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aggienautJuly 26th - Departed the hotel at 8am after being picked up by the organization's Program Assistant Ousman and driver (?) in their white landcruiser. It was raining, of course.
Slogged through traffic for awhile amidst the usual flowing cascades of the capital's streets. For a significant portion we took a small sidestreet to bypass traffic on the main road but it was quite the bone rattler -- I don't know if you can speak of pot holes when the entire surface is covered with them. After only about an hour we were free from the city. In the past I've described it as takign several hours to get out of the city but that was when I was staying in a hotel near the end of the peninsula, whereas now they're using a hotel much closer to the mainland. Conakry is a very long skinny peninsula. I had forgotten that just as soon as we got to the mainland some mountainous hills rise suddenly out of the mist kind of picturesquely.
The drive was mostly uneventful as we wound up into the interior through little villages of huts and towns with decaying old colonial buildings. The road was new and smooth in large segments and still under construction in others. At one point we passed a convoy of cars that appeared temporarily stopped on their way toward the coast full of Chinese occupants. I was told the government had made a deal with China to give them rights to extract gold if they built 1000 km of road, but that they had started to extract the gold first and so had been told to pack up and go home. Nevertheless construction appeared to be ongoing in places, where we passed teams of local laborers hacking away at the embankment with pickaxes while a chinese foreman looked on under an umbrella.
Arrived at Dalaba around 1500. I've been through this town on my way elsewhere but never stopped here before. It looks at first glance like a small not-too-hectic town in an area of large hills (they call it the Switzerland of Guinea). It's chilly here, I've had to put on an undershirt to stay warm enough and wear a light jacket in the evenings. It seems to hold true to its early not-too-hectic impression, its easy to walk around and most people seem to get around by foot, with a few motorcycles.
Arriving at the hotel we found four white landcruisers already parked out in front, with the logo of GIZ on the side -- GIZ, the German government development bureau, was the funding agency of the project in Ghana. So this boded well, the hotel apparently wins the NGO's Choice Awards.
front and restaurant looked good ... room was kind of small and dingy, and most pertinently didn't have a mosquito net hanging over the bed (we checked other rooms, none did); also no seat on the toilet which I always find very tedious, and if you can afford a toilet surely you can afford a seat for it?? It just feels weird and wrong perching on the rim of the toilet itself to do one's business.
Also, though the room has what would be a decent window, for some reason there's big signs entirely obstructing the view from the balcony that runs along the fronts of the rooms, and thereofre the passage of light is extremely impaired. One thing I hate is not being able to wake up to the light of day and as I found out the next morning indeed very little of it filtered into the room.
But there was a back door made of glass that had a curtin over it, surely this leads outside right? Well, there's a balcony out there but... it leads to some weird interstitial space between this building and an add-on with a conference center. This balcony just puts you in a position to awkwardly peer into the conference center where presumably the GIZ people were then having a meeting. And what's worse, the bathroom window has the same view. Sooo not my favorite hotel but whatcha gonna do.
Presently, while I was sitting at the rather nice front outdoor area of the restaurant, two guys from the host organization came by and took Ousman and I to the location where trainign would be taking place, a training center (sponsored by USAID?) in a residential district not far from the hotel.
After that the driver took us to this other hotel Ousman (who is from this area, went to high school in this town) wanted to show me. This was only yesterday and I'm assuming the driver took us there, though I don't remember exactly, but don't remember walking. I recall the last 50 meters of the drive leading up to the hotel seemed formerly grand, flanked on either side by little columns with mostly broken lights on them. Hotel was long and low with vines growing up the walls. Up a stone staircase, past a deserted looking reception niche, and suddenly the inside was breathtakingly grande. Half the building a large open room, grand and high ceilinged. There was a piano in a corner, a bar in the center and ... no people, just one guy in his twenties who Ousman introduced to me as the owner. I shook his hand feeling vaguely confused.
Then we stepped out the back door, from where a stairway led down to a pool with a stunning view of the valley below. Here there actually were some other people, mainly young and taking selfies, though a couple seemed to be practicing a dance routine. Ousman told me it is really happening here on the weekends. Ousman said the place had opened in 2017, which didn't seem to jibe at all with how old the place looked to me. Finally after awhile, as we were walking around the beautiful serene grounds, he said it was an old colonial hotel, for a long time the only hotel in the area, but had fallen into decay as the owner wasn't really keeping it up, and finally he died and his children inherited it and have rehabilitated it.
But "there's lots of music and partying here on the weekends thats why we don't put volunteers here" he said. But looking around it on this Tuesday afternoon it was extremely serene, and fresh from being very unimpressed with my actual hotel, I had half a mind to ask if we could move to here -- but I decided to trust the judgement of GIZ. It looks like the new owners, being lads in their 20s, are concentrating on the party pad aspects and perhaps totally neglecting its qualities as an actual hotel. Which is a shame because its a grand old place. Walking back through the building to leave I was thinking it seemed like something from a Wes Anderson movie.
We were able to walk back to our hotel from there, just a few hundred meters. We passed the old shell of another colonial building, possibly a church, walls exhibiting ambitious and interesting architecture now surrounding rooms full of lush shrubbery.
For our next adventure, after I'd spent a bit more time sitting and reading in the restaurant, Ousman mentioned to me he was going to get a haircut and would I like to come along. By now it was twilight and clouds / fog were blowing through town. We walked around the corner from our hotel past the entrance to the local university, where some drunk young man was yelling or exhorting to a bunch of bemused people sitting by the entrance. The proprietor, a young man, had a bunch of young women seated in his shop but somehow Ousman persuaded him to give him a haircut immediately. His hair was already extremely short but he basically got his head shaved. One of the young women had a deformed/destroyed eye which I didn't like to look at. Haircut finished, the barber then commenced applying henna to one the young women's feet, who we were informed was about to get married. As we walked past the university entrance the drunk man was still there exhorting his fellows.
I was starting to really wonder what time dinner was planned for (and also noting that no one seemed to eat at tthe hotel restaurant) when around 20:00 Ibro, the country director, showed up with the other program assistant and driver. He (Ibro) is always smiling and cheerful and its always a pleasure to see him. He informed me we were invited to the host's house for dinner so off we went. I noted with interest the host lives on Rue Rosa Parks. His house was as nicely appointed as any house in "the West" could be expected to be. We sat on couches and talked while dinner was prepared. I noted at one point there were six people poking away at their cell phones, two not. Also with the exception of one woman who was out in the living room with us working on her laptop, all the women in evidence were in the kitchen and were never introduced.
For dinner (which finally was ready at 21:15) there was some rice with a spicy soup with meat in it to put on it, but I've seen so much of this exact dish over the last three weeks that I was really overjoyed when they also brought out a bowl of shell-shaped pasta in a cheesy sauce and had several helpings of that. Plus a salad.
As we drove back to our hotel, at 21:45, I was able to look into the barbershop as we went by, the barber was still busy putting henna on the young woman's legs.
Going to bed I felt annoyed that tehre was both a bright light in the corridor just outside my room as well as the light had been left on in the conference room and was clearly illuminating my room from the other side as well ... but then the power went out (apparently for the whole town) and remained out for the whole night. Which made for a nice silent night, though I was concerned over not being able to charge my phones.
One way things have changed in the ten years now (!) that I've been doing this is when I first started I could only expect power when we had the generator running for the projector for the training, and internet access forget about it unless the hotel had wifi. Now I have the luxury of being annoyed when a power outage interrupts my electricity supply, and though this hotel doesn't have wifi, I have a local sim card with over a gig of data (once again piggybacking my main phone onto the other phone's wifi, though now I'm using bluetooth to tether them which I wildly assume might use less power than just having my phone operate was a wifi hotspot)
