The Boat Pushing and Other Adventures
on Freetown Blog (Sierra Leone), 17/Dec/2009 00:27, 34 days ago
We are now back in Freetown after 8 days of travelling down the coast and up-country. We set off last Wednesday with only a vague plan, deciding to travel light without much gear and hope for the best. And the best was, pretty much, what we got.Our first stop was River Number 2 Beach. Before we left Freetown, I was unsure how easy it would be to get places to stay, but as it happened we were the only visitors there (and that continued to be our experience for the whole week). That evening on the beach we had a good chat with the only other person on the beach - a Bristolian, who first arrived 10 years ago on a government engineering project, and seems have all he wants for a happy life in his beachside house, with his Sierra Leonian wife and the gin bottle in the pocket of his shorts. We could certainly agree with him that as far as the setting is concerned, River Number 2 is hard to fault.The next morning we crossed the river mouth by boat and walked three miles down the beach to Tokeh Village. Tokeh Beach was the site of the filming for the original Bounty Bar advert in the 1970's and you can see why the chose it -the sand is so white and so soft that it is more like walking on snow than on sand - it even squeaks like powder snow. Tokeh village is a fishing village and when we arrived they were just selling off the night's catch of lobster, makerel and small barracuda.From Tokeh Beach got some transport a few miles south to Bureh Beach, where we were hoping to find some beach huts to stay in. In the event, we were over optimistic. However, we did find local lads who, from somewhere, found us a tent, which they hired to us, cooked us a supper of fantastic grilled fish, lit us a bonfire, and sat round the fire with us singing Sherbro songs and comparing the quality local gin and Hungarian Brandy (the the words of the songs, we later found out, would be enough to make a rugby team blush!)  One of the many remarkable things about the Freetown Penninsula is  theway the sand colour changes in just a few miles. The sand at BurehBeach is a deep golden colour which almost looked like it was glowingin the early morning light.We found that as we travelled down the coast, we were continually meeting up with the brothers and cousins of people we had previously been with and began to suspect that word was travelling ahead of us  that there were two white guys on the way in need of assistance (mobile phones are a wonderful invention). From Bureh Beach, we were offered a boat trip across to the Banana Islands (which was our destination anyway). The starting price was $100, but we eventually settled on $30, and it seemed everyone was happy. And so it was that we arrived at the Islands, which are just three miles off shore from the Peninsula.  In the early 19th Century, the Banana Islands were used as a base by the Royal Navy in an effort to stop the slave trade, which was continuing at that time despite legislation in the UK to abolish it. The islands are now a place of complete quiet and peace, with only about 1000 inhabitants, but the traces of their military past are there to see, including a number of half buried cannons, one of which clearly shows a foundry mark of 1813.We stayed 2 nights on the Islands and it was one of the most relaxing places I have ever visited. Before we left Freetown, I picked up a novel that was lying around in the house in anticipation of getting a bit of time to read on the beach. It was Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park', and you might think that such a novel of 19th Century England would have little connection with the Banana Islands. However, as I read it, I discovered that it was written between the years of 1811 and 1813 - exactly the years when the Royal Navy was here on the Islands. One of the characters in the novel is a naval captain (and Jane Austen herself had two brothers in the navy), so it is not impossible that she had a fair awareness of what was going on here. One of the significant aspects of the first part of the novel is the prolonged absence of Sir Thomas Bertram, who travels to  Antigua to  attend to financial difficulties on his estate - problems  we can assume were probably caused by the loss of the supply of cheap labour resulting from the efforts of the Navy here and elsewhere along the West African coast. It all brought home to me just how closely tied the history of this part of the world is to the great events of the 18th and 19th Century in the UK and Europe. The same events have had repercussions down the generations here and many argue they were a significant factor in the events that recently tore Sierra Leone apart.During our second day on the islands, we were shown a boat, which had just been completed after 9 months of manual labour and was due to be launched the following day. The site where the boat was built was in the middle of Dublin Village, and getting it to the water involved pushing it several hundred metres down to the beach. We were invited to the ceremony, and duly turned up next morning at the appointed hour. The ceremony began with us all being asked to gather round the boat and recite the Apostles' Creed; then sing Now Thank We All Our God ("first verse only"); then The Doxology; then we had the tossing of Kola Nuts to seek the blessing of the ancestors; the sprinkling of palm oil and palm wine; the throwing of food  into the boat (which was eagerly grabbed by the children). Then, amid much chanting and general hilarity, the Boat Pushing began, and we joined in. When the boat eventually got in to the water, it floated with perfect balance, but that was not enough to stop us being alarmed when it was decided that the maiden voyage of the boat should be the one that took us back to the mainland. If I look nervous in the photo below, and as if I have just grabbed one of the only two available life jackets, it's because I was, and I did. Our arrival point back on the mainland was Kent Beach, at the slave wharf where John Prescott madea speech on the 200th Anniversary of the abolition of slavery ("from such an idyllic place, so vile a trade").  It was yet another stunning place that we had to tear ourselves away from after only one night to travel up-country.The day we left Kent, we travelled up to Mile 91 to meet with my VSO friend Jayne, and the following day, travelled on north on a dusty 8 hour round trip to visit the Bumbuna Falls. As you can see from the photo below, the road, particularly the last bit, was not all easy going.When we parked the car, we couldn't actually see the Falls, but could hear a rumbling, more like a jet plane accelerating down a runway than a waterfall, and when we got down the path in front of the Falls, the sound was almost too deep to be audible - more like being thumped on the chest by the force of the water. The driver of the vehicle we hired to get there had lived in Sierra Leone all his life without seeing the Falls and was as mesmerised as we were.By the end of our trip we were pretty comprehensively dust covered. The sort of dust which, I fear, will not get extracted from every orifice until long after I get back to Cardiff!.And so, it's back to  noisy, dirty old Freetown. I arrived back this afternoon, to a phone message from my boss, saying he has a lot of things he needs to finish by Friday and really needs my help. I find that I am really pleased about that - to be busy and involved right up until my last day is how I would want it. So tomorrow, Laszlo will be off to negotiate Freetown on his own. Hopefully, we will meet up again tomorrow evening..