Island Xmas + Mountain New Year

I spent Christmas on Banana Island where Julian, Diya, Jayne (VSO friends) and I did a whole bunch of nothing for four days. When you order lobster for dinner, they swim out to the trap just offshore and grab one for you. It's that kind of place. We saw a few monkeys in the forest and plenty of bats at the beach -- this time they spared me their poop, thank goodness. Banana Island was an important part of the Atlantic slave trade, so they have a modest museum just outside the guest house. A wacky little woman gave us the museum tour. At one point she picked up two whip-like sticks and said with a straight face, "This is what they used back then to flog the slaves...and this one is what we use now to flog our children." How do you respond to that? It was pretty funny in a sad kind of way if you know what I mean.

On the way to the island, I also visited Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, where they are rehabilitating chimps that were rescued from captivity. Chimp genes are 98% the same as humans, so it's interesting to watch them. But the whole place is very un-zoo-like since the idea is to eventually reintegrate them into the wild. Unfortunately, Tacugama is now famous for a recent tragedy where some adult chimps escaped their enclosure, were spooked by a truck full of people and ended up killing one man. Tacugama survived the war, so I'm sure it will recover from that incident. Oh, and they have a chimp named Grant. Sweet.

Our final vacation stop was Kabala, which is the coldest town in Sierra Leone. It's super hot in the afternoon, but at night it is actually sweater-worthy cold. We danced around a bonfire all night at a super-fun club on New Year's Eve, then we hiked up to a mountaintop celebration on New Year's Day. The mountain was beautiful until the entire town's population showed up all at once -- then it was just hot and crowded. But I tried my luck at the ring toss and won a package of cookies, so I hiked back down the steep trail a happy man.

Best wishes for 2008...