Cote D’Ivoire: Man

We left Monrovia and drove inland to small town Ganta as the roads along the coast are apparently terrible.

On the way out we got stuck in unbelievable traffic. One side of the main road was closed for works and the market which usually lined both sides of the road was squashed along one side, along with the many customers and the two-way traffic. Result gridlock which took more than an hour to pick our way through.

So we ended up leaving Monrovia about 3 hours later than planned and having to drive the last hour or so in the dark, which we try to avoid. We were stoped a couple of times by police who needed to record our details and route manually into their big book.

We spent our last night in Liberia at Jacquie’s very green guesthouse and had fluffy pancakes with syrup for breakfast.

After quite a rough road, we crossed the border and our temperatures were taken on the Liberian side. Rob’s was well below 37c, despite the outside temperature being more than that, but when they pointed the infrared at my forehead it beeped and showed 38.1c. My heart stopped. They tried it again, this time 38c.

Despite the posters claiming cross border co-operation they let me through to the Cote D’Ivoire side, where luckily they only asked us to wash our hands (I tried to subtly dab my forehead with water), but didn’t take our temperatures, just as well as I was sweating buckets.

The landscape was really distinctive with steep hillocks covered in majestic trees. We were back in Francophone country and with the Muslim influence immediately obvious too, with calls to prayer and elders walking along counting their misbaha prayer beads.

We stayed only one night in Man and regretted that we couldn’t stay longer, but we only had a few days remaining on our Cote D’Ivoire visa.

Man is located in a deep bowl surrounded by beautiful green rolling hills and it seemed a really lively, interesting place with people enjoying going about their business.

We stayed in Cascades de Man, an impressive 70s minimalist hotel set above the town, with a lovely big terrace where we enjoyed merou fish and kedjenou (chicken in tomato and peanut sauce) with attieke (Cote D’Ivoire couscous made with cassava) and a couple of cold Ivoire local beers.

In the morning we had time to visit the waterfall (not too fast flowing in dry season) and feed some mango slices to a little troop of macaque monkeys before heading for the administrative capital, Yamoussoukro.