Sunday, May 8, 2011

Easter road trip



Four days off for Easter weekend = road trip through Sierra Leone. We rented a van and got to it. This blog is a photographic chronicle of the fun.

Our awesome road trip van, complete with flat tire and bonus flat spare tire.

Dulce is sad about flats. Fortunately, we counted on the kindness of strangers. You can see me in the back there about to get into some guy's SUV to go fix the tires.

Success. More kind strangers are always close by in Sierra Leone.

The third member of the road trip, Liz Cantu, extreme photographer.

We stopped at every bridge to see if I could jump from it.

Dulce convinced me to swim under the bridge to check the depth first. She was right, I would've broken my legs.

"Buy my goat! Good price for you!"

The African landscape burns. This is a farming technique called 'slash and burn'.

Not everything dies after it's been charred.

A peek inside van life. Dulce is probably about to do something terrible to me.

Hot outside, eh? Note the American air freshener. People in SL like us stateys.

Hungry? Just pull over and knock down a mango from a tree.

A genuine African car ferry. We balked at first...

...but then we went for it.

We just had to take a picture of this school. There's no 3 story building just out of the shot, that is the school.

Finally at one of our destinations. The van almost fell apart on those roads.

Beautiful amenities. Also included was an army of monkeys waking me up every few hours by throwing our dishes around.

Easter morning, 7am. The perfect time for a canoe trip to find some pygmy hippos.

And there they are. They weren't afraid to bellow at us when we got too close.

All smiles. Great time at the park.

The long road home...