bugsonmyboard

After more than a month, I finally managed to extricate myself from the Freetown peninsula.  The welcoming nature of the surfers, my beautiful camp spot on Bureh beach, the buzz of new beginnings in Freetown, and the ever-present hopeful spirit of the people made it a good place to get stuck.  Sometimes a long journey just feels looking for one place after another to get stuck. Places that fill in the gaps for a while that widen with every mile on the road.

While in Freetown, I’d procured  a fresh new passport from the US Embassy and employed the usual African ingenuity to repair the broken latch on my toolbox.

I even managed a to leave with stack of calling cards courtesy of Tony on the Road’s  mobile media center.

When it was time to head off, some of the kids from Bureh wanted to come along for the ride.

I managed to shake them.

Motoring south through Sierra Leone the road deteriorated to the point that I weaved in S-tracks back and forth across the road to avoid all of the truck sized holes. The smaller holes had nice smoothly curved sides that I could into ride into using them as berms to bank off of.  Massive woops created by the trucks swallowed up every inch of Dyna Rae’s travel and sent me weightless over their crests. I thought that I may have taken a smaller road by accident, but I knew that those holes must be from the biggest of trucks. If they were on this road, I figured that it must be the main road south.

The road eventually turned into a river.

Roads like this are utterly arduous to travel in a truck as you get shaken to bits with every hole and protruding rock.  While tiring to ride on a motorbike, it’s fun also plenty of fun endeavoring to keep pace with a smooth flow through the whole mess. I made my stealth bush camp for the night out of sight from the road and as usual ended up hearing voices for hours along the road and hoping to stay undetected. Sometimes I feel a bit old to still be honing my hiding skills.

The jungle bloomed around me.

The trees towered overhead.

The forest corridor stretched on.

I couldn’t have timed my arrival to the beach in Liberia any better, with a fresh swell just rolling in to the legendary left-hand points of Robertsport that I was so keen to ride. The continental shelf drops off abruptly offshore of Liberia, allowing open ocean swells approach the coast at full steam.  Swells slam into a series of points to generate the storied reeling, down-the-line waves that are still rarely ridden by more than a handful of surfers.

Like Sierra Leone, Liberia endured years bitter civil war that left the cities in ruins.  The second Liberian civil war lasted from 1999 to 2003, close on the heels of the first civil war lasting from 1989 to 1996.  Together the wars resulted in 250,000 people killed.  The first war ended with Charles Taylor in control who went on to play a role in further atrocities committed in neighboring countries.   In September of 2013, Taylor was found guilty of war crimes in a tribunal at The Hague for his role in Sierra Leone’s civil war and sentenced to 50 years in prison. A tenuous peace has in endured for the last 10 years in Liberia with democratic elections dictating changes in power rather than coups by warlords.

While peace has come to Liberia, the tourists have not. In fact, the only white people that I meet here are those working in some capacity or another, either for the US State department, US AID, Peace Corps, or one of the NGOs.  Your only company on the beach are fishermen going about their daily business.

Robertsport is filled with interesting looking buildings with plenty of dilapidated character.

I rode the points of Robertsport at about head high for days with hardly anyone to share it with.  I did enough backhand snaps to get on my own case when I did a bad one and congratulate myself a bit when I did a good one.  It’s a funny thing surfing good waves by yourself all day:  its a fantasy when you’re surfing your normal crowded breaks in California, but after you do it for a few days straight, you just want someone to share in the fun (and see when you do a good backhand snap). I wasn’t even surfing the best points most of the time, which really get cranking during the wet season.

I camped beneath a massive cotton tree that reminded me of ‘Home Tree’ in the movie ‘Avatar’.  The trunk was huge and had roots that created vertical walls radiating out away from the tree. It felt like I was getting a big hug from that tree.

When traveling in Africa you have to get used to lots of attention.  The kids that you spent the previous afternoon playing with appear at 7 AM to watch you make breakfast and pack your things.  The morning that I left was no exception, and I tried to keep my patience with them but failed and ended up telling them that they had to go away.

At the campsite I met a British girl named Louise who is working for an NGO called the Sustainable Development Institute in Monrovia, which advocates for legislation and policies to improve the lot of local village people in land transactions. This sort of work is critically important in such a corrupt country as Liberia, where whoever has the cash generally gets to make the rules up as they go. This usually results in the village people, who often use land communally, getting royally screwed when a big company arrives with plans for a forest tract.

Louise invited me to come stay in Monrovia where I slept on the hammock on the balcony for a few nights and had a great time with her and the crew who lived at the house.  Most importantly, I learned that I absolutely love sleeping in a hammock in tropical climates.  Beats the crap out of sleeping a little tent sauna.

The UN is still here in force as are copious NGOs still helping to put the pieces back together.  Nowhere is the UN presence more apparent than in Monrovia – the place is filled to the brim with UN workers and still some troops.  The white trucks with the big UN marked in black letters on the side are ubiquitous throughout the city.  American accents can be heard all over the place.  It’s kinda weird. I scurried off from Monrovia for more hiding in the bushes.