Into Guinea: the border that is a rope

The border between Guinea-Bissau and Guinea is a rope.

Not a barrier, not a gate, not a booth with a window. A rope, strung across a red
dirt road, at a point where the last brick house is long behind you and most of the
traffic is motorbikes.

We had been up since a few hours before sunrise to cross Guinea-Bissau – eight hours
on asphalt so broken that everyone drives on the verge beside it – and then spent
several more hours at the post itself, under a sun that made standing still feel
like work. Driving away from Bissau you watch the country change around you: cement
and brick give way to mud and straw, cars give way to motorbikes.

Then there is the strip between the two posts, which is a small country of its own.
That road was built perhaps fifty years ago and has never been touched since. Our
cars barely got through. The potholes were not damage to the road; they were the
road.

The officers were the real surprise. So few people arrive here by car that they
honestly did not know how to process us. The e-visas were fine; the vehicle paperwork defeated
everyone. They sent us to Koundara; the post that could actually have helped was further north at Sambailo,
where our passports were registered and where, when we asked about a temporary
import permit for the cars, the officers decided not to understand the question. We
drove into Guinea without one.

Nobody ever asked for it. Police stopped us many times over the following days and
not one of them mentioned the permit. What they wanted to see, again and again, was
two warning triangles, a fire extinguisher and a first-aid kit.

One thing did cost us. A photograph was taken at the border, a phone was
confiscated, and it came back only after a sizeable tip – though nobody, in the end,
cared whether the picture was deleted.

Bring the triangles. Both of them.