I woke up after 7am. The plan was today to leave town and go on, to Buchanan but I didn’t wanna get up. Is the bed, though single size, so comfortable? The fan working so well, so quietly? Don’t know. I was pondering what to do for some time and I decided to stay in Monrovia for the day?
I left the guesthouse after 10am. Looks like water came back to the taps.
Brunch I had in Tyleen Restaurant, a few blocks away. There was no leaf stew, I had a dish that was advertised to me as containing “small eggs”. Eggs here mean eggplant. It was good and spicy, there was even a small crab in the stew, unfortunately there was nothing to open it with.
Lonely Planet mentions only few sites to see in Monrovia. An abandoned hotel Ducor – once the most splendid hotel in town, a closed down cinema Rivoli, an abandoned EJ Roye Building which it turns out I saw yesterday, and Grand Masonic Temple. All sights are weird enough, I go.
From the restaurant I pass by a brutalist building that turns out to be a church. It’s surrounded by barbed wire.
Cinema Ravioli is just around the corner but it’s shut down and there is not much to see. More fun seem the Merry Christmas posters hanging on the fences along the main street.
The entrance to the cinema is blocked by street hawkers. I decide to take my chance and stand in front of them, greet them and ask them if I can take a photo.
They say OK, and I back off a bit and take out the camera. The elderly woman in the centre flees the scene. The young woman hides in her friend’s lap. Only the man seems undisturbed.
Next door there is a hotel and a woman sits in front of it, seems she is working there. She asks me to approach her and the first question is “why do you take pictures?” “Ma’am, I’m a tourist and that’s what tourists do”. Fair enough, we chat a bit, the hotel she is sitting in front of is $30/day.
I walk up to the end of the street towards Hotel Ducor. I wonder if it is completely safe to see, if there are squatters and will they disturb me. It’s full of young people hanging about among the trees. Part of the driveway up to the top of the hill is completely covered in trash. In fact, piles of trash are burning just next to the building but it only adds to the atmosphere.
There are squatters in the hotel and they cheerfully greet me. A young man coming down from the hotel tells me I would need “permission” to go upstairs. There is a woman and a man sitting in the empty hall. The woman says it’s $5 to go upstairs. I tell her I can pay a dollar. She sneers at my price, I sneer at her price, she allows me to go to the other side of the hotel where there is an abandoned swimming pool, complete with trampoline, half-filled with dirty water. The views look promising. A man is watching me so that I don’t sneak upstairs. I go back to the woman and I see a school trip coming down the spiral staircase. It’s surreal. I tell the woman I can pay $3 and she agrees. More – she leads me up to the roof. I ask her if I can take a photo of her on the grand staircase, she runs away from the camera.
We walk till we are on the last floor. The views are nice. I think that maybe I’m not too well, skipping National Museum in Freetown because it was $5 but paying $3 to see Monrovia from up high. But I’m a sucker for a good view.
Down there small children are playing in the pool.
We walk down, I look into one of the guest rooms, there is still tile work in the bathrooms. Elevator shafts are completely empty.
I walk down the hill and take a picture of what I thought is US Embassy but later on I find out it’s actually the Masonic temple. It’s massive.
Down at the foot of the hill I take a beer and receive an email from my bank concerning my defrauded card. They send me some forms to sign and send back by 17 April, jokers and I must provide statement from the police that I reported the theft of the money from my card. Well. I type a statement why I can’t provide the report. I was in the bush, no police station in the village and anyway I already left the country. Now to print it.
Oh it was a challenge. Centre of Monrovia has a huge number of printing shops but none of them seems to have internet access and I have to bring them my docs on a USB stick. I also had some quite weird conversations like:
Me: “Can I print here?”
Printer: “Yes, we do that. How many pages? One?”
Me: “Four.”
Printer: “No, we can’t do that.”
After quite a time I finally find something that calls itself internet cafe. Inside a narrow corridor I see a young man with two laptops and two printers. I ask if I can print, and he says yes.
He connects to internet using a mobile modem attached to his laptop. After it manages to connect, the connection is too slow. Then after finally the Gmail page opens up, the man doesn’t remember his own password. He asks me to log in myself to my own Gmail and download documents from there. But the internet connection stops working. I offer to connect his laptop using my phone’s internet. We do that. It goes a bit smoother. When we finally press the print button the printer starts printing presidential election leaflets. It runs out of paper. I am completely covered is sweat. While we struggle with the paper a woman enters the building and starts talking to me. Who am I? What’s my name? Where am I from? She, too, travelled, to different countries like Malaysia and Bangkok and she likes to connect with fellow travellers. Can I give her my number? All that talking while we struggle with the printing. I ask her to wait as we are trying to make the printing work. After maybe 5 minutes she takes a piece of paper and pen and tells me to write my number. I don’t know my number. She tells me how to check my number using my phone. It doesn’t work. She doesn’t believe me. I try again. It doesn’t work again. She makes me type her number on my phone and call her. Then, satisfied she goes upstairs where she lives, the “cafe” is in a hallway of a residential building. We managed to print the 4 pages some time later. 240L$. I don’t even ask the man to scan them, I use my phone to do so. When I leave, the man says “anytime man.” Struggle is real.
From the printer I walk back towards the grand masonic temple, looking also for some gauze. The saga of my scratched knee continues but it’s almost over. On my way, a very poor looking man, with one arm only – there are quite many people with missing limbs in Monrovia – comes up to me and starts talking. I ignore him and he keeps following me. One street, two streets, three streets, he follows me and keeps asking for money and that he is hungry. I enter a pharmacy, he waits just outside the door. I leave the pharmacy, he keeps following me and he won’t let go. I tell him I can’t do anything for him and he keeps following me. I repeat myself again, finally he lets me go still talking to me or himself. English here isn’t easy to understand. I don’t know what I could do for him. Buy him food. Give him money. I was thinking I should put aside a dollar or so for beggars, away from the wallet so I can give it to someone, people beg on the streets and it isn’t a pretty sight.
The Grand Masonic Temple is just across the road from American Embassy and it’s grand. I mean it’s probably the grandest building in town. It’s enormous. American Embassy is also not a small one, surrounded by trees covered with bats, “no photography” signs every 10metres.
But I’m not photographing the embassy. I want the masons. I enter through lower gate and decide to ask for permission to snap a pic. A security woman runs out to me and when she hears I wanna take a pic she goes: “Gimme small ting, small ting. No money? Go!”
I don’t give up. I walk up the street and take a few not too good pictures from a position where none of the people in the temple compound can see me. I only wonder – who the hell belongs to this order when they build such huge structure in such a poor place? They truly rule the world.
From the temple I went back to St Theresa, stopping on my way for a small beer in a wholesale shop.
I went out of the guesthouse again at sunset. I asked the gatemen for food, they wanted to take me to “decent African food” but I first wanted to go down to the beach, since it’s just 300m away.
I passed by some very poor looking houses and found myself on the beach. It’s a nice beach, clean but the waves are too strong to swim in the ocean. When African coast, going down from Morocco to Sierra Leone South, turns East the water changes. Instead of calm seas there are furious waves. And it really lasts like that until Cameroon (where the coast turns South again), few beaches are swimmable inbetween.
On the beach there is a bar. Cheap and cheerful, I sit down, take a Guinness. A woman named Felicia comes up to me, offers roasted fish with salad. I take the 400L$ option but then I realise a $2.5 roasted fish might be too small so I go to where she prepares the food and ask for an upgrade. I go for L$600 option, negotiated down from $800. Not bad and the fish and the salad was nice. It got dark, I saw some people sitting just at the edge of the beach when the shore goes down to the sea, I took another Guinness and sat down in silence. African evening magic kicked in: warm, fuzzy, waves crashing at my feet, reggae from the bar in the background. Sitting on a beach alone, without crowds around, in such temperatures, only on this continent.
I left the bar around 9pm. Outside, on the street, women are selling white liquid in plastic bottles. Palm wine!!! I cannot miss this opportunity. 60L$ for half a litre, it’s sweet and fresh. I can stay one more day in Monrovia.
Coming back to Maman 