Road trip to Outamba Kilimi National Park....getting there

A couple of weekends ago I joined 4 others for a trip to the North of Sierra Leone to visit Outamba Kilimi National Park with the expectation of seeing hippos.

The park is located nearly 300km north of Freetown.  The first section of the journey is to Makeni which should take 3 - 4 hours on good roads.  However,we left on a Friday afternoon and had a small breakdown on the way so actually it took 5.5 hours.  We had booked into a local convent and Sister Perpetua was glad to see us arrive safely. There's a lovely statue in the grounds.

On Saturday morning we set of on the 86km to Kamakwei on a terrible road - another 5 hours.

 The final push is to the park itself  involves crossing the Mongo River on the grandly names Kabba Ferry - actually more of a raft.  This should take an hour but not if you turn up the one day they are delivering food aid.  So we stood for and hour, being bitten by river flies, watching rice and palm oil being unloaded from lorry to ferry taken across and unloaded to pick ups on the other side!

So eventually we reached the park. Unfortunately though they were not expecting us and had to break the bad news that their canoes were out of action.  They were awaiting glue to fix them and it was in its way!  Undeterred we settled into our huts (basic but bed, pillows and mossie net provided)  to see what the morning would bring.