West Africa Part III: Guinea, Liberia & Sierra Leone

Guinea

: One of the first things I noticed after having entered the forestière region of Guinea is how the concrete spindles on many of the houses were in the shape of dollar signs

: I also noticed this guy raising the roof on another one of the houses we passed

: Apparently Hotel Mont Nimba here in the regional capital of Nzérékoré used to be a pretty swanky joint that the who’s who of the locals used to frequent, but now the place is so run down that even the rooms are too busted up to stay in. So, what we did here was rent three rooms just so our group of twenty would have access to three bathrooms and then we set up our tents wherever we could find a decent space somewhere on the property.

: “No water?” This sad sight at Hotel Mont Nimba reminded me of the derelict pool at the beginning of the SNL Schmitts Gay beer commercial before it suddenly filled with water and all the hot greased-up gay guys in speedos came out to party with Chris Farley and Adam Sandler while Van Halen’s “Beautiful Girls” plays in the background

: Saw this guy (or gal) near my tent when I got up to brush my teeth in the morning. Not at the market here in Nzérékoré but at the one we were at a few days beforehand in the town of Man in Ivory Coast, they had a bunch of these snails for sale in the food section. Makes me kinda sick to think about one of those things wiggling around in my mouth.

: The market of Nzérékoré

: I don’t know how well this shirt design sells here in Guinea, but I imagine it sells better than it would in Kenya where everyone and their mother is a freakin marathon runner

: This dude in the orange shirt running one of the little supermarkets in Nzérékoré was well-educated and spoke good English. After a few minutes of chatting, he tried to teach me how to do the local handshake that included a snap at the end of it, but I was way too white and awkward to get the hang of it. In spite of my pathetic and embarrassing handshake skills (or maybe because of them, maybe he felt bad for me) the guy insisted on giving me a free bottle of water to welcome me as a guest in his country.

: Inside the same shop from the previous photo, they sold these here vaginal tightening and bleaching products

: I bought a box of this stuff with the intention of leaving it somewhere for someone to find – still haven’t decided where or who to prank as of yet

: Nap time

: We spent two nights in Nzérékoré and on one of the days we took a day trip out to some remote village where they got a vine bridge

: A brickmaking operation seen along the way

: Once we’d arrived in the village, it was like an hour-long walk through the jungle to get to the vine bridge

: Walking through this burning jungle here made me feel like I was on set for the filming of a Vietnam War movie

: First glimpse of the vine bridge, with our guide standing next to the staircase leading up to it

: Longer and stronger than the one we saw in Ivory Coast

: ‘Bout to walk across this thing. I was wondering how they managed to tie all those supporting vines onto all those branches high above. Very impressive

: How it’s tied at the side near the top of the staircase

: Side view

: The Liberian dude I bought this thing from in Nzérékoré referred to it as a “passport mask.” He said that each tribe has a different style of mask and that these pocket-sized ones were used to identify what tribe you were from and your ranking within it while traveling outside of your own tribal community

: Little stand selling a bunch of products popular with the locals as seen en route to go visit the chimpanzees of Bossou. Lots of skin whitening products in the mix there

: Some items for sale at a handicraft market

: In the couple hours we spent trekking through the dense jungle around Bossou looking for these chimps, this is the clearest photo that anyone in our group was able to take. I personally couldn’t get close enough to any of them to take a photo. I only caught glimpses of their asses here and there, as they started running in the opposite direction anytime we began to get close. That said, one thing I did get during this walk was absolutely ravaged by ants. We kept walking through colonies of them and the moment you put your foot down, they immediately hop on and start burrowing into your shoe and running up your legs and biting the shit out of every part of you that they can. They were mean little motherfuckers, they were.

: I popped into the outhouse in Bossou to take a quick shit before going to bed and saw a family of these fuckers on the wall. I didn’t know what they were so I was a bit hesitant to pull my pants down in front of ‘em, lest they try to burrow into my butthole while I make brown. So I went back to the group to see if anyone was interested in having a look at this thing and a few people came to check it out. Jason, one of the two group leaders, was able to identify it as a whip spider which are apparently non-venomous and aren’t really interested in going after humans.

Liberia

: As we spent a couple hours or so getting our paperwork sorted out at the Guinea-Liberia border crossing, I passed the time watching this guy make progress building what had probably been a roof but that I’d been hoping was a ladder to heaven

: At the time of our visit, I think the conversion rate had been about 195 Liberian dollars to 1 US dollar

: I felt like such a fuckin boss after exchanging money at the border. Man, I had hundred dollar bills hangin out the ass that day. It’s a shame that each one of em was barely worth more than fifty cents

: There seemed to be a lot of these PSA, “do this, don’t do that” sort of signs all along the main roads in Liberia

: Here’s another one. Other ones I saw but didn’t get photos of had been: Stop child marriage. Report rape. Report good policing, report bad policing. Send your female child to school. (And regarding some kind of upcoming elections) Ballots not bullets.

: The Liberian-American-Swedish Mining Company was founded in 1955 and operated here at Yekepa in the Nimba mountain range where they mined for iron ore until the First Liberian Civil War which occurred from 1989 until 1997. And this is where we camped during our first two nights in the country. Not too long after I’d set my tent up here, a pretty powerful storm ripped into the area and blew it away. It didn’t go far, but by the time the storm ended it was all mangled and there was like six inches of water on the inside of it.

: This was one of our guides that took us hiking around the Yekepa mines. And the tank-shaped thing at the bottom of the photo was a radio or mp3 player that he’d been listening to music on.

: Every man is the captain of his own ship

: Shot of a stand at the market in some town I can’t remember the name of where my cook group had to do our shopping to prepare dinner that evening

: We completely ran out of water somewhere between the Yekepa mines and a place called Kpatawee Waterfalls, which’d been our next destination. So, we stopped in this small town and asked if we could fill up a couple jerry cans.

: Little “shop” next to the well in the previous photo

: On the left you have the lazy river and on the right you have the beach at Libassa Ecolodge. The waves at the beach there were so powerful that, as I was walking down into the water, they plowed me over and almost ripped my swimtrunks off as I tried to get back on my feet.

: This food that one of the other cook groups made at Libassa Ecolodge looked like someone took a shit on a plate…didn’t taste much better either. At this point in the trip, I was pretty sick of eating everyone else’s cooking. To be honest, after five weeks with the group, I was starting to feel claustrophobic and was ready to get off the truck. But at this point we only had about a week or so left to get through, so obviously I was gonna stick it out.

: Freshly caught fish for sale on the beach where we were camping in Robertsport. I went for a nighttime swim here and I think the water had some kind of bioluminescent plankton in it. Although it wasn’t glowing on its own, when you’d move your hands around under the water it looked like there were sparks flying off of your fingers. It was pretty cool. I spent about an hour enjoying this phenomenon.

: Generic Home Depot ripoff in the Liberian capital of Monrovia

Sierra Leone

: This little hustler and the “Make me rich” kid behind him were selling drinks at the border between Liberia and Sierra Leone

: According to this immigration officer’s shirt, he’s a simple man that likes tits, beer and… I can’t tell what that third image is supposed to be. Shout out to the cute fuzzy little teddy bear on his sweatpants

: Although I’m sure this kid would rather be playing “the floor is lava” type games with his friends, he was pushing around and selling a wheelbarrow full of clothes at the border. I guess if you’re gonna get stuck doing child labor, as many kids in Sierra Leone do, selling clothes isn’t the worst thing in the world – seems better than working in the diamond mines.

: Sierra Leone recently knocked three zeroes off of their currency. 1USD is equal to about 22.5 new Leonean leones. And I think the old leones were supposed to have been taken out of circulation by January 2024, but we still managed to get some during our visit several months after that.

: Think that truck driver put that decal on there of his own volition or does his boss make him ride with it on there? And what’s the deal with the nike swoosh next to the blessing? Very confusing.

: Ready to boogie down

: Our Tiwai Island guide Mamadou was working hard here trying to bust a nut to show us what was on the inside. Additionally, I swam across that river in the background and then swam back. It probably took around half an hour. It was only after I got back from the other side to the shore here that some kid told me there might be crocodiles out there. Couldn’t tell if he was being serious or if he was just fuckin with me.

: There were some absolutely massive trees on Tiwai Island

: She’s a beauty

: Man, what the fuck is this thing!? I don’t remember why the guide picked it and handed it to me and I couldn’t find anything about it online when doing a Google image search.

: I thought this monkey on Tiwai Island looked like it had a henna-dyed beard – kinda like the guy I superimposed next to it

: Nice spider web. Have you ever heard of the experiment NASA did in which they gave different drugs to spiders to see what kind of effect each one of them might have on their web-making abilities? https://www.businessinsider.com/how-powerful-is-caffeine-nasa-spider-web-study-2019-5

: Pharmacy in the town of Bo where they’re selling a bunch of bogus medical products that probably don’t even work. I like the one called HUNGA-UP which advertises itself as a “hunger growth syrup” and has a picture of a girl giving a thumbs-up on it

: I started to get really sick at a place called Bureh Beach. We spent two nights there after visiting Tiwai Island just before ending this particular leg of the overland tour in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. I came down with a terrible case of diarrhea and was going between ten and fifteen times a day. As such, I don’t have any photos from Bureh Beach. But here I am taking a little walk in the area around Jam Lodge Hotel in Freetown.

: There were a bunch of these PSAs painted on the wall near my hotel

: Solid advice

: Someone erased the word “harmful” at the top as well as the phrase “Don’t sell alcohol to children” at the bottom

: I like the sentiment behind this one, but something tells me that that burnt-to-a-crisp body in the driver seat is beyond saving at this point

: It was around noon and I was walking in sandals along this sidewalk here in the courtyard of the Jam Lodge when I stepped on something soft. “Hmm that’s peculiar,” I thought to myself, “I didn’t see anything but concrete ahead of me towards where I was walking.” I lifted up my right foot and an enormous rat quickly scurried away from me down into that sewer on the right side of the sidewalk. It must’ve been running up behind me and just happened to be in the same place as my foot while I was setting it down. I thought it was pretty god damn disgusting and went back to my room to wash my sandals in the shower.

: The international airport that serves Freetown isn’t located in Freetown itself but in a tiny town called Lungi that you gotta take a forty-five-dollar, half-an-hour ferry to. So, while in Freetown I was buying my tickets for that as well as reading up on and paying my twenty-five-dollar “Securipass” airport security fee in advance. The route I’d be taking home was from Freetown to Brussels to Chicago.

: I was still sick as a dog while I was in Freetown (and wouldn’t get better for more than a week once I’d gotten home) and accidently shit the bed while I was taking a nap. I took the sheets off the bed and did my best to wash them clean in the shower using a bar of soap. When checking out of the hotel, I left this note in my room for the cleaning lady to find.

: This dinky little piece-of-shit burger I bought at Lungi International Airport cost more than ten dollars. I was tired of all the high prices for low quality stuff in West Africa and this parting shot was just salt in the wound. I mean, it was a really interesting trip meeting people and seeing how things are and the way people live in this area of the world, but I just couldn’t wait to get home. I missed America. I was tired of washing all my clothes in a bucket every other day to try and rid them of the sweaty, dusty film that’d instantly start building on them any time I stepped outside. I was tired of strangers staring at me and telling me to give them money whenever I’d go for a walk down the street. I’d had enough of packing and unpacking everything every day and the long journeys on bumpy roads and the group dynamics on the truck and…I dunno. I was just done. I wasn’t the only passenger getting off in Freetown. There were probably five or six others who finished there, and there were new passengers jumping on to fill our places who’d either ride up to Dakar in Senegal or all the way to Marrakech in Morocco before the group leaders Jason and Annabel take the truck across the Mediterranean and back up to the UK where it’s stored during the offseason. I wished them all the best. It sounded like an amazing journey. But it was just time for me to go home.