Riding my Motorcycle through Guinea
Update 79 (January 2025)
Crossing Guinea to Côte d'Ivoire
It had now been about five days since I arrived in Conakry in Guinea. I had obtained my visa for Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). I also started making plans to go through Sierra Leone and Liberia. I actually paid and received my eVisa for Sierra Leone, but then finding the Liberia visa got too hard. And I was also still a little uncomfortable about running out of pages in my passport before the new one is ready.
I had previously decided that it is a good strategy to keep things simple in Africa, because it will inevitably become complicated anyway. Less border crossings to pass through the continent seemed sound.
So I decided to skirt around Sierra Leone and Liberia by riding the 1,000 kilometres through Guinea straight to Côte d’Ivoire.
I tried to leave Conakry early to beat the peak hour traffic but failed. By the time I got the hotel breakfast it was 8am when I left. Skipping a reasonable hotel breakfast is not an option these days as it is difficult to find food during the day in regional areas, and typically I end up skipping lunch. The Conakry city streets were difficult and time consuming. The police had a lot of major roads closed off for some reason, so there were huge traffic jams passing through rocky dirt backstreets at times.
Eventually I cleared the city and rode towards Mamou, my first stop. The weather is pretty good really, when I leave in the morning it is around 15 degrees Celsius and peaks in the afternoon around 35 degrees. The dust and smoke can be choking and harsh on the eyes. The locals seem to do a lot of burning off of the bushland and maybe then collect and bag the charcoal to sell, or maybe they are just producing it elsewhere. And most people also use wood fires for cooking. So the country is in a constant smoke haze with no storms or strong winds to clear it.
The road to Mamou was about 50/50 dirt and bitumen. The trouble is it is a constantly changing mix, so vehicles are forever swerving all over the road to avoid deep potholes, often 30cm (one foot) deep . There was a lot of evidence of accidents, some very bad, particularly with large buses. Often the vehicles just seem to be abandoned by the side of the road. This is National Route 1, so you can imagine how busy it gets. Motorbikes and pedestrians were the only ones getting by this recent problem.
On the second day the road was better and I made it as far as Kissidougou. It was about 5pm when I was riding through the main street and a policeman suddenly appears and waves me over. I was apparently riding the wrong way down a one way road. I had not seen any signage and Google Maps was telling me to go that way but road signage can be pretty thin on the ground at times.
The policeman spoke some English and was full of bluster and yelling at me about the terrible thing I had done and there was a 200,000 Guinea franc (25 USD) fine. He asked to see my papers which I complied with. The next thing he is keeping my passport and demanding I follow him to see the Chief at the police station.
But things were not adding up by now. I asked for my passport back several times but he kept refusing. He was on his own which wasn’t normal, typically there are multiple officers. He was wearing navy clothes but certainly wasn’t presented like a formal police officer. I asked to see his police papers or identity, but he had nothing. I kept saying I did not believe he was a real police officer and I would not follow him. This increased the drama level. I pointed out his unofficial uniform and all he could do was point to a small tattered coloured badge.
All this while he was yelling at me and demanding that I follow him to the police station. But he didn’t have a police vehicle, he was flagging down moto (motorcycle) taxis and getting one of those. Why didn’t he have a police vehicle? I refused to leave. By this time I was also noticing many other motorcycle riders going the way I had. I started yelling at him that they were also breaking the law and why isn’t he stopping them. He leapt out and randomly stopped two and took their keys. And then yelled that I must follow him and went to find another moto taxi.
There was now quite a crowd building now. They started talking to me in French. I tried to ask if he was a real policeman, to which I think they were saying yes, but some were also saying I need to pay him some money to fix things. In the meantime, the other moto riders with the confiscated keys were yelling at the police officer to return their keys. The policeman was yelling at me to follow him, but he seemed to be having trouble finding a moto taxi by now. I think the taxi riders wanted nothing to do with him.
By this time things were really starting to escalate. There was a large crowd of some 80 people, mainly women that was blocking the road. Many of the women seemed to be on my side and were yelling at the police officer.
Eventually it got too hot for the police officer and he returned my passport. I was totally surrounded by the crowd but grabbed my passport and the vocal ladies helped clear a path. I wasn’t hanging around.
I don’t know what happened after I left. Hopefully it didn’t get more out of control and the other riders I had effectively sacrificed and dobbed in were able to leave okay.
It is difficult to understand what was really going to happen. The alleged police office was definitely trying to extort money from me. He was too focussed on me as a wealthy foreigner and too keen to get me away from the street and crowd. It is hard to know whether I was going to end up at the police station or somewhere else. I certainly think the ladies and the crowd saved me from something unpleasant or worse.
I did stay in the town that night. It was too late to go elsewhere and luckily I found a hotel on the outskirts and tucked away. I was a little nervous in the morning about whether there had been an escalation after I left and I would get blamed or be the subject of any reprisals (assuming he was a police officer). There are often police checks in and out of towns, so I was holding my breath until I cleared the town.
The ride was okay and there was some nice country including Massif du Ziama Forest. But I was over Guinea by now and just pushed towards the border to hopefully cross the same day.
Another small town as I near the border.
I eventually arrived at the border with Côte d’Ivoire around 4pm. The Douane office (customs) was about 5kms from the border. They stamped my Temporary Import (passavant) and that was the motorbike clear. The police or immigration check was further on at the border.
I handed over my passport, then the trouble began. My visa was not complete and I must return to Conakry to get it completed properly. Now, Conakry is back some four days of reasonable riding, plus a day or two to get the correct paperwork. Upon returning to the border, I would probably use up nearly ten days. I didn’t establish what it meant that I only had two days left on the entry stamp in my visa. I still haven’t worked out what the actual procedure is. The information on the Guinea eVisa website focusses on airport arrivals not land borders, so it is possible I needed more than the approved eVisa and stamp in my passport.
I really didn’t enjoy my time in Guinea Conakry. The country ranks up there with the most corrupt countries in the world. Unfortunately this behaviour seems to pervade the general public which I guess is not surprising. I felt like I was a constant target for money. Whether it was hotel prices, shopkeepers, corrupt officials or local people demanding I give them money, I was over it and glad to leave the country. Don’t get me wrong, I recognise how poor people are and have had an approach so far of randomly giving at least one person per day a valued gift of some cash. But I closed up my wallet in the end in Guinea.
Entering Côte d’Ivoire was refreshing, the police officer doing the immigration process was friendly and professional. I already had a visa from the embassy in Conakry, who were also as professional. And 7kms further on, douane (customs) did not want to complete any paperwork for the motorbike. I think I had read this is correct but I still need to check. I don’t want any problems getting to me when I exit the country.
I arrived in the town of Man in the dark around 7:30pm. But roads in Côte d’Ivoire have been very good so far, so it was okay. I was just glad to be clear of Guinea. In the morning I walked into town to get a SIM Card from Orange, Côte d’Ivoire. I do have a phone with an eSIM these days but I just prefer to have a local one. Phone data is often the only practical option in countries like these and you get much better value with the local offers.
