The border to Guinea was a two day drive from Dakar. The road there wasn't particularly eventful, but we wild camped both days. One of those nights we encountered a local man who suddenly approached our camp carrying a machete. This was basically the first time we encountered a local rural person, and seeing him approach us with a huge knife was super scary. We then found out he had just been working in the fields and was just carrying his work-tool. We just smiled to him nicely and gave him a Capri-Sun, he was super happy and stayed for a while just watching us as we set up camp. Turned out that he was just really curious. Anyhow this night we didn't get much sleep, every small noise we heard we were scared to death. However, after a few days we got used to people walking around and it ended up beeing a part of camping. The first nights in the rooftent were quite nice actually, it was the perfect temperature at night because of the dry and tempered climate. But this would soon change.
As soon as we entered Guinee the temperatures soared to 38- 40 degrees celcius. I was just finishing my feever and Vetle was starting his sickness, so it became an exausting week for us. Guinee is a very unknown country but with breathtaking nature. One of the places we went was called Salaa falls, and after one hour offroad and a track so overgrown that the car barely could fit we came to the amazing waterfall in the middle of the jungle. Several of our days in Guinee were spent exploring these places and driving a lot of bumpy roads. The people in Guinee were very friendly and we felt safe everywhere. A lot of the people in the villages almost never see white people, so some were just standing around us for hours just watching what we did. With time we got used to it, it was just very unconfortable when you had to go to the toilet.
We only had one annoying (and funny) incident with one of the locals. So we went through this track to a hidden hanging bridge in the jungle, and we went a little bit around the area and stayed there for maximum 20 minutes, and as soon as we want to return to the car this guy comes towards us and says he is the local guide and wants to show us around. We politely said no thanks because we knew he wanted money, but when we started walking away he said he is the chief of this place, and we have to pay 15 euros for driving down his road. We first told him that is bullshit and we're not going to pay. With this he got really angry and seeing the huge knife he had in his backpocket we quickly tried another approach. So we said we don't have any cash left and need to go to the bank. After a lot of bad french from our side and him not understanding anything we made a deal that we will take his phone number and call him as soon as he got the money. But this was not enough for him, he wanted to come with us... So we let him stand on the back of our car. At some point near his village he jumped off the car. So we just drove straigh ahead and our friend Mohammed never heard from us again :).
The next days we drove towards Liberia. It took some time because the road system is really weird in Guinee. 80% is perfectly new paved road and suddenly it stops and you have 80km of no road at all. We had to doulbe check our GPS several times because we got so insecure that it still was the right way.