It was four in the morning, out on the inky black streets of Kenema in east-central Sierra Leone, when I finally realized that I would not be making it to Liberia to find former government soldier Joseph Duo. This is after a week of yo-yoing plans formed and abandoned in Freetown as I tried to stitch together some combination of boat, bus or plane that could deliver me just up the coast to Monrovia and get me back in time to make my flight to France.

That last part was the sticking point, that and money. Cash is the only form of currency honored in Sierra Leone and the stash of $100 bills I had folded into my money belt was running low. I was surprised to learn that my ATM card worked at a downtown bank, but it only dispensed 200,000 leones at a time, about $50. Standing at an outdoor ATM repeatedly taking out huge wads of cash, despite the presence of a security guard with an FN assault rifle ostensibly there to protect those making transactions, did not greatly appeal to me.

So dwindling funds had ruled out two of the most direct approaches—air travel and renting a private SUV. The flight from Freetown to Monrovia wasn’t prohibitively expensive, but only one airline—Royal Air Maroc—flew between the cities and only on specific days. Return flights only landed on Thursdays, which was the day I needed to depart for Paris. There was a one-hour window between one flight landing and the next taking off, but it being rainy season in West Africa, I knew the chances of making the connection were slim. Even more than running out of money, I didn’t want to be stranded in Freetown for another week.

The SUV option was simply too expensive. There was no lack of drivers willing to make the estimated 18-24 hour direct run, but at a rate of $150 per day plus gas. I automatically doubled the estimated timeframes and figured it would take a minimum of five days round trip, or $750 just to rent the vehicle. I didn’t have the cash.

As I crisscrossed Freetown sussing out these plans, from the Royal Air Maroc office downtown to the seedy sea-timber bars of Aberdeen to meet with prospective drivers, I also called and emailed Joseph, who’s hopes of meeting me accordioned along with my various schemes. All seemed lost until I finally resorted to extreme measures. I decided to take local transportation from Freetown to Monrovia.

Let’s be clear about what this means—an average Sierra Leonean wishing to travel upcountry has limited choices. The cheapest is via public “bus,” which can either be the size of a minivan or a school bus. At around $5 per leg of the journey, it’s cheap. But in order to maximize revenue, the bus operators defy the rules of physics and mock the principles of common sense and safety by cramming as many humans as possible aboard. Watching decrepit vehicles inch past in a cloud of diesel smoke, with faces and elbows pressed to the windows as if they’d been squirted inside from a tube meant to fill all pockets of air, can be morbidly funny if you’re watching from the curb, but it’s an entirely different sensation from the inside.

Here’s how it works. A team of employees collects money and arranges luggage under the seats and in the aisles, assembling the ragtag suitcases, plastic bags, sacks of grain and the odd chicken and monkey like master puzzle-solvers. They won’t depart until the passenger count is at least double what the bus was meant to carry; not even the driver is spared the discomfort of overcrowding—he usually shares his seat with the money-collector. With rivets threatening to pop from the metal seams, this deathtrap wheezes its way through the gears to its destination, stopping from time to time to disgorge someone who, more often than not, squirms through a window because it’s easier than crab-walking over other passengers to the front. If you’re one of those passengers, you pick a position you hope will be comfortable for the next six or seven hours, because you literally can’t move a muscle.

I knew what I was getting into when I opted for this route. My friend Mike Seamans and I endured a seven-hour kidney-splitting ride from Freetown to Koidu in such a vehicle a few weeks before. My knees were locked in a fetal position due to the luggage underfoot and I emerged convinced that I had contracted plague or worse from my hacking and wheezing fellow passengers, who shared more intimate space with me than my wife. Never again, we vowed.

But Mike had left and I was determined to get to Monrovia—I’d made a promise to Joseph and to myself to do all I could to meet him and see if and how I could carry on the commitment made to him by Chris Hondros years ago. So I fashioned a plan whereby I would leave before dawn on Monday for Kenema, where, I was told, I could hop another bus for the Liberian border. Once on the other side, I’d have to negotiate a third ride into the capital. I thought I could accomplish this by sunrise on Tuesday, at the latest, and have the rest of the day to track down and spend with Joseph. Then I’d reverse the route on Wednesday and be back in Freetown in time for my flight to Paris on Thursday. I pared down my luggage to a single backpack with essential gear and left my large suitcase with the fixer in Aberdeen. I arranged for a taxi to pick me up outside my downtown hotel at 3:30 a.m. and went to bed early.

The plan disintegrated well before dawn. First, the taxi didn’t come. I spent a few tense minutes wandering the streets in near total darkness with a backpack crammed with expensive photo and computer gear and a few hundred thousand leones looking for a replacement ride. Then, an hour after I got to the initial bus stop, I learned the bus wasn’t running for some unknown reason. By then it was too late to take any of the other large commercial bus companies and my only option was to stand in line for space on one of the deathtraps at a muddy motor park on the other side of town. By the time I arrived, it was pouring rain.

In spite of the lackluster start, the trip to Kenema was less horrible than I expected; having gotten to the motor park late, I scored a prized spot on the passenger seat, which I shared with another man. I would turn from time to time to scan the 50 or so other passengers shoehorned into place and silently thanked the gods of travel—they were all glass-eyed and zoned out, clearly meditating themselves to some personal Happy Place where they could stretch their legs.

But because of the late start, I worried about getting to Kenema in time to catch the bus to the border. The other passengers knew my plan—you simply can’t sit so close to someone for so long and not learn all about their life—and they pointed me toward the back of the car park as we ground to a halt.

“Where?” I asked, seeing nothing but a wrecked bus rusting in the mud.

“There, there,” the said, pointing directly to it. “That’s the bus to Liberia.”

It was the sketchiest thing I’d seen so far. Barely the size of a VW Westfalia, it was crumpled in the middle from some long-ago T-bone accident. There was no glass in the side or rear windows. All the tires were odd sizes. And, to make room for 20 people in its 10 seats, all the luggage was being lashed on top in a teetering pile. They planned to cover this mountain of hobo sacks with a hole-filled tarp to try to protect against the rain. They only needed one more passenger—me—before they could heave off into the unknown, a journey that would take at least six or seven hours because, as the driver told me, “the roads are very, very bad.”

Up to that point, no African trying to sell me a ticket on such a thing had admitted that any goat path was less comfortable than the German autobahn, so I knew I was destined to break a few bones if I went. What finally made up my mind, however, was that the bus wouldn’t make it to the Liberian border, if it made it at all, before it closed for the night. The passengers, I was told, would sleep in the bus until morning, presumably in whatever position they were seated in. This news came to the backdrop of thunder and the first few spatters of rain that preceded the daily downpour. The ticket-man stood with his hand out for my money and all the other passengers eyed me to get on with it so that they could be on their way.

“Fuck that,” I said, snapping my fingers at a motorcycle driver. “Take me to a hotel.”

I knew my hope of getting to Monrovia was growing dimmer by the minute, the window of opportunity for me to accomplish my mission and return in time for my flight closing rapidly. I still considered leaving well before dawn on the next bus, but even though I arrived in the pitch darkness long before most other passengers, it was sold out. So were the busses going to every other major city in Sierra Leone. I ended up taking a taxi to Bo and then caught another sardine truck back to Freetown, where I instantly got stuck in a two-hour traffic jam in steady rain trying to make my way back to the hotel.

I considered myself wise to give up. In view of the difficulties encountered going just a third of the way, I would probably still be in Liberia trying to get back. I haven’t even mentioned half the other challenges I would have faced (such as not having a Liberian visa and having a Sierra Leonean one that only allowed me to come and go across her borders once, not twice, as I was attempting to do). In retrospect, my plan was thwarted because of a novice mistake—I assumed that I could wing it once I was there and after I’d gotten the rest of my work done. Indeed, I had no other choice; by the time I decided on the side trip to Monrovia, all of my other plans were locked in, so any journey was going to be ad hoc at best.

Still, I haven’t given up. Presidential elections are next year in Sierra Leone and with luck, I’ll be there to report on them. If so, I’ll arrange my visit to Liberia well in advance. Africa, as I was reminded, does not favor the last minute traveler.

About the photo: Misery on wheels: The photo, by my friend Mike Seamans, does not do justice to the discomforts of local travel in Sierra Leone.