The North

Hello.  This is Matt.

From Freetown we head for Makeni on a crowded poda poda, a minibus that is the most common transport from town to town.  They rarely follow a schedule and depart once the driver feels he has fit enough people inside, or on the roof.  As a passenger, you might think it's full, but it's really not.  There may be four people on a 3-person bench, but really there should be five.  The roofs are loaded high with cargo, usually doubling the height of the vehicle, and often late-coming passengers (always men), ride up next to, or on top, of the cargo.

 In Makeni, we truly realize how nice the ocean breeze on the coast had been.  It's seriously hot.  There are thousands of motorcycles whizzing around the town.  Motorcycles, known as hondas or ocatas, seem to be the standard local transport method in provincial towns. In Makeni it's a flat 1000Le per person wherever you're going (about a quarter).

The next day, we leave the paved roads and take a 5-hour poda poda to Kamakwie, a town in the north, close to Guinea.  As we pass small villages (hamlets?), we notice adults moving at a much slower pace, or not at all.  We also find a street named after me!  The children of the villages are also more keen to notice us, with gleeful shouts of "Abato," "hellohellohellohello," or simply "white!" depending on the ethnicity of the village we're in.  Their faces light up as we wave to them. 

There are mosques in almost every town that look remarkably similar to the one on the right. We also notice that this turquoise/teal color is preferred.

Arriving in the late afternoon, our two hondas fly down a track (barely a road) through jungles and over hills to Outamba National Park.  The large river on the way is crossed by a "ferry," a metal and wood raft pulled along a cable by two men. On the left is a photo of our ferry on the way to Outamba National Park. 

Outamba Park is nice and quiet aside from the steady buzzing of insects and bird and monkey calls through the trees.  We camp just above the river bank in our wonderful mosquito tent (thanks Katie and Elliott), though in the night, we discover that the camping mat we're given because my thermarest broke contained plenty of bugs including a cockroach.  The next two nights we sleep in little thatch-roofed huts.

Our first day there, our guide and I canoe down the river, with Alex on a stool in the middle.  We stop paddling whenever we see the tree branches on the bank shake and look for monkeys.  We're able to see several troops, including the black and white colobus, the spot-nosed, and the vervet monkey.  Incredible birds we've never seen before fly back and forth across the broad river.  Then our guide tells me to stop paddling as we coast towards some objects down river.  One of them sprays water in the air and snorts loudly enough to echo off the trees. We pull off to the side and watch for a while as the hippos disappear and reappear at random intervals like a big game of whack-a-mole.  Occasionally one grunts loudly and exhales a plume of spray.

This should be a video of the hippos...if it does not work, I've included a photo below as well. 

The next day we cross the river walk along wide paths through 12-ft tall grass.  The elephants who created the paths have shown little regard for their impact as we pass countless trampled clearings.  Less-trodden side paths branch off in both directions, and it seems we're on an arterial route.  Our guide points out their footprints as well as those of a 'bush cow.'  We climb a small hill and are amazed at how far the park stretches.

The park is minimalistic in terms of amenities.  Each evening, we would wade out off a sand bar wash in the warm river.  Locals said there are crocs somewhere in the river, but they didn't seem worried, so we tried to put that out of our minds.  We had to pack in all of our food, and our bread was getting stale by day three.  We made a small fire and heated up a can of baked beans and some luncheon meat (Pat should be glad to know that Alex abstained from the spam), that we had purchased from the Lebanese-run grocery store in Makeni.  It's incredible how many businesses here are owned by Lebanese.

We take hondas and poda podas back to Makeni, and scour the town for wi-fi to get the next books of our series on our kindles.  We get lucky at the SOS charity orphaned-children's village on the outskirts of town, where one confused but generous employee turns on the generator and calls his supervisor for the wireless password.

A 3-hour shared-taxi ride later, and we're in dusty Kabala.  A combination of the tapering Harmattan winds (northeasterly winds blowing sand from the Sahara), countless controlled brush fires, and the honda traffic on dirt roads create a lingering haze.  The town is higher in elevation and significantly cooler than Makeni.  That part is nice.  There are three ethnicities in Kabala: Limba, Kuranko, and Fula.  Each has its own language that members speak among themselves.  They also kind of have their own section of town.  If conversing with someone random, like buying something at a store, people would use Krio, the heavily-pidgined english spoken in Freetown.  A Limba boy told me that he can tell the ethnicity of a stranger by their face (Fulas are darker skinned, and Kurankos have wider faces), but it's tough for me.

Kabala

Looming over the town is a broad rock face that we climb up and around, with the help of a young guide.  The hill is one of the Wara Wara mountains, a chain northwest of Kabala, characterized by solid monolithic slabs and cliffs.  We take it slow in the town, recovering from our travels and some sickness.  In the evenings we frequent a bar called Choices (which i think sounds like a great name for a gay bar), which shows european soccer and sells cold drinks.  Through the entire country, if you want electricity, you've gotta make it yourself using a generator, so not many places have cold drinks or lights.  Most hotels and guest houses will have lights for a couple hours in the evening or thru till mornin, depending on how expensive or upscale it is.  The fuel costs determine the prices for many things in Sierra Leone from hotels to transport and even little things like packets of filtered water, which are twice the price in Kabala as Freetown because of the shipping.

On our last day, we take a motorcycle over a long bumpy track out around the Wara Waras to Kakoya village (the supposed origin of the Limba people).  We sit down with the brother of the chief and the whole village gathers around us.  We try to explain we want to hike the mountain behind his village, and he seems skeptical.  Eventually he provides us with two teenaged guides and we start up a track.  The mountain had been recommended in the guide book which came out two years ago, and I guess other owners of the book had passed before us, because one of our guides asked me why my colleagues all want to climb the mountain?  The majority of the young children in the village follow us initially and several stay with us the whole way.  The track disintegrates and we bushwhack our way up to the top for a splendid view and a glimpse of the elusive "stone goat," a marmot-looking creature.