Friday 22nd April - Sunday 24th April
For the Easter weekend, Miriam (country director of EducAid) kindly decided to take me as well as some of the EducAid staff and their kids to a beach near Freetown. It's called River number 2.
It is very beautiful, as the pictures will testify when I finally get a chance to upload them and add them to the blog.
The management of the site perhaps doesn't quite exhibit the same level of competence that we might expect from a tourist resort in the developed world though. The rooms that had been booked for us were occupied when we arrived, the toilets in the room had no door on the doorway and not even any kind of covering over the doorway to give the user any privacy. Orders taken for food were often incorrectly handled or misunderstood.
I find it easier to forgive these transgressions when you learn that the outfit is essentially a not-for-profit organisation, since the profits go into a community fund that helps to improve the lives of local people.
But I'm surprised there isn't a thriving tourist industry in Sierra Leone. There has been peace for 10 years now. The beaches are beautiful. I would have expected a European hotel firm to have built a hotel on the beach and to be selling package holidays, whereas in fact this resort consists of only about 10 rooms, and they are largely occupied by development workers and local Lebanese people.
Come to think of it the tourists would have to make it through the money-grabbing airport and the roads that are so potholed that I sometimes see people lifted off their seats because of the bumps. Maybe I'm not so surprised, come to think of it!
But there did used to be a decent tourist industry in Sierra Leone before the war. Brima, the Lumley site manager for EducAid, told me he used to work in a hotel, and I think it was French-owned (certainly European anyway). So there's still hope...
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