Tokeh & River No. 2
The Freetown Peninsula is a green mountain that falls into the Atlantic south of the capital, and along its western foot lies a string of beaches that the brochures once fought over: River No. 2, where a clear river comes down from the forest and turns across white sand into the sea — the beach in the chocolate-bar advertisement of the seventies, run today by its own village; Tokeh, three kilometres of pale sand under palms with the peninsula's calmest water and its one real resort; Bureh, where the country's only surf club lends boards on a point break at the end of a fishing village; and, between and beyond them, Lakka and Sussex and Hamilton, coves with pirogues and grilled fish, York and Kent, the old Krio villages, and, twenty minutes by boat from Kent, the Banana Islands, where nothing much has happened since the eighteenth century. Behind it all the Western Area forest rises to Picket Hill, and holds, near Regent, the chimpanzee sanctuary of Tacugama.
The traveller crosses from the airport at Lungi to Freetown by the sea coach, and comes down the peninsula road in a hired car or a shared poda-poda — an hour to River No. 2, where the village collects a small fee and the traveller swims where the river meets the sea and eats lobster under a shelter; sleeps in Tokeh, at the resort or in one of the simple lodges, and does very little for a day; goes on to Bureh for a lesson with the surf club and a plate of fish at Bureh Beach's shack; visits Tacugama's chimpanzees in the hills, by appointment; and takes the boat from Kent to the Banana Islands for a night in a guesthouse on Dublin, with the ruins of a slave-trade fort in the bush and a reef to snorkel from the beach.
The Guide's honesty: Sierra Leone is not a country of resorts and the peninsula's beauty comes with the country's realities — the peninsula road is bad in stretches and worse in the rains, the power is generators, the water is what the lodge has, and cash is king; the beaches are safe and the currents can be strong, and there are no lifeguards — swim near people; the sea coach from Lungi is the sane way across the estuary; the country's recent history is heavy and its people are the reason to come, open and funny and glad to see you; the surf at Bureh is small and friendly and the club is a good cause; and the traveller who expected the brochure will find something better — a beach where the village that owns it will offer him a chair.