is bare (they’re working on it), but on the inside are pictures of Queen Elizabeth and signs about Sierra Leone’s relationship with the monarchy. Our tour guide certainly knew how to lead a tour because one of the first things he did was request my phone so we could run outside the train car so we could stand on the back on the reviewing platform and wave to a non-existent crowd like Queen Elizabeth would have while he took pictures. Extremely cute. Other train cars they had included a steel goods car and a payment car for the railway to pay its employees.
This is a Hudswell Clarke 0-8-0 diesel locomotive No 105 (works No. D1180), built in 1959. Specs: 145HP, top speed 20mph, mostly used for shunt work. This is well documented online, both on the museum website and on the specialized wiki. Man there are a lot of train guys out there in this big beautiful world. And, I have to assume, train women.
Besides the cars they had the engines. Most of the engines they had were pretty small diesel engines from the latter part of the railway’s history. They are pretty cute! They had some even smaller steam engines and a larger steam engine. These all look pretty complete but I think are a far way off from running. What does run however is one of those railway pump cars you always see in cartoons and stuff. They got it on a short length of track and under the careful supervision of our tour guide we got to take it for a spin which was a hoot. An absolute delight.
We wrapped up our tour in the giftshop where I bought a marvelous little booklet on the history of the museum and the railway and then my super amazing wife got two postcards with old photos of the railway which is cool. This is not the most expansive railway museum in the world but the staff is enthusiastic and the history is neat and I mean you gotta go see trains. Last week I was worried about becoming a bird guy but now I think I might become a train guy. Of course, isn’t every man a train guy at heart?
Hot on the heels of our weekend of rest and relaxation of Tacugama, we decided to do even more rest and relaxation with an overnight on Banana Island. The Banana Islands are off the coast (as many islands are), a couple miles to the southwest of Kent, a fishing village. Getting to Kent was a two-hour drive from Freetown (the way back was three hours with traffic) and once we got to Kent it took some directions from some friendly people along the side of the road to find the little port with a boat that would ferry us over to the resort. We were staying at Bafa Resort, which offers glamping stays on the island. And so we arrived around noon and settled in.
If there was not much to do at Tacugama there was even less to do at Bafa for most of the time. I mean this is what we were there for so it was perfect. After my harrowing experience on our last relaxing weekend of forgetting to bring a book, this time around I brought two, but didn’t manage to finish reading the one while we were still on the island. I should say you can do activities at the resort (snorkeling, fishing), we just didn’t really. For no extra cost you can go swimming though it was better at high tide and we didn’t get the timing right. You can also eat and drink and that was fantastic. The food there was really really good. We favored the seafood and the menu changed for every meal. We also had a few drinks while we were there, and one of the highlights was that after years of reading about palm wine I finally got to try some poyo. It was good! Faintly nutty flavor. It would be fun if I could find a more regular supply.
Our overnight of rest and relaxation.
Anyways so we spent our time that afternoon hanging out overlooking the ocean and reading. An utterly perfect activity. The weather was beautiful, the company was great (my wife is super amazing), and admiring Sierra Leone from the sea was beautiful. It was cool to see the peaks of the Western Area disappearing into the mist as the continent rose from the ocean. Very cool. We also got to admire the stars and then eventually turned in for the night.
The highlight of the visit for me was the historic tour we did the next morning. We almost didn’t get to do it and I would have been crushed. Our boat was leaving at noon and though we had originally arranged to do the tour starting at 10 the resort didn’t tell the guide that so he didn’t show up until 11:15 or so and we had to do the whole thing speedily.
Firing Point
The history of Banana Island I have found to be frustratingly difficult to dig up. Maybe this is just because I now fancy myself as something of an expert on the history of a certain chunk of northern Zambia, and starting from scratch and not knowing where to look is simply frustrating. Most of the easily accessible histories of Sierra Leone I’ve found focus on Freetown and not so much the outlaying areas. Even if you go on the Heritage Commission website there’s not a whole lot about the only national monument on the island, the Firing Point. There is some conjecture and that’s really about it. Even in the book I found with a chapter on the Banana Islands is mostly just concerned about ownership status and doesn’t really dive into what happened on the islands. I have found reference to the islands in a few other sources (sometimes they are the Bananas and sometimes the Bananoes) but no nice comprehensive history. Maybe I’ll have to write a whole blog post about them or something.
1881 Anglican bell.
But enough complaining, the historic tour was great mostly because it got us out of the little resort area. The town of Dublin on Banana Island is really cool. Apparently it is a very old town with streets laid out in a kinda regular grid with street signs and antique lampposts. There were fruit trees everywhere and like I always am I was mesmerized by everyone’s gardens and all the things they were growing. I saw cassava and bananas (obviously) and oranges and breadfruit and coconut and taro and chickens and goats but didn’t have time for a really in-depth look. Besides the Firing Point the other historic thing we saw was an old bell from the Anglican church. They had built a new church next to where the old one was, and since the bell tower had burned down (I think) the bell was hung from a tree. The bell was from 1881. I think the Anglican church must have been founded by the Church Missionary Society when they were invited in by one of the early governors of Sierra Leone in his attempt to establish townships for the former captives of slave ships the Royal Navy had brought into Freetown and condemned. But I’ll have to look into that further in my Banana Islands blog post.
After zooming through the tour (which included a plug for the resort on the island we weren’t staying at), we had to head back to our resort, settle the bill, jump on the boat, and head on home. It was a great time and I can easily imagine going on, if only to explore even more of the island this time around. There’s always so much more to see!
Hello again future readers. I am writing to you from the long-ago time of early 2024. Although my previous Tacugama entry will have gone up only a week before this one, in real time it was about four months in between our visits. Life here in Sierra Leone has been a hoot but getting out and about to explore stuff was a bit more difficult than initially anticipated. Some of this is artificial but the morning we departed for Tacugama we finally got a car and so finally had some independent mobility. Plus it has taken a while to understand what was going on in the area, historically, which meant we didn’t quite know where to go. But my super amazing wife’s birthday was coming up, and Tacugama was a place we knew to go, so we had an extremely lovely weekend just relaxing there. We spent two nights at Tacugama in one of their eco-huts and it was great.
We left for Tacugama on Friday night after work, in such a hurry that I forgot to bring a book. Cell phone reception up there isn’t the greatest and there wasn’t much reading material on hand so this was potentially a disaster. The whole plan for the weekend was to spend the large majority of the time just hanging out and reading and I was left without reading to read. Oh no! The solution to this was to go through a backlog of stuff I had meant to read on my phone, and also, when she was busy crocheting, to steal my super amazing wife’s book that she had brought. So that worked out well and when I was reading and we weren’t eating (we also spent a large chunk of time eating during this trip, the food was phenomenal) I could nap in a hammock.
Speaking of thirty-something-guy activities, our real big adventure during our time at Tacugama was going on the birdwatching tour. This we did Saturday morning. We set our alarm for 6:30, hoping in a metaphor reversal the worms we caught were in fact the early birds. Our tour guide was Alfred, who simply made the whole adventure. Alfred loves birds. He got so excited about the birds we saw, even the common ones. If you are going on a bird tour in Sierra Leone ask for Alfred.
For the birdwatching tour we went up to the top end of the reservoir. On our last trip to Tacugama we hiked over the dam of the reservoir, but this time we were seeing the other end. On our last trip it was also the rainy season, and this time around it was the dry season, so it was neat to see the reservoir with a lower water level. This is a much preferable indicator of the change of seasons than like snow or something is. Boo snow. Yay tropical jungle. We didn’t see way too many birds on our birdwatching adventure. I got a number of pictures of the same reed cormorant. Birds I didn’t get pictures of were a flycatcher with a very colorful orange tail and a green turaco.
Upper end of the reservoir.An agreeable cormorant.
The most dramatic part of the adventure however is when we almost caught a glimpse of the Great Blue Turaco. Turns out Alfred’s absolute favorite bird is the Great Blue Turaco. We had spent our time at the reservoir and were about to head back when Alfred saw a rustle of leaves and heard the Great Blue Turaco call. We couldn’t leave now that we had a chance to see one. We stayed still and waited and heard a few more calls but alas it was not to be. So we hiked back along the trail and over the dam again and wound our way back to camp.
Wet season reservoir.Dry season reservoir.
The afternoon we went off to see the chimpanzees. They were much the same as last time though this time around I got much better pictures of the babies playing around thanks to a zoom lens. And I was prepared for the alpha chimp throwing rocks at us, though there was also a much bigger crowd so individually I wasn’t as much of a target. We also saw some chimpanzees grooming each other much more intensely this time around, and it was funny to watch one manhandle (chimp-handle) another’s leg and spin its friends around to ensure they got all the angles.
The rest of that day was spent in various comfortable chairs reading or in the hammock napping or up in the kitchen lean-to eating. Minus the reading part I now realize this is the life of a chimpanzee at Tacugama so I guess we really got the full experience. We went to sleep that night and the next day had another delicious breakfast and a very relaxed morning before heading on home. Not a shabby weekend at all.
After two years I can finally reveal that the undisclosed country we have been living in is Sierra Leone. I can now finally reveal this because we have left. I assume anyways. By the time this gets posted I will have written it two years ago, so hopefully I got like two years of posts saved up because I figure it is better to write about these things in real time so they’re fresh-seeming and then post them later so I can build up the content. I hope it’s been a good two years!
Anyways, one of our first big adventures here in Sierra Leone was visiting Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary! These weren’t the first chimps I ever saw but they were the first chimps I ever saw with my super amazing wife. Tacugama wasn’t actually that big of an adventure. It is essentially in the middle of Freetown which makes it relatively easy to access. It was like a 30 minute drive, tops. The most difficult part is that the visitor’s center is at the tippy top of the hill and the road up it was unpaved, single-lane, and kinda steep. At least it was in the far distant past of August 2023. When we were heading up they had plans for a nice new visitor’s center and a paved road, so maybe more recent visitors have gotten to partake in those luxuries.
An angry chimp is as strong as five men.
During our visit we had two major activities. The first was a tour of the facilities. We were led around by our very friendly guide Sulayman who was eager to tell us chimp facts. There were various helpful signs around the place. Tacugama’s main raison d’etre is rehabilitating chimpanzees that people have kept as pets. It is illegal to keep a chimpanzee as a pet in Sierra Leone, and honestly it is my understanding that chimps make terrible pets anyways, but some people just aren’t satisfied with a cat. When Tacugama finds out about someone keeping a chimpanzee as a pet they kindly ask that person to turn the chimpanzee over no harm no foul. If the person refuses they’ll get the authorities involved but like all organizations like this one a big focus of their mission is community outreach so they try to be nice.
Once a chimpanzee is taken in by the park it goes through three stages of rehabilitation. At first the chimpanzee is quarantined as chimpanzees are susceptible to human diseases and they want to ensure it won’t bring anything bad to the group. Once the chimpanzee is done with this hurdle it is introduced to the Stage 2 group. This stage is about the chimpanzee learning how to interact with other chimpanzees and be part of the group. They are carefully monitored and fed regularly.
The guy in the foreground was the current leader of the group. He really didn’t like us watching the group and kept throwing rocks at us, which honestly was totally fair. Besides him though it was cute to watch all the rest of the chimpanzees hanging out and climbing around. There were two little babies that kept swinging around and having a grand ole’ time.
After Stage 2 the chimpanzees are sensibly moved onto Stage 3. This is more of a wilderness type setting. It is still enclosed and the whole scenario kinda gave raptor pen vibes because it was this electrified fence surrounding pretty dense jungle and you were just told that there were animals in there somewhere. Potentially dangerous animals too. Apparently the chimpanzees test the fence sometimes and they have escaped before. Like I said raptor pen vibes. But in the large enclosed space there are plenty of fruit trees and the chimpanzees mostly fend for themselves though they do get fed regularly, just not as often as in Stage 2. They prefer living in the jungle anyways. They’re chimpanzees after all.
Unfortunately so far there has never been a Stage 4, which is releasing the chimpanzees back into the wild. Maybe this problem has been solved in futuristic 2025, but in 2023 there is still a lot of habitat loss and poaching of chimpanzees in the wild, despite chimpanzees being Sierra Leone’s national animal. Tacugama is afraid that if they release the chimps into the wild they’ll just get poached. Very sad but as I said before Tacugama is big into community outreach and does a wide range of educational and developmental programs for people surrounding the park and throughout Sierra Leone in order to protect the wild chimpanzees along with the other wildlife in the area.
But enough about animals! After the tour the next big thing we did was go on a hike. We went on the waterfall hike. This was very picturesque. It was the rainy season so everything was lush and green and very wet. Clouds often kiss the hilltops and the jungle roars with life as water cascades down the hills. The below picture is actually of a reservoir that apparently dries up in the dry season. That’s how wet things were.
The hike itself was very pleasant. The guide warned us we would be out and about for three hours but I think it was closer to two. I think mileage wise we didn’t go very far but we worked our way down the hill along a river as the guide stopped to explain various bits of infrastructure and what Tacugama was doing to protect the park and try to preserve swaths of jungle. People are of course hungry to make a livelihood and send their kids to school so it is a balancing act for them. The sort of finale of the hike was being led across a rope and wood plank bridge to get a good view of the below waterfall. As I was looking at it I was thinking about how one of the first things we did in the Peace Corps was visit a waterfall, and now here I was doing the same in Sierra Leone. Peace Corps was a hoot, so I guess this is an auspicious way to start a new adventure in a new country. I hope so anyway. I’ll know how it turned out by the time this is posted.
Hunting Trips in Northern Rhodesia by D.D. Lyell, F.Z.S. (pretty racist)
As it has been over a year since my previous update on our garden, it is time to give you all the latest, and the last. You see our time in undisclosed country is drawing to a close and so therefore too is our time with this particular garden. And um there isn’t actually a whole lot to update. We did not grow as much this year as in previous years. The seeds we had did not really take this time, so there was no big harvest of various foodstuffs. For a while there some pumpkin vines were sprouting of their own accord, and really taking over the garden area. The trellis we had gotten set up the year before was still there, even though it never really served as a rain shield, but with the pumpkin vines it could instead serve as a very nice sunshade with vines growing all up an around. But although the vines covered the sky and ground and there were many flowers, never did any begin to grow a pumpkin. Oh well.
Instead my real big successes were trees. This was all touch and go for a while. I see in my last post that I was excited for my avocado tree to grow taller than I was, and I can happily report it is significantly taller than I am, all in only about two years. Still no avocados of course, but I am sure the next occupants of the house will find them delicious. In the dry season the leaves were getting coated with some sort of grime, or perhaps a fungus, though it would still push out new leaves occasionally. In the rainy season it seems to have recovered its mojo and shot right on up. It is my single most successful tree I’ve ever grown.
In that last post you’ll also recall my small citrus tree in the ground. Unfortunately it has remained small and rather unhealthy. I don’t know what is wrong or what to do right, though it is still hanging on. Instead above is a picture of a totally different citrus tree, this one I think orange though I mixed up all my seedlings and can’t remember. I think keeping it in a pot on that concrete platform helped, as it made it harder for pests to get to it from the grass. I think. It is really now much too large for that pot but I was reluctant to change it as I knew I would give it away and didn’t want to make it too unwieldly. In our wrap-up here it has indeed found a new home where it will live for some time, and they have already created a much larger box in which it can reside. A proud legacy! Though also in the back of the house there are several small citrus trees I planted which were quite sickly for a while but are now growing quite strong. Maybe someday there will be tons more citrus.
A fun part of the garden (when I am not accidentally walking through spider webs) is all the bug (and frog) life. In fact the frog above is the first I have seen, and I spotted it hiding out in a new leaf. I suppose that might actually be a baby toad, and those we have seen plenty of, but I am no herpetologist. The various other critters have also been cool, and it has been interesting to spot them as I walk around. Some I see often, like the spiders, but I only ever saw one of the anime-looking mantis, and the pictured jumping spider is the only one I’ve seen in the midst of catching prey. Life is truly wonderful. Besides the tiny critters and the toads, also this year a rather large rat-looking thing moved into some of the bushes in the corner. I was happy to have it there, as I figured that its presence meant our yard must not have many snakes. Not that I dislike snakes in general, but I wouldn’t want to disturb one in surprise as that would be unpleasant for both of us. Oh and lizards! There are lots of lizards!
At any rate that has been our gardening experience here in undisclosed country. It has been a lot of fun and it is so nice to have some greenery outside the window. I hope the trees will continue to grow big and strong and bear fruit, and more importantly that the friends we are leaving behind will take pictures of the trees with that fruit and send it to me. I will be so proud.
The Uttermost Part of the Earth by E. Lucas Bridges
Back when we visited Shetland Wool Week, one of the things we really wanted to do was go to a natural dyeing class. I have a whole degree in chemistry so that sort of thing of course interests me. Unfortunately we were thwarted by the overwhelming popularity of Wool Week and so couldn’t do it there. But why go all the way to Shetland when you can do something at home? The answer to that is Shetland is beautiful but that is not the point.
We had managed to pick up a natural dye kit from Hilltop Farm and Fiber Arts while we were up in their neck of the woods. These kits contain pretty much everything you need to try out some natural dyeing. It comes with a skein of yarn, ready to be dyed, mordant, the dye stuff (in our case a bunch of marigold bits), and some safety items like a mask and gloves. All in all pretty comprehensive.
Our skein, ready for the time of its life.
The caveats in the above paragraph, “pretty much” everything you need and “pretty” comprehensive are because the thing we lacked was a big ole’ pot. You should keep your dye equipment separate from your cooking equipment, and while we have a fair-sized pot we didn’t actually have a BIG pot, so the hardest part of this whole adventure was going out and sourcing a hefty stainless steel cauldron in which to do our chemistry adventures. But we felt it was worth the investment, even if we couldn’t use it to make the overwhelming amount of spaghetti of my dreams, because we hope to do more dyeing in the future now that we are experts courtesy of this kit.
Anyways! Although we were willing to invest in a pot we were only willing to invest in the one pot, so we had to do everything in series instead of doing some things in parallel. Turns out the process of natural dyeing is heating water up to 180F or so and keeping it there for an hour, and doing that multiple times. The first time around was to put the mordant on the yarn. In our case it was aluminum sulfate, and the kit came with a pre-measured pack. So you just had to dump it in water, let it dissolve, heat the whole thing up to temperature, and put in the yarn. The trickiest part was keeping it at the right temperature, as you don’t want it to boil lest that felt the yarn and ruin it (ruin it for knitting purposes anyway).
With that out of the way, next was to make the dye itself. This was very similar to making a pot of tea, because it’s pretty much the same thing. We had dumped out the remaining mordant mix, filled the pot up again, added all the marigold bits, and then of course we just had to keep it at 180F again for an hour or so. I notice now, perusing Hilltop’s website, that they sell dye bags, which would have been handy. We were making this pot loose-leaf style, which was well and good but made it rather difficult to filter out all the marigold bits once we were done with them. For us this involved an additional bucket or two. We got there in the end but an oversized tea (dye) bag would have made our lives much easier.
Then the real exciting part! Now that we had dye, we just had to add back in the yarn and yes of course then keep it at 180F for an hour (photo at the top). If our dye to yarn ratio had been closer, the yarn would have sucked out all the dye out of the liquid which would have been cool to see, but we had made a very strong tea. So the water was still very brown when we extracted our new golden yarn, but that’s fine, we had a beautiful yarn. The next step did not involved any temperature control, but just letting the yarn cure for two weeks (aka let it hang up and stay dry) and then give it a regular wash. And we had natural-dyed yarn, extremely cool! My super amazing wife isn’t quite sure yet what she’ll make with it but it is exciting to know that we had an intimate hand in making the yarn ready for use:
As a fun diversion, the below is a school assignment my mom sent me recently and which I apparently wrote when I was 11. What the exact assignment was is likely lost to time. The story itself reflects at best a medium understanding of fish biology, but I think that is compensated by an excellent showing of story structure and that certain je ne sais quoi of PatInTheWorld writing. Please enjoy:
Hi! I’m Mr. Fishy Dude! I would love to tell you a strange story of adventure and sadness. It’s a story of hard work and mayhem. Yeah, but who cares?
My story starts one nice spring day, when I and one hundred thousand other fish suddenly got this strange feeling that we should go on a mission to lay eggs and die for our offspring.
Welcome to the ocean with me and a school of one hundred thousand fish. Due to just plain instinct, we are going from this ocean into the estuaries and rivers. From there, we will go further into the streams and creeks to our spawning grounds. Exciting, huh?
When we first started migrating, nothing much was happening. We were following the distant smell of our spawning grounds, and having smaller fish for lunch – the usual. Then, out of nowhere, a school of striped bass came along! I guess I forgot to mention that I’m a herring. So striped bass are bigger than us and to them, we’re lunch! So, we dodged, we swam, but in the end, one forth [sic] of us got digested. Now, we were only 75,000 fish. We were all sad at the loss of our companions. That will always be in my mind, along with a deep fear of striped bass.
We swam on. Very soon, though, we ran into a fisherman’s net. All of us escaped through holes just big enough for us. We also saved most of the fish from another school, but they’d already lost a lot of their fish. That school swam on with us for awhile [sic], but unfortunately, we must have gotten greedy, because some more of us died because of lack of food. I’m so sorry that we were greedy.
After that, we had finally found, by following the scent of the distant spawning ground, what we had traveled the ocean for; the estuaries and rivers.
When we got to the estuaries and rivers, that other school split up from us. They asked if we would meet again, and I said it was always a possibility. After swimming around for a while, I got the feeling that something bad was going to happen. And it did. It was a horrible scene! Our fish were just being ripped apart, stomach and eyes flying. I guess I’ll always have nightmares about it. The striped bass were back! One fourth of us perished. Our school only had fifty six thousand, two hundred fifty fish left in it. After that terrible scene, we saw another poor school get caught in a gill net and choked in mud. Only a few of them survived. That will be in my nightmares too!
Next, we found strange man made objects. It had little pools that went up and up to another part of the river. I figured out that we were supposed to jump from one pool to the next until we got to the top. We did, and it worked. When we got to the top, it was the beginning of the streams and creeks, the last step to the spawning grounds!
We thought we were home free, but we were not. There was more trouble ahead. The spawning ground was within our grasp. We met the two schools we met before and they joined us. After awhile [sic], we found anther strange man-made object. It wasn’t a fish ladder, it was a flood control. It started sucking our fish in and destroying them! A lot of places to spawn were destroyed. One half of us died. Now, we only had 28,125 fish in our school. We were in bad shape.
The other schools that joined us shared our luck. Some of their eggs got covered in mud, and others got nibbled by small fish. The other school separated from us. And then, our hearts jumped! It was the spawning grounds.
We were all glad to get to the spawning grounds. We made it! I decided to leave this part out because its got a lot of love and mushy stuff you wouldn’t like. After mating, we laid eggs and died. However, my conscious self is passed on to my child most like me. I got this power from an alien species who were not so smart by human standards. They felt that we were smarter than humans, which, was, of course, right. They gave one fish, me, that power. It also made me immortal as long as I manage to spawn. Our school had 843,750 fry (baby fish). After taking some time to grow, our offspring returned to the sea.
The streams and creeks were not familiar to me. The flood control had changed them. Still, out of instinct, we knew where to go. When we were swimming, I saw something that was a strange color. Then I realized, that’s toxic sludge, also known as toxic chemicals. I told my school to go around it, but they wouldn’t listen. Half of my school swam through it. They died. Now we only had 421,875 fish left. So, the lesson of this little story is always listen to the immortal fish in the school.
We decided to put that behind us, although we were sorry for those poor fish who did not listen to their elders. We swam on. Then, we found the fish ladder – the gateway to the estuaries and rivers! In the estuaries and rivers all we really did was swim, swim, and for a change of plans, did some more swimming. We saw some striped bass, but easily got around them. Finally, we found the ocean.
In the ocean, we all swam off with the current to find lunch and grow up so that we could make the amazing journey that our fathers and mothers had made. This, my friends, is, at long last, the end of my story.
Pat in the World 
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