After spending two nights in the Sahara desert, including a night camping in the sand dunes, we traveled west, towards the Atlas Mountains, into the Todra Valley and spent the night next to the Togra Gorge. From Todra Valley, we headed back through the Dades…
Till I visited Morocco, I had no idea that ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ (1975), ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ (1977), ‘Time Bandits’ (1981), ‘Marco Polo’ (1982), ‘The Jewel of the Nile’ (1985), ‘The Living Daylights’ (1987), ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ (1988), ‘Kundun’ (1997), ‘The…
From Marrakesh, we drove towards the foothills in the southern direction and then onto the pink-ochre-orange High Atlas mountains. In one and half hour’s time, we arrived at the busy and touristy village of Imlil, in the shadows of the Toubkal Mountain – the tallest…
I was on a week-long work related trip to Ghana and because I did not have my return flight till the following week, I had to stay back in Accra (the capital) over the weekend. My work done, I decided the hit the roads and…
The strategic location of Cape Coast in Ghana made it a lucrative spot for a permanent presence of European imperial powers from the mid 16th century. It was an ideal location for the extraction and export of gold, ivory, timber and slaves from Africa into…
In the previous two episodes from my trip to Ghana, I wrote about the history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that spanned over four centuries and how the coast of present day Ghana (erstwhile Gold Coast) came to be the hub of this trade. We…
Lakka Beach is barely half an hour drive from the center of Freetown city and despite its proximity to the city, it is largely pristine and spotless clean. The sands are fine, light golden yellow and the beach itself has a wide sweeping curve. Charlotte…
My trip to Bureh-Town beach was unusual. Located in coast of the Freetown peninsula, Bureh-Town beach may be easily reached by road and that doesn’t take more than an hour and half from where I live. Nevertheless, when I went to Lakka beach over an extended weekend,…
Banana Islands is a spectacularly beautiful place off the Freetown peninsula, at its eastern end. Taking off from Lakka Beach on a small motorized country boat early one Saturday morning, it took me about two hours through the choppy deep blue waters of the North…
For a small country, Sierra Leone is amazing in its sheer physical diversity. Mountains, forests, rivers, scrub land, islands, lagoons, mangroves and long stretches of pristine sandy beaches – name it and it has it. In my view, the most spectacular feature of the country…
In a previous post, and the first in this series, I wrote about my arrival in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Those of you who have read that episode would probably agree that even the simple act of arriving in the…
The Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary is located amidst the forested hills of the Freetown peninsula, Sierra Leone. Over the years because of hunting, depletion of their natural habitat and trading, the chimpanzee population of Sierra Leone has dwindled to an alarmingly low level. These wild animals…