One week ago, Freetown was alive with gunfire. But who knows!? What is known, is that the next few months for both of us will be epic.
Landing in Freetown at 1am was always going to prove tricky considering the boat journey required to get from the airport to the city. An attempted coup the week before including an attack on a Freetown army barracks, and the breakout of over 1, inmates from a prison brought a nationwide curfew into effect that made the whole process even trickier.
Luckily for Amber and me we had booked rooms at an airport hotel months beforehand so as to avoid any late night estuary crossings, deciding it was easier and safer to catch a boat in daylight hours after a good night sleep. The hotel had been in contact and assured us that our transfer would still be meeting us at the airport but with the addition of a military escort. However, getting through the airport was far too easy. But these were passengers who had originally planned to cross the estuary and stay at hotels in the city that night, we just needed to find our transfer, a transfer that never turned up.
That solution ended up requiring one of us to walk out of the hotel into the curfew on the blackest of nights and up the road to another hotel where a second room had been hastily arranged to honour both our bookings. I was greeted at the next hotel with a reasonable bedroom and a shocking bathroom.
The generator roared throughout my three hours of sleep but at least that kept a fan working that was sufficient at keeping the worse of the heat at bay.
