[ Koidu Town, Sierra Leone ]
After leaving the health post in Kunya, I well and truly left the map behind me. It took me five days to cover the 110km to Mogo-Bendugu, from where I could reach the Guinea border to get an additional stamp for my visa.
The roads were the usual steep rock, gravel, and mud, but this time much smaller. Four-wheeled traffic wasn’t possible, and some days I only saw one or two motorcycles along the way. The combination of bad roads and recovering Protagonist meant a whole lot of pushing and shoving and slipping and sliding and falling.
Demoralizing, to be sure, but also EXACTLY why I chose this path (and came to Africa in the first place). The whole sequence of my days was to ride through thick, seemingly uninhabited rain forest, emerging at regular intervals into tiny villages where no outsiders ever go. My interactions were undiluted, intense, illuminating, and profound (at least to me).
The nature of the encounters meant that it was often inappropriate to take photographs, but I have a few I can share for now. There are more pics of the bike and the road than usual, but that was the nature of this segment (and hey, the road was damned cool).
Peace,
—jim
The Hard Way
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