Liberia to Guinea – 6k in 8 hours

An early start as we are crossing the border to Guinea. It took a couple of hours to drive slowly down the slippery roads back to Yekepa, and a couple of wrongs turns (the gps doesn’t work here) before we arrived at the Liberia border post. The are highly unused to tourists here, and today they had 19 of us plus a group of 8 Czech tourists. The details of every passport had to be manually recorded so we sat in a grubby hut waiting for the officials to fully satisfy themselves that we could be allowed to leave. That took two hours! 

 Then we had a checkpoint, Guinean immigration and another check point. Another two hours. The highlight of the day was buying a woman traders entire stock of bananas at the border with our left over cash. Everyone here is pretty honest with prices of food as they are totally unused to tourists. 20 bananas for $1

We finally got into Guinea and promptly got stuck in the mud 1km from the border for an hour. There were many helpful offers of advice from the assorted officials and passersby, and one of them even helped digging. I can’t fathom how Jason and Zoe have the energy reserves to dig out the truck, deal with officials and local hassle, and manage the passengers. I continue to be amazed by both of them 

We arrived in Bossou by 4pm and pitched camp at the chimpanzee research facility who are taking us to see the wild chimps tomorrow. Consistent with past days it was gloriously sunny at 4.30 and then the thunder rolled in and by 5pm it was torrenting down.

It was an uneventful day in overlanding, we are now about 6k as the crow flies from camp last night and it took us 8 hours to get here.  
Lunch was lentil salad, dinner is lentil salad…. I can’t wait to get to a town with a steak, which I reckon is at least a week more.  

Today’s high brow after dinner gossip revolves around butt cracks! Two of the guys are serial offenders! One in particular, at the royal age of 48, has not learnt how to pee standing up without letting his pants hang all the way down at the back, treating the whole truck to a view of half his butt (and yes his pants have a fly so there is no excuse)! Not pleasant. This is a source of much irritation on the truck, but of course no one will tell the offender but we will keep grumbling amongst ourselves. Oh the joy of truck dynamics and it has only been two weeks

Bossou November 28, 2016