Koundara to Conakry: 21 hours whichever road you take

There are two roads from Koundara down to the capital, and they both take
twenty-one hours.

That is not a figure of speech. We reached Koundara at one in the morning and
decided against sleeping. Three of us found a taxi and took the shorter road, 570
kilometres by way of Boké, which locals told us was the better of the two. Their
driver slept for thirty minutes in the whole run and put them in Conakry
twenty-one hours later, in a car whose suspension had been jacked up high enough to
swallow the potholes whole.

The rest of us took the other one, 660 kilometres via Labé and Mamou. We chose it
because someone had posted on Facebook that it had at least some asphalt. That was
the entire body of evidence. There was no road report to consult and no authority
to ask – only hearsay, and whatever you found when you got there.

It did have asphalt, in stretches, unmaintained enough that we crawled anyway.
Twenty-one hours.

Except for one car, which took twenty-six. The hammering finished its shock
absorbers, which came up through the floor into the cabin. Every mechanic in the
nearest town seemed to arrive at once, and five hours later it moved.

I fell asleep in the afternoon. When I woke I asked the driver whether
we had passed any waterfalls, because the Fouta Djallon is full of them. He said
yes, several, and they had looked good. We were all asleep, and he had not wanted
to wake us.

We had agreed before the trip not to drive at night. We then drove two nights back
to back. Somewhere in the dark, men carrying AK-47s stopped us for documents and
for tips, and we did the only thing we had: pretended to speak no language at all,
and offered water, cookies and bread until they lost patience with us.

We reached the hotel in Conakry at three in the morning, the group finally in one
place.

Take the Labé road. Better surface, far more to see – and ask to be woken.