The best mango

I just ate the best mango. As I may have mentioned, it’s mango season. The trees are dripping with fruit. Everyone you pass is eating one. The roadsides are lined with mounds of mangoes for sale and littered with pits dropped where eaten. The roads littered with mangoes that fell from trees and no one can be bothered to pick up because there are so many mangoes.

On my way back from Kabala, I bought a good 10 lbs of Shipley mangoes for less than a US dollar. Shipleys are small, yellow and amazing fragrant. I think the one pictured above might be a Guinea mango. I just ate it’s sister. I will eat it tomorrow.

Last weekend, before going to Kabala, I went on a little road trip with a friend who has his own Land Rover. It’s quite bare bones (as in no AC) but managed well enough. When you get out of Freetown, you are almost immediately in another world of small villages and bush. The villages have a few hundred to a few thousand people. The larger ones have a school and a clinic and a small market. There is no electricity but some families may have generators or small solar panels. Most use solar flashlights at night – you see them charging on the porch roof during the day. Water comes from a well or a stream.

It is a level of infrastructure I associate with more remote, less populated areas, but these areas are not remote or unpopulated. The villages are quite close together. You could walk from one to the next and many do. Walking is the main form of transportation. A few have motorbikes. Clearing the land, preparing the fields, planting, weeding are all done by hand.

Here are women preparing palm kernels which will be pounded and cooked to make palm oil – a staple for cooking.

We crossed this ferry on our little adventure. Crew and passengers move the ferry across using the tow line. Note the canoe used to transport a motorbike.

The mounds in the pictures above are how the fields are prepared for planting especially if its lower lying land. Below is how things look when they are further along. Multiple crops are planted together.