I only passed through Guinea and just got a little glimpse of this beautiful country. While in Guinea's northern dry and arid neighbours like Mali or Burkina Faso I found beauty in colorful outfits of the women, in elaborate greetings and handshakes, and countless other little things, in Guinea and now in Sierra Leone the area is blessed with lush, paradise like beauty of green jungle covering gentle hills.
First thing in Sierra Leone - I headed towards the national park I spotted on the map. As usually, the journey there was at least as interesting as the destination. It took entire day of half hitching, half riding unbelievably overloaded bush taxis along bumby dirt roads and seldom visited villages. Finally hiring a guy with a motorcycle for the last  strand of the otherwise unaccessable path. Then yesterday morning a local man with a cannoe took me along the river. That river, like most other rivers in this country used to be full of hippos but apparently most of them were hunted and eaten by the rebels in the recent war, the man told me. However, a handfull of them survived and they were eyballing us cautiously as we passed by. Once on land, my cannoe man told me in peculiar local English:
"No see them foot tracks? Elephants."
But this time the foot prints was all I saw of the elephants, because they apparently moved further up. But other wildlife abounded around - couple of different kinds of monkeys jumping in the trees, iguanas, turtles, some fluorecently blue birds... I wasn't lucky (or unlucky) enough to encountre chimpanzees, but now in Freetown, the capital, the big news is a couple of chimps escaped from the local ZOO and killed and wounded some people. It's a slightly wild country. There's no regular electricity or running water anywhere in the country. And yesterday I got picked up and am now staying with a small scale German gold and diamond dealer and his local friends. Heading towards Liberia soon...

No, it’s not going to be a piece describing my African romantic adventures… I did experience climax in paradise though – climax being the name of a herbal power drink and paradise the name of one of Freetown’s pubs on the beach.
My stay in Sierra Leone was short but every moment attraction filled – canoeing by the hippos and climax in paradise being just the beginning. I spent one whole day riding around the capital with my diamond dealing friends watching the process of them trying to get legal stamps and papers for illegally purchased diamonds. Spent one night dancing away to the latest Sierra Leone hits at a disco in a little town. Got a ride at the back of a pickup truck with the actors in the freshly released movie called “Blood of the country virgin.”

Sierra Leone is a fascinating country – both rough and gentle, desperately poor and outrageously rich, devastated by cruel civil war but looking hopefully into the peaceful future.

As if passing through this country wasn’t interesting enough, getting out of it and getting into Liberia was where real adventure began… (details in the Liberian chapter)