I wake up before dawn to heave my bike and carriage up the gravel hill that is my street for the last time. I have been too busy being sad about leaving to decide my route, and as I rattle down towards the big Lumley junction I try to focus: turn right for a straight way out of the city.

Or turn left to follow the coast, a detour, yes, but maybe with a dip in the ocean.

Lumley Junction is already chaotic; the market pushing out into the streets, cars and buses pushing past on the road and kekes and motos pushing in exactly everywhere in between. I haven’t made a choice. I indicate automatically and a policewoman helps hold back the traffic while I hold my breath and scramble over the four lanes. I take the left.

I have three days to reach Kenema where I will meet with my friend. I know already that I’ll have to take transport in the end, so a detour shouldn’t make a difference.

As the road turns south out of Freetown and into the suburbs and pre-towns, it starts taking almost comical leaps up and down, letting me fly downhill in one moment only to knock me out of breath as I fight up the next. Something is wrong with the wind, too: it comes in bursts and only when I roll downhill, slowing me down and whipping sand into my eyes. Damn Harmattan. It is no fun.

But then at some point the morning moodiness settles (in both myself and the weather), the sun peeks out and the sky opens big and blue, waves a few white tails of clouds across. The road flattens and I can see far over the fields onto the houses and small towns in progress, the yellow grass and the green and blue hills rising up behind. On the other side spreads the ocean, still and untouched, its white beaches drawing a clear border. The wind and the few passing cars are the only ones disrupting the silence and I stretch into it; grow into its endlessness after the wonderful but loud month in the capital.

I take it easy, stop for photos, chats and rice. By the time I approach the rowdy Waterloo in the late afternoon and re-join the road I could have taken, I regret nothing.

By the next roundabout a few kilometers further on I only stop to buy snacks and a bar of soap, but have already made my choice; I get off the highway, take the village road. The one that will turn into flattened sand waiting for asphalt, and then into a rain-furrowed track running over hills. Where the grasses grow high and the silence lays even thicker. The one where the sunset will color the sky and the forest all pink and gold and bring out the birds who drill, croo and call. The one that fills with stillness and mist when I wake and where the villagers will wish me good morning as we meet, emerging as silhouettes with fabric-wrapped legs and basins on their heads. Them on the way to the fields and me, this strange white monkey-girl with the little bike and swaying carriage, passing on to god knows where.

No matter the detour; I will take the scenic route.

…

(This story told in pictures.)