Let me preface this by saying two things.
First, I love Freetown. I
really, really love it. A few years back, I schemed madly to find a way to
convince The Globe and Mail to put its new Africa bureau here. In the end, I
gave up, for reasons that will become clear below. 
But this remains my
favourite city on the continent, this choked, teeming, boisterous sprawl over
the jungly hills.
I love the soda-pop cadences of Krio, the national
language.
I love the ingenuity of people struggling to survive in what the
United Nations says is the world's least-developed country - give a young man a
thousand leones (about 25 cents) and he will find a place to charge your cell
phone, or physically stake out a rare and precious parking space until you get a
car into it, or arrange to get your clothes washed in one of the streams that
snake down the hillsides into the sea.
I love the warmth of friends who
greet me with the highest compliment, "You're so fat! Ooh, you're fat! Fat!"
(That took a little getting used to.)
Second, this country has the most
beautiful beaches that I've seen anywhere in the world, an order of magnitude
more lovely than I had ever even dreamed a beach could be. From the deserted
white sands of Freetown's rather pedestrianly-named Beach No. 3, I once
launched into cyan seawater and found myself in the middle of a school of tiny
fish flashing silver in the sunlight. It was like swimming inside a disco
ball.
So you will understand when I say, in broad principle, that I think
everyone should visit.
But I also feel it's only fair to relate the
following small travel story, so that when you book your next March Break in
Sierra Leone, you know what to expect.
I am meant, as I write this, to be in
Monrovia, the capital of next-door Liberia. But I've been here for four days now
because when my connecting flight touched down on Monday, and I disembarked to
transfer to the flight to Monrovia, the airport staff burst into laughter.
There were no flights to Monrovia. Hadn't been for days - maybe weeks. They
thought the ticket I had purchased that very morning in Dakar for a flight,
scheduled at 5 pm, to Monrovia, was one of the funniest things they had ever
seen.
Eventually my good friend Benjamin Franklin (and the basic kindness of
the aforementioned airport staff) helped me get around the fact that I had no
visa for Sierra Leone, and I set off for town.
Since then, I have spent an
inordinate amount of time talking to employees of various airlines with which
you may not be familiar, such as Slok Air. Slok is meant to have a flight to
Monrovia a couple of times a week, but a rowdy pilot apparently cracked the
windscreen of their plane and so they are grounded. Elysian Airlines is
inexplicably not running, its staff a bit vague about why that is.
I tried
to go overland, but no one could agree on whether Freetown to Liberia takes one
day, or three. And a British military officer I know, stationed here to help
train the country's new armed forces, muttered darkly about how things "are
still a bit hairy" around the border.
And so finally I abandoned all hope of
reaching Monrovia and tried to get back to Dakar, where I have reporting for
other stories waiting. Lagos-based Bellview Airlines, the people who got me into
this mess in the first place, sold me a ticket (yes, I had to pay, even though
they marooned me here) for a flight that was variously reported as leaving at 1,
2, 4 or 5 p.m. today.
Now until quite recently you could reach Lungi
International Airport by helicopter from the city. But apparently Sierra Leone's
recently removed Minister of Transport was somewhat undiscerning in his
willingness to register aircraft (dozens of them) with the national call
letters, aircraft now operating in drug- and gun-running businesses in other
parts of the world - that's the story in Freetown these days, anyway. So the
country has been suspended by international air transport authorities, and there
is no helicopter. So if you want to get to Lungi, it's overland or nothing.
I
set out from my holiday on Freetown's Signal Hill in the early morning, in order
to spend hours snaking through the go-slow, with the car mostly gridlocked and
turned off, on one of the capitals half-dozen main arteries - roads barely wide
enough for one lane of traffic, let alone two plus innumerable handcarts,
hawkers and women with jerrry cans of water on their heads.
We reached the
ferry dock - about 5 kilometres from the hotel - just before the 11 a.m. ferry.
The boat has recently had a smart coat of orange paint courtesy of one of the
fiercely competing cellphone companies, but has nevertheless clearly seen better
decades. I sat up top, in the shade but open to the breeze - until an itinerant
Muslim preacher in an emerald green embroidered polyester ensemble set up his
bullhorn next to me, at which point I retreated downstairs to "first class"
(cost: $2) for the hour-long crossing.
(An aside: the cabin has a resident
DJ, who uses a cheap Chinese-made DVD player to spin full-volume tunes with
videos on a wall-mounted TV. First there was some fantastic local music, and
then a moving retrospective of the great works of Whitney Houston -- "The
Greatest Love of All" seemed to send the whole packed cabin into wistful
melancholy. Then the DJ played – three times – "We are the World." There were
Cyndi Lauper, Kenny Rogers, Huey Lewis, Michael Jackson, belting it out for the
starving children. And I noticed something in the video that I never had before
– the singers perform in front of a huge banner reading "USA for Africa." The
irony seemed a little dark, as a hundred Sierra Leoneans quietly hummed along:
the U.S. never intervened in Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war, even though
its battleships were often stationed within sight of the Atlantic coast. More
than 70,000 people died. But I digress.)
When the ferry docked on the other
side of the lagoon, I got into another rickety taxi for the half-hour drive to
the airport - where there was no sign of check-in staff. Would-be passengers had
lined up their luggage in an orderly queue while they flaked out against the
walls in the stifling heat. One fellow in a uniform told me the flight to Dakar
was canceled. Another told me it left in two hours. A third told me it would fly
in the evening. I found a piece of wall to lean on myself.
Two hours later, a
voice on the intercom announced check-in - at which point the orderly queue of
luggage became a Lord of the Flies-style scramble for the doorway. Two more
hours of shuffling along, and an alarmingly thorough body search later, I was in
the departure lounge - where there is a truly wonderful if deeply improbable
French restaurant. Another hour, and a Bellview plane landed. Another hour, and
I was aboard it.
Then we sat on the tarmac for two hours. If you've ever sat
simmering on a grounded Air Canada flight while the staff studiously avoids
telling you anything about what's going on, let me tell you, an Air Canada
employee has got nothing on a Nigerian airline employee for sullen,
tooth-stucking obstinacy. On the other hand, a planeload of Canadians will sit
and mutter quiet, bitter recrimination to their seatmates - but when half the
passengers are Nigerian businesspeople with deals to do, they resort, before
very long, to full-volume, windmilling-arm, near-violent physical confrontation
with the cabin attendants, which tends to be somewhat more effective in getting
the information flowing.
Paperwork, we were told in end. Didn't have it, now
they did, we are leaving.
And 13 hours after I left the hotel, about 20 km
away, the flight is taking off for Dakar.
The moral of this story? Come to Sierra Leone - it's a magical place.
But bring some good books, and some Benjamins, in your hand luggage.
globeandmail.com:
Incwati ezela - For those of you contemplating a beach holiday in Sierra
Leone
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