Afrikisurf – A surf trip to West Africa

This is not good, we are stamped into Guinée, all official and good. But not stamped out in Mali. In my passport, as for the car,  there’s no such thing saying “seen at the border, left the country then and then with this vehicle..”, it still says that my car is in Mali. I guess I would need a new passport if I would ever go back to Mali. Even then it could be troubles..
Roads are rough and dusty, up and down little hills, sharp turns, rocks, potholes and branches of trees on the piste. No cars, every hour a motorbike. This is for sure not a border that people pass through often. Had to cross a river too, the ferry is broken and luckily some guys built a ferry, two pirogues attached together, some wood on top of it to put a car sideways on it. Well, no other choice unless we want to go back to Mali.
Looked for a place to spend the night and ended up staying a couple of days in a little village called Akassa, twenty kilometers from Kankan. As usual, we are the main attraction and everyone wants to see us. Unfortunately we also had to dance one night, one by one, to the fast beats of the Tam-Tam, one bonfire and several hundred people laughing with us. The next day, after some more Tam-Tam, all the woman and many kids as well as a few men from Akassa and the surrounding villages headed out towards two ponds which still have some water left from the last raining season. Once a year they gather to empty the ponds with nets and hooks, taking out all the fish that got bigger over the months. Most of it is tiny and weird, five to ten centimeters and with some spines sticking out. Occasionally they catch a bigger one, after two hours it’s done and all the people go back home to cook.
People are very nice and have a great way to tell stories, typical african french-accent and word-combinations that make one laugh all the time. One old man was telling us about the national park around Mount Nimba, in the very south of Guinée, towards the border of Liberia. There is still some elephants and other animals to see, but what he told was a lot more interesting: He’d seen some “Grenouilles” there, huge frogs, taller than a man but not dangerous. They jump around and do the same as normal frogs, but they are taller than a man, very tall. It was hard to believe, but it was one of the best stories we’ve ever heard! Or two brothers, the Camara’s, both fishermen-Nomads going up and down the rivers with their families, staying a few days here, a week there. They move around in the pirogues and sell the fish in the cities. One got stung by a scorpion right at were we stayed, they were just laughing at this and saying this is no problem, it doesn’t hurt. They told us about fishing where there’s Hippos and Crocodiles, snakes and showed us their scars when they got bitten by bigger fish. Our lives are miserable compared to what they go through every day.
In Kankan we got in trouble with the gendarmerie; drove into a one-way street and I had to get out of the car. I wasn’t wearing shoes as we are always driving barefoot, so I got another penalty. 25′000 Francs Guinée could get us away without having to go to the poste de gendarmerie, it’s about three Euros. We changed all our CFA’s in Kankan, since there is a new law it is illegal to change foreign currencies in Guinée, even for the banks. So you have to do it on the blackmarket, in some backstreets or backyards out of sight. For a couple of hundred thousand CFA’s in bills of 10′000 we got several million Francs Guinée in very old and dirty bills of 5′000, half a backpack full of money. Always a funny feeling to carry that much money around.
Made our way though the country, stopped here and there for a night. Roads are moslty terrible, more holes than anything else. It gets a bit cooler and more humid in the heartland of the hills of the Fouta Djalon, more tropical and hotter towards Conakry. The condition of the van is getting worse after thousands of kilometers on shitty roads or pistes, there is more noises and you can tell it’s been used. Dakar-Tambacounda-Kayes-Bamako-Mopti-Sikasso-Kankan-Mamou-Conakry was 4′500 tiring kilometers in three weeks, about half of it was either piste or shitty paved road, half of it was pretty good.