Living in the Community – Kuru Hills – The Ascent

We parked the car under some shady trees in the village of Moria which, although it was probably not known to Tolkien, did have a sort of Middle Earth air about it (acknowledged it was not subterranean).  It made Fintonia look like a metropolis.  It was a group of a hundred or so huts in amongst the trees; there was no real centre.  Where the road stopped was at the edge of the village and to reach our path up in to the hills we had to navigate through a series of people’s backyards.  It was already mid morning and many villagers were in their fields or away on errands.  A few young mothers were cleaning up their houses, sitting chatting in the shade of their compounds.  A couple of very old men were sat in wooden chairs on their porches, mostly oblivious to the world around them and certainly to this foreign party passing through.

The Ascent   – and Kofi’s colourful shirts

We started to climb through some fields behind the village but as the gradient got steeper the cultivation stopped and we were in the usual scrubby woodland of all this area.  It was a glorious sunny day and the climb was hard work for all of us.  We would get glimpses of the escarpment ahead and I wondered just where this path made the ascent to get us to the top.  These mesas are common in this part of the world.  The Guinea Highlands are a series of plateaus in the interior of west Africa and form a continuous belt separated from the coastal lands by almost sheer cliffs.  In the coastal plain itself there are vestigial pieces of these highlands standing proud above the plain.  The Kuru Hills is an example of this.  On a map it appears like a pick axe with a swollen head at the northern end and a long shaft heading southwards.  We were climbing the handle.  Our purpose in exerting so much energy was to see what was on top of these mesas.  Being elevated, they had markedly different vegetation from the rest of the region.  Just what that vegetation looked like was difficult to determine from the satellite imagery.  All we saw was more green colours reflecting back, and much of it uniform.  That told us that much of the area had much higher rainfall than the surrounds which may have extended into the dry season, keeping the vegetation in leaf much longer but whether this was forest or grassland was difficult to spot from the imagery we had to hand.

So up we went, and the walk helped to identify layers of vegetation at different altitudes too.  From the scrub forest we passed another of the small rubber plantations.  Gray had read that the British had experimented with rubber in Sierra Leone.  It had never really caught on but these old plantations still existed.  It looked like the locals did not tap the sap here, but did use the trees for timber and fuel.  Beyond the rubber the undergrowth got very tangled and dense and we could not see far as we plodded up the steep path.  The lack of air circulation made us intolerably sweaty and overheated.  It was too much for Kofi.  I’d always been amazed how this slight, urban man from Ghana had coped with the village work out here in the most remote parts of Sierra Leone, but cope he did.  Although never looking like he was enjoying the experiences of mosquitoes and mud and scratching seeds and grasses, sweat and humidity, he never moaned, and usually had this impassive tolerant air about him.  But on this slope he was defeated.  His reasoning was he saw no reason to kill himself trying to get to the top of the hill.  He said he would head back to the village.

Living in the Community – On the road to Kuru Hills

Nevertheless, it was with renewed excitement that I woke up the next day.  We made an early start for the Kuru Hills.  Gray was out here mapping the vegetation for the whole of West Africa.  He was trying to teach various agencies in each of the country’s his techniques but still him and his colleagues had to do the bulk of the work.  I admired his techniques of interpreting the landscape and mapping the different types of vegetation and land use on the surface, and I wanted to see how he did his field work, keen to pick up some tips.

One of the national park rangers from the Kilimi-Outamba Park joined us in Fintonia and we travelled north from the village , past Sumata where we had been stranded by the fallen tree the previous year.   The road was permanently diverted round the remains of our tree and the tree itself was now overgrown.  We passed a couple of hamlets and the village of Yana, then Gray and the driver started talking about where the turn off  was.  He spotted it no problem – Gray is a supreme geographer therefore an obvious navigator.  It was only 7km to the foot of the Kuru Hills but the track was narrow and potholed and it wound up and down and round and round to take the easiest route through the knobbly terrain.  Gray was already working as we went along.  He had spotted a series of strips of vegetation that looked more uniform than most of the forest and they appeared to be along this route we were taking now.  We looked around to spot we were traversing along a narrow strip of rubber trees.  To our left the natural forest could be seen starting again only about 30m away, and about the same distance to the right we could see scrub and a view out over the plain below these foothills of the Kuru range.  It seemed that the track we were on would have been to service these trees and ship the timber back to the coast.  The villages we passed through close to the end of our journey had most probably sprung up because of the road, not vice versa.

Moria