I woke up before 7am. The rain was heavy. I just lied down waiting for it to be over. It was quite chilly. Very often here you don’t get anything to cover yourself with in bed as it’s too hot and such was the case here. I covered myself with towel and it was enough. On the subject of towels, and tourist towels especially, they are a waste of money. I don’t think they dry much quicker than regular towels, perhaps they are lighter than regular towels and they do take less space – but they so soon stink so horribly that the whole rooms get fouled with the towel’s rotten smell. Horrible.
There was breakfast! I got a nescafé and four pancakes that a woman fried for me. Quite tasty.
They asked me when I wanted to leave, I said 10am and a few minutes after 10am we left.
I paid 390,000le for everything – accommodation, dinner, long walk, night walk, a beer – the long day walk was counted as regular walk, so 30k instead of 50k. I somehow was convinced it’s all organised locally but apparently no – the money goes to Freetown where the headquarters are. I should have tipped my guides! I mean, despite no chimps, no pygmy hippos these walks are great value: $6/20zł per walk and I walked alone. In 2005 I was in Kibale National Park in Uganda and then a night walk was $27 per person. Possibly you can see much more than in Tiwai but you get the idea. Tracking chimps was $70 14 years ago. I wonder about the prices in Kibale now.
Back in the village I am taken to Bobo’s hut – he will take me back to the world. I am using occasion, i.e. not being alone and having asked permission from only the camp’s caretaker , and I snap pictures of the village. The huts are made of mud and mainly thatched. There is a school nearby. The well is operated by hand (i.e. no tap, you pump manually).
I asked Bobo for Zimmi, which is 55kms from the border – he asks for 120,000le. I get the impression it’s cheaper to get motos from village to village than one moto all the way to the destination. Possibly the drivers have bigger chances to get someone to carry when they are going back to the village. Bobo asks for 30,000le to Potoru, to the road.
And we ride, chatting a little bit, Bobo telling me about their palm oil “gardens, kola nut gardens, rubber gardens. He asks how much I wanna pay to Zimmi, I say 70,000le, he says it’s too little.
In Potoru of course I am surrounded by moto riders but I decide to try waiting for a car. It doesn’t look good though, Potoru is nothing but a village and I’m at a junction a bit of a distance from the main road. Anyhow, I get offered a seat, someone brings a chair and I hide under the roof waiting over the light rain that has come back.
Since I’m back to internet civilisation – well, not quite, the signal is GSM/EDGE which is the 2nd slowest internet you can get but it seems to work quite well.
I open up email. There is an email from the bank: “we blocked your debit card, please contact us.”
It’s gonna be a bit of publicity now. The bank I use, mBank, last year introduced a debit card that is a godsent to people who travel outside EUR/USD/CHF/GBP zone. It doesn’t add any costs to the exchange rates, it uses VISA exchange rate, which frankly speaking is hard to beat. Withdrawals from ATMs are free all over the world. I pay 10zł/€2.34/$2.7 per month for the card. Transactions over 300zł/€70/$79 per month balance the card cost. The card is called Visa świat intensive and it’s good.
And the card is blocked now. I open my account and see three transactions there, each for 10thousand Indian rupees, made in Chennai, India, that’s 556zł/€130/$146 as…. cash withdrawals!!
And here I am in a remote village. I try calling the bank using Skype but I’m sceptical because of the internet speed. Miraculously, I can hear the bank consultant very well, he can hear me very well. Technology. Unless I admit these transactions are mine the only way forward is to block the card and issue a new one. In panic, I start thinking whether I brought with me another ATM card. I open my secret not so secret pouch with cash and there are no cards. I have only credit card left in my wallet. Only at the end of the phone call I realise that I carry all the other cards in the same wallet just in a different compartment. Yeah, all travel security rules broken I know. I have another ATM card. Just everything will cost more now. And I’ll have to exchange cash more now.
While I’m on the phone calls a moto bike appears. The man patiently waits till I’m finished (although of course he drove up to me and started speaking to me while I was on the phone call). He asks for 60,000le, I say 50,000le and he agrees. Off we go.
There is no more asphalt but the road is wide and flat. It’s also closed at various points and we have to go aside and ride on the dirt roads running along it. There are quite many lorries which we have to pass or overtake or follow in dust. We cross a river on a ferry. The bridge already stands but it’s closed. The ferry is ancient and free. There is quite a lot of traffic going the opposite direction to ours (i.e. cars going from Liberian border) and most of the cars are my good old Guinean renaults. They go from Monrovia to Conakry, as via Sierra Leone it’s the quickest way. 2 days, 670kms.
In Zimmi the ritual begins. I am surrounded by moto drivers who even wanna immediately carry my bags to their own bikes. I take time especially that I hear prices of 100k, distance 55km, three checkpoints on the way, drivers pay 5k at each checkpoint. I buy myself popcorn and wait. Zimmi feels a bit like end of the world, a rusted billboard reminding us to use condoms at a roundabout with a EU-sponsored sign reminding us smuggling diamonds is bad.
The prices slowly drop, I hear the motos carry usually two people, 50k each that’s why the price I hear is 100k. I still stand by my price of 45k, which is not out of the blue, Bradt Guide mentions it. But Jendema on the border is 55kms away and I already paid 50k for Potoru-Zimmin which is 43km so I doubt I can hold 45k. And true, my driver from Potoru comes to me and says he has a driver who will take me to Jendema for 50k.
And so we go. One of the men around tells me to zip pocket my phone because it will be “gallop”.
And gallop it was and it was mad. We made the distance in almost an hour! Of the 3 checkpoints the driver gave money only at one, I was registered by another.
The road soon disintegrated into a regular bushtrack, we crossed a few small rivers. I don’t see asphalt to Jendema any time soon.
Jendema is just one wide dirt road, a bus stand with Guinean vans waiting for more passengers and a lot of curious people. I was dropped at a guesthouse called by everyone Bobby’s. 80k for a room with its own tiny bathroom, bucket water only, electricity in the evening. The guesthouse has its own well inside the building, where the water is taken by hand, buckets and cannisters lowered down on a rope. They also serve beer and I didn’t find any other place that does.
With so many Guineans around I hoped there would be Guinean coffee but unfortunately there isn’t. Nescafé only. I had rice and potato leaves for lunch in one of the stands for 10k. I was shown ginger juice, 0.5l for 2k. Jendema is quite expensive! The ginger juice was sold in a Muslim house. When I first went there, about 5 women, all in black, some even with their face covered, were reading Quran in Arabic. The book I was reading, Segu, is partly about struggle of traditional African faiths against Islam and how Islam is narrow-minded and archaic. These women unfortunately looked like that. Where in Sierra Leone reading Arabic will come useful? Well, you never know.
Evening I went out of the guesthouse to find dinner food. Unfortunately rice isn’t dinner food. There are women frying plantain, fish, flour cakes. One of them offered couscous and spaghetti. When I just asked for eggs she said she makes the dish very tasty and I will like it but she doesn’t wanna force me. Okay, I went for it but asked for only a little mayonnaise (!) and even less ketchup (!!).
The dish was tasty, pieces of spaghetti and couscous prepared possibly with tomatoes, pieces of fish, eggs and onions. The mayonnaise wasn’t as bad as the ketchup, which – being sweet – didn’t quite match the dish. It was also 10k.
I bought a box of mosquito coils. The ones I bought in Freetown all broke down in the transport. Even the mosquito coils are made in China. The ones I had in Bamako were more flexible and didn’t break.
I finished Segu and spent most of the evening trying to download some books about Sierra Leone to the Kindle. Strangely Amazon refused to sell them to me saying I’m in a region to which Kindle doesn’t belong. Interesting, that in Guinea it wasn’t a problem. I started up a VPN to UK and after a long time – extremely slow internet, my default payment card just got blocked too – I managed to download these books – I use Rough Guide as reference, they list books at every country’s chapter, seriously these guys are the best, there is also an article in The Guardian that I may have already quoted here: My year of reading African women:
The heart of the matter by Graham Greene
Journey without maps by Graham Greene
Soldiers of light by Daniel Bergner
The devil that danced on the water: a daughter’s memoir by Aminatta Forna
Coming back to Maman 