For as we all piled back into the vehicles and the cavalcade headed off down the track round the corner I had been observing, I realised there was no border post on the Guinean side. Indeed we then proceeded to drive for a further 40 minutes. We were not at a border, we were at a frontier. I’d had the feeling ever since we crossed the Scarcies River on the ferry that I was detached from the rest of Sierra Leone, but now I realised we were heading through a gently changing continuum from one country to another.
The landscape continued to open up and there were far more areas of just grass. Northern Sierra Leone does not have cattle, they tend goats and maybe a few sheep and pigs, but no cows. Here I saw my first herd as we drove through this no-man’s land. Indeed this was no empty space between the two countries; there were people on bikes, herdsmen with their cattle, women and children carrying wood on their heads, and even the odd collection of inhabited huts.
Deep in frontier land
The weather had closed in again as we crossed a large bas fond, heavily grazed down to the roots, and our way ahead was barred by a barbed wire fence. Near our track was a camouflaged watchtower. Aimed at our vehicles was a machine gun, although since it was rusting out in the rain I doubt it would have done us much damage. There was the usual style of chain check point, but it did not go down immediately. Haba chatted to the three guys in their fatigues, showed the vehicle laissiez passer and I fully expected we would be next to be inspected. But instead the chain went down and we passed through. This was merely the military border. In fact our driver explained that technically we were still in Sierra Leone. We had not left yet. The border was ahead of us running through the southern part of the town of Madina Oula to which we were now gently descending. We passed a series of fields, then huts, then more substantial houses and were finally coming into the market of Madina Oula when I spotted the actual barrier that marked the border between Sierra Leone and Guinea. Right outside the police station in the centre of town. And when I looked at my GIS maps of the area, although there was some confusion as to where the exact border was all round here, several of the lines converged on this point.
With the market still in full swing around us, Haba once more went through the process of getting his laissiez passers inspected and stamped, and all our passports were taken in a bundle into the dark recesses of the station. Stephanie accompanied Haba and came out with a tired smile on her face to tell us we could go ahead to the STEWARD guesthouse and they would pick up the passports later.
When I Went To 