Ivory Coast
Ivory Coast – Country 32
For the Ivory Coast leg, we had two 2 guests joining us from DHL Norway. We have all been on the road so long I am never sure how people will handle travelling with us. We have got used to the long hours in the car, in sometimes insane traffic, the lack of healthy food, different beds most nights, the dust and the heat. Maarten and Michal were real champs and went with the flow and experienced what Africa has to offer, we even had Maarten driving the wrong way up the main road, through the mud and chaos (we would have been in traffic for hours otherwise…).
We attended a youth day celebration with one of Ministers to hand out giveaways to all the different schools that attended. The next day, my favourite, a visit to an orphanage to give out food and school supplies.
The boys did a lot of sightseeing that I didn’t join them for as I was on a visa mission (a very successful one I might add…). The one thing we all did on a few nights (not the norm!) was go out and listen to live music, not usually my thing but I really enjoyed it and found my dancing shoes (I thought I had left them at home!) DHL, Ivory Coast entertained us well after hours and kept us well fed at local restaurants during the day (it will take me months to get into a shape other than round after this trip…).
On Saturday, we had the customer function, the Ivory Coast National Rugby team joined us for the day (very nice of them!) and it was mostly sunny, we hit Abidjan in the rainy season !!!
Sadly, on Sunday we had to say goodbye to Michal and Maarten as we headed for the Liberian border.
This is where we hit some problems. We were refused entry!! Now, we do go through some painful border crossing but usually, we can get across. This time because of Ebola it was a flat no, they did say we could try and get special permission, but when we try and leave Liberia it would more than likely mean a 21-day quarantine – with our schedule, that was out of the question! So we made the decision to turn right and head up to Mali. This threw the schedule out quite a bit, but everyone was very understanding… On the way up, we had a bit of excitement, we stopped in a small village and found a little hotel for the night, quite a nice little place (always a bonus in the boondocks!). As we sat down to dinner (we hadn’t eaten all day), we heard shouts and screams, we went outside to have a look. One of the storerooms had smoke billowing out of it, after a few minutes, we saw that everything seemed to be under control, so went outside the gates while they put out the rest of the fire. The next minute, the fire took off and quickly got out of hand (the town was so small there was no fire brigade). We ran to get the cars out of the way (we had just got the one car back from catching fire in Gabon!) and took our shovels and axes off the cars to give to the locals as they were chopping out the burning wood and throwing sand on the fire. It turned ugly really quickly as the flames took hold, so we ran back into help, the smoke was hectic (I’ve just stopped coughing 2 weeks later!), we spent 2 hours helping to put the fire out and stop it spreading. When the fire was eventually put out, the locals treated us like heroes thanking us nonstop for helping (DHL will be welcome in that town any day!), we were then taken up to the owners house for food and drinks (we made a friend there!). Luckily, the rooms at the back of the hotel were not damaged. So they replaced all the furniture that was taken out to stop it burning and we were able to spend the night in comfort, but in the dark with no water…
The next morning, it was incredible to see how quickly they were sorting things out. They had already taken off the what was left of the burnt roof and clearing out all the burnt furniture etc. I reckon they would open again in a week or two – amazing spirit!
