Pictures: 1) view from helicoptor; 2) on the drive up to Kabala; 3) goat in guesthouse yard.
One of the unavoidable truths about travel is that it often isn’t fun. Lucky for my readers, misery is a far more interesting state than happiness and like my other two trips to Sierra Leone this trip came equipped with a bounty of distressing moments.
First off, getting there and back…For an average-sized adult, cramming into a coach airline seat is perhaps the most dehumanizing requirement of the travel experience. And once you’ve been hectored about sharing overhead compartments, been spoken to like a child for twenty minutes, obediently stowed your carry-on beneath the seat in front of you, and settled in with your luxurious twelve inches of legroom, you try and busy yourself with in-flight entertainment and free wine for the journey. All said and done a one-way trip to/from Freetown to Atlanta takes about 24 hours. Needless to say, free wine is a very good thing and keeps the threat of complete mental collapse at bay.
So then you land at Lunghi National Airport, make it through immigration and customs, exchange $20 of US currency for a fat wad of reeking, filthy Leones, take one last breath and then step out into the frenetic crush of the main part of the airport. Above the incomprehensible racket of about five hundred people screaming for the attention of a hundred and fifty passengers, the humidity descending like a blast furnace, and the smell of a BO infiltrating your nasal cavities like a sucker punch to the face, you run like hell to escape. I retreat from this theater of the surreal to a company vehicle which will deposit me at a moldy hotel room. Typically I have to be up in exactly seven hours when the company vehicle will come and collect me and transport me over “roads” for about five hours to the northern part of the country where my organization has a sub-office and where the project I work on is being carried out. You then repeat this five hour journey back to Freetown.
Freetown is a frenetic city and a reeking mess of poverty, traffic, crime, corruption, and filth; nevertheless, it is bursting with people who somehow maintain a bulletproof optimism in the face of decay, disorder, and daily tragedy. This type of environment never ceases to amaze me. Anyway, life isn’t perfect in Sierra Leone: I know that going in every time. Whenever I make this trek I always pack just enough faith, enough nerve to deal with the unexpected, and enough cash to make more friends than enemies.
This time it took me 27.5 hours to get back to Atlanta due to happenstance. Truly, there is no place like home.
First off, getting there and back…For an average-sized adult, cramming into a coach airline seat is perhaps the most dehumanizing requirement of the travel experience. And once you’ve been hectored about sharing overhead compartments, been spoken to like a child for twenty minutes, obediently stowed your carry-on beneath the seat in front of you, and settled in with your luxurious twelve inches of legroom, you try and busy yourself with in-flight entertainment and free wine for the journey. All said and done a one-way trip to/from Freetown to Atlanta takes about 24 hours. Needless to say, free wine is a very good thing and keeps the threat of complete mental collapse at bay.
So then you land at Lunghi National Airport, make it through immigration and customs, exchange $20 of US currency for a fat wad of reeking, filthy Leones, take one last breath and then step out into the frenetic crush of the main part of the airport. Above the incomprehensible racket of about five hundred people screaming for the attention of a hundred and fifty passengers, the humidity descending like a blast furnace, and the smell of a BO infiltrating your nasal cavities like a sucker punch to the face, you run like hell to escape. I retreat from this theater of the surreal to a company vehicle which will deposit me at a moldy hotel room. Typically I have to be up in exactly seven hours when the company vehicle will come and collect me and transport me over “roads” for about five hours to the northern part of the country where my organization has a sub-office and where the project I work on is being carried out. You then repeat this five hour journey back to Freetown.
Freetown is a frenetic city and a reeking mess of poverty, traffic, crime, corruption, and filth; nevertheless, it is bursting with people who somehow maintain a bulletproof optimism in the face of decay, disorder, and daily tragedy. This type of environment never ceases to amaze me. Anyway, life isn’t perfect in Sierra Leone: I know that going in every time. Whenever I make this trek I always pack just enough faith, enough nerve to deal with the unexpected, and enough cash to make more friends than enemies.
This time it took me 27.5 hours to get back to Atlanta due to happenstance. Truly, there is no place like home.
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