One day... Three countries

Hastings, Sierra Leone

Let me update you with what's been happening so far this week. 7th March 2007

On Monday morning at 8am the driver took us to Roberts International Airport. Sean and Gerhard flew ZS OJF locally that day and Sarah and I did the Conakry night stop in ZS SLO. Nice one boys... make the girls go into a phase 3 country (apparently that means the country is unstable... The world food program has evacuated all their non essential staff from Conakry to Dakar) I must say everything looked fine and we didnt feel in the least bit worried about our safety at any stage.


Anyway we arrived at the airport at 9am and sorted out the plane and fuel and loaded our passengers. We departed at 10am and flew to Hastings which is in Sierra Leone. Its really beautiful there and hope i'll go there again. From Hastings we flew to Conakry (Guinea). There we dropped off the one remaining passenger, refueled and picked up a passenger and lots of cargo for Nzerekore. My French is non existant but I could make out that the boxes were full of powdered milk to combat malnutrition.

Once safe on the ground in the middle of the jungle, the milk was off loaded and they refuelled us in next to no time. It was incredible how things went like clockwork. We didnt even have to wait for our next lot of passengers. Equally funny was the fact that we had to request start as this strip had a full on control tower!

Then we headed back to Conakry. Unfortunately the tailwind back didnt seem to equal the headwind we had going there. Someone from the world food program fetched us from the airport and took us to our hotel. Conakry looks like a rubbish dump. It is grey with not a speck of colour anywhere. I wasnt expecting our accommodation to be anything amazing and was preparing myself for the worst. But to my surprise we were dropped off at the Riviera Royal which must be a 5 star by their standards and about a 3 star in ours. The night cost $85, I'm glad that wasnt my bill to pay. Each room had internet access... man i would love to have had a laptop at that point in time. We ate a lovely dinner and had the whole place to ourselves. There was also a gym that we could have used for free had we brought our gym clothes. Everything was very luxurious with a beautiful pool and palm trees. It felt like we were in some kind of movie.
I felt pretty safe there as we had our own security guard sitting outside our room the whole night. In the morning I asked him what his name was. His name was Schmuck. Classic hey ?!