Sierra Leone: Sweet Salone

Sierra Leone was apparently named by the Portuguese who spotted lions in the mountains. Everyone seems to call it Salone.

We arrived at the border, Pamelap, not far from the capital Freetown and were welcomed to Sweet Salone, even the police and border guards wished us a great trip.

We breezed through the border crossing with such ease and good wishes and were just about to drive across when we were told there was one problem, right-hand drive cars were banned in 2011. The officious Road Safety Officer made it sound like that was final and we had no chance of continuing our journey through Salone.

We were not about to return to Guinea though, so we persisted, explaining that only had 5 days remaining on our Salone visa and we were only passing through on a longer trip.

We were told we could call the Director of Public Relations who may give us temporary dispensation for the 5 day duration of our visa. Just as well we could do this in English.

Using persistence and charm “so sorry to inconvenience and interrupt you, particularly on a Saturday” worked and not only did we get the temporary permission, but we got a personal escort by the Road Safety Officer through first 6 checkpoints into Freetown.

We stayed in a lodge in Lungi, near the airport on the other side of the wide estuary bay from Freetown, run since 2011 by Lorraine & Ghazali from Blackpool.

They explained some of the challenges they’ve faced such as the falling water table meaning they’ve had to dig a deeper well several times and buy a new £8,000 generator as the electric supply is unreliable.

Lungi is across the wide bay from Freetown, so we took the tiny and terrifying Sea Bird ferry at a cost of $40pp each way, paying an insane $160 for the 30 minute journeys, probably 4 month’s salary for the average Leonean.

The maximum amount we could withdraw from the ATM in the airport was 400,000 leones (£31) each as the wadges of notes are so fat. We felt pretty wealthy with 800,000.

We were told a new currency ECO is to be gradually introduced across the West Africa region starting this year.

As in Gambia, we noticed a lot of public notices along the main roads, everything from education, health, voter registration and reforestation and UN descendants programmes.

As we travel south and the landscape gets more tropical, we spot new and exciting plants and trees, such as the unfeasibly tall skinny palms with Sideshow Bob hairstyles.

Throughout our trip, stray dogs just break your heart. After we gave a dog with both its ears cut off a sugar lump when having coffee on a Senegal beach (I know, but it’s all we had at the time). She put it on her paws to clean off the sand and then followed us for at least an hour along the beach doing cute tricks to show us how fun she was, in the end we had to shoo her away so I can’t even look at a dog now.

A more pleasant observation is that the crescent moon is U-shaped like a bowl rather than the C-shape we see in the UK.