Category: Travel

Progress on two fronts

Monday Louisa was finally given the go ahead to resume normal activities. Not wanting to make this a medical journal; we didn’t cover the numerous laser surgeries required to repair additional retinal tears. But no reoccurrences in several weeks, so back to bike riding and skiing. The continued tearing for a couple of months is common once a tear has occurred.
The other progress is in Guinea. After months of strikes and at least one hundred dead the president has appointed a prime minister from a short list provided by the strikers. We hope this means the start to some prosperity and freedom for the long suffering citizens of Guinea.

2007 plans

Monique is planning to visit Guinea again next year and put on the Raid du Fouta Djalon, and she’s invited us to join them. We might bike the running route. Although the runners will probably be faster since it’s uphill and we’re always stopping to take images (still or moving) and visiting with the locals.

We’re both going to work on our French starting now. Tonight, I’m checking our a class at Savoir Faire to see which level I should be in. Louisa took a summer conversational class before our trip. I did nothing and with my already poor French missed a lot.

We’ll be looking at a month in France or maybe somewhere else before the trip to take an immersion course.

The saga ends—a serious problem resolved

The trip home was necessary. Louisa had a torn retina which was laser repaired this afternoon. She’s lucky it didn’t detach in the ten days since it tore, because an untreated tear leads to a detached retina which results in blindness.

Sadly the photos of her eyes she was given in Conakry are not her eyes. The doctor in Conakry should have known that for at least two reasons: 1) the photos are of eyes that were a patient who has had a dye injected and he didn’t inject Louisa, 2) the lesion in the photo is in the right eye; the problem was with the left eye. He neglected to perform other necessary diagoses.

Fortunately Louisa’s eye doctor in the US gave good information by email to convince us of the necessity of getting good eye care. We considered going to Paris, but figured that we would lose time finding our way around the French medical system, so headed straight home. We didn’t know how lucky we were to get a flight booking; we had completely forgot about it being Thanksgiving week—we realized it when we heard someone on our flight from JFK mention Thanksgiving.

Travel guide

To complement and/or update the information in the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides for West Africa, I’ve together some notes. Partly for us since we plan to return next year and for other travels who plan to go. I’ll update the links here as I do the pages. UPDATE: We had the 2002 edition of LP and the November 2003 edition of Rough Guide. Lonely Planet West Africa was updated to the sixth edition in October 2006, so much of what I have to add may already be the new edition which we now have, but didn’t when I wrote most of this.

We found Guinea easier than we expected. The people are helpful and friendly, with few touts. The lack of touts may be that there is so little independent tourism that the tout industry hasn’t developed. Another example of the lack of tourism is that the restaurant service is not westernized—I’ll explain what I mean by that. The staff is nice and will try to meet requests, but little initiative is shown. I’m mainly speaking of the medium quality hotels which are often the top hotels away from Conakry. When you walk into the restaurant things move at a leisurely pace; maybe it’s developed from the hotter parts of the country were that may be only pace possible. After serving you, the waiter disappears. Hors d’oeuvre were almost never offered. None on the menu, occasional peanuts. Petit déjueuner was often as expected, but often confiture was omitted and not available. Although sometimes it was a special treat as in Labé with guava jam. The lack of confiture is consistent with a seeming lack of sweets, certainly desserts were rare. The cookies/biscuits offered at taxi stand shops were never locally made, but imported from Brazil, Turkey, and India in our limited experience.

The transportation system is adequate. Phones aren’t too good. Although the cell phone service is better than land line apparently. People often carry phones for two cell phone providers since calls within each system works, but system to system doesn’t work as well. The phone numbers now seem to be eight digit, usually a 60 in front of the six digit number found in the guidebooks and many on-line resources.

Water is available on the street in at least four ways: 1) bottled, 2) labeled sealed plastic bags—supposedly safe—I got away with drinking it once, 3) hand tied plastic bags (presumably local generally unsafe water, 4) in pots. All the hotels had tap water, but no signs assuring any kind of treatment or quality. We use iodine and bottled water.

Knowing French definitely enhanced our visit and makes it easier to travel. Louisa’s French is good enough for communication. Mine is at the basic travelers level. Since they have so few tourists, they don’t seem to understand how to deal with people who aren’t fluent.

The articles:
Conakry update
Kindia update
Labe TBD. Main comments: stayed at Tata which was fine. Different CyberCafe which worked well, but not air conditioned.
Traveling with Bicycles

Dakar, Senegal and chez nous

The doctors here in Guinea have been as helpful as they can be.  It has been an interesting insight into third world medicine to be a patient here. There is unfortunately only so much they can do. How lucky we are in the USA.

One last hot day in Conakry. The Marché du Niger downtown seemed uncharacteristically low key compared to the seething  frenzy we have seen in the market of Kindia and Taouyah. The market ladies are fierce competitors pushing their wares in front of you and on top of their neighbors wares to make a sale. I did not get as much shopping in as I wanted nor as much video footage. As Greg mentioned anyone with a camera is facing adverse conditions and a lot of negative responses. I resorted to my back up camera the little Sony as it is more difficult to be spotted using it. Great caution should be used when ever you see a policeman or anone in military garb. They are notorious extortionists when it comes to cameras and tourists.  We concluded that buying the protection of a local who can be the intermediary is the best way to be able to shoot pictures you want.

Unfortunately just when we are beginning to feel more at home here, seeing and understanding more we have to leave. My high school French has been put to a severe test here but has improved with daily use. I look forward to when we are able to return again and parle avec tout les gens de Guineé qui sont très amicable et génial! Merci beaucoup Guineé pour tout!

Louisa