Unpublished, August 07.
Travel blogs typically announce themselves from a misty-eyed distance. Whether you are swimming with an albino-siamese manatee in Fiji or breaking down barriers (or laws) with children in Cambodia, the point is that backpacking is all about you, and adding an extra 40 litres of ultra-lite GoreTex to your not so ultra-lite ego.
Your friends don't want to hear about it. The manatee doesn't even want to hear about it. Only the most miserable fucks in the land - in houses where the the colouring books are coloured in, the Jigs have been Saw-ed, the Mills have been Boon-ed - will anyone do anything but press delete and condemn your tiny little email screaming down black hole of cyberspace.
It is with this in mind I embark on my Freetown blog. To say that Freetown is the anus of West Africa would be unfair. It would imply that 1) it can be wiped clean and 2) that there is a regular (and/or smooth) passage of traffic through the region, when in fact neither is the case. Aesthetically, Freetown is a generous dollop of concrete on the Atlantic, nothing more.
Arriving ten days ago at the airport - accessible only by water, thanks to some aeronautical sage - Arwen and I spent one night at the 'Lungi Airport Hotel', an outrageously overpriced hotel frequented by giggling BA staff and entrepreneurs (henceforth read arms dealers). Here follows a rough transcript of a conversation with one of these people:
Arwen (chirpy north American twang): 'So how long have you been here?'
Person: 'One week.'
Arwen: 'How are you liking it?'
Person: (gravel-like, the horror, the horror voice): 'One week is enough'
No-one in Freetown seems to want to be here. The chorus of 'HelloHowAreYouHowCanIGoToAmerica' is predictably common. The NGOs don't seem too keen either (I have it on good authority that one member of the UN staff succincty assessed the combined intra-factional polticial tensions, infrastructural crisis and estranged youth as 'shithole'). So it is lucky for me that I'm staying in one of the rare places with people who do.
Freetown YMCA not only boasts a small but friendy crowd of Anglophone travellers, but has the best thing an African city can offer, the only thing that can keep you entertained for a day's length, come rain or shine (but mostly rain, being the rainy season); a balcony. And being bored by writing my own blog that's exactly where I'm going now.