Arriving by canoe on Tiwai Island Tiwai Island is home to the densest population of primates in the world. Red-tailed/black and white colobus monkeys, chimpanzees, and spider monkeys abound. I was looking forward to a respite from the traffic heavy city to a totally natural environment that we had to get to by boat. The drive, as is the case with any overland travel in Africa, was arduous. For those of you unfamiliar with overland truck travel – we travel in a 4x4 overland

River No. 2 Beach, Freetown Peninsula On the morning of the 20th we left for the 90 minute drive to the stunning beach at River No. 2, stopping en-route in one of the most frenetic markets I’ve ever experienced in Africa in a town called Waterloo. In spaces where people are so closely packed that you have to squeeze your physical way through…mini vans arrive blasting their horns causing the already tightly packed crowds to jam ever more tightly together in the space created

Slums of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Mass graves were dug here during the 2015 Ebola outbreak. My flights went without incident and despite being very tired indeed – I landed in Freetown on a hot and humid Sunday night. Having sat next to a very friendly native Sierra Leonean, I felt confident that I would have some help navigating immigration and transport on arrival despite being exhausted. We exited the aircraft and that familiar blast of heat hit me full on and I breathed i