IN LIBERIA: AVACATION PARADISE
Liberia can be a dream destination too
On the last day of my family’s big trip home to Liberia, the staff of Mamba Point Hotel threw an impromptu going away party for my six year old nephew, Cooper.The kid had already been spoiled shamelessly during our two-week stay. He had cleared Mamba Point’s sushi restaurant of all its edamame, and had devoured, by my count, more than 65 eggs, scrambled carefully for him every morning by the breakfast chef Leroy Blehsue, (one morning he consumed eight).
This was over the holidays, and the hotel was empty since tourists don’t go to Liberia. For Cooper, that meant a huge edifice to explore. He swam in the new pool. He explored the corners of the hotel casino. He sprawled on the couch in the bar playing Minecraft on his mom’s iPad. He heckled the doormen by running in front of them to open doors for ladies as they came in, before saying between giggles: “I’m doing your job.”
I would not have blamed them if they had shooed him away. But they didn’t. “Hi Cooper,” Edward Quad, the second-floor doorman said, grinning as Cooper invaded his turf.
In fact, “Hi, Cooper,” had become the refrain for my family’s big trip, and for all of my inner grumbling, I was ecstatic. This was the first time my entire family - from my mom to my two other nephews to my brother-inlaw to my sisters all the way to Cooper, were all together back in Liberia, the land of my birth. Cooper had never before been to Africa and, let’s face it, Liberia is Africa on steroids.
I had fretted for months before about the trip, having come up with the idea that, after the years of civil war, capped off by the 2014 Ebola pandemic, it was time to see if Liberia was ready to be a travel destination.
“We’ll be tourists!” I had cajoled. “We’ll go to the beach, we’ll go to Kpatawee waterfalls, we’ll go to Sapo National Park. And think of the food!”
The mention of the food had eroded their initial dubiousness. Liberian food is “sweeeeeeet” - Liberian English for “so delicious you want to cry.” We boarded the flight home with thoughts of palm butter, bitterleaf, fufu and proper Liberian jollof rice, in our heads. The central question, though, was: Could we really spend two weeks in Liberia as tourists? Liberia had long been that fantastically beautiful place that had never seemed able to deliver on its travel destination potential: Sandy white empty beaches, but with no roads leading to them; lush tropical rainforests but with no place to go to the bathroom; open people who love foreigners but few flights to link them. About a year and a half ago, I had stumbled on a Liberia tourism video on YouTube that started to answer the question.
The video, set to highlife music, was enticing yet real at the same time. “Experience our children!” a bunch of adorable uniformed schoolchildren said, laughing into the camera, which nonetheless captured the dirt roads these children walked on every day. “Experience our culture!” was followed by a clip of a “pekin” (Liberian English for “frisky child”) with no shoes doing a complicated dance involving wide leg sweeps, accompanied by drummers. “Experience our natural beauty!” had a wide gorgeous smile from a Liberian park ranger showing off peaceful rainforest lagoons, tented lodges on the beach and real-life Liberian surfers cresting waves. Whoever put the video together hadn’t shied away from the tattiness of the capital city of Monrovia, which was featured in all of its dilapidated glory.
This trip was Cooper’s first visit to the Third World, and I was eager to see how he would do. In the back seat of the car as we navigated Monrovia’s traffic, Cooper was glued to the window: Market women with baskets of oranges on their heads and babies on their backs battled with young boys selling small plastic bags of ice water. At major intersections, all manner of bush meat, fish and poultry were available for purchase by car passengers too lazy to pull over and walk to the side of the road. So sellers came to them. One guy thrusted what looked like an aardvark at us.
“Bucket,” Cooper said, quietly to himself, at one point, when we passed a woman balancing a bucket on her head. He seemed particularly fascinated by the size and weight of what the Liberian women carried on their heads, plugging into the image that more than anything else, tells the story of the continent of Africa as a whole. “Look, she’s carrying two things on top of each other!” he exclaimed. He struggled with the heat at first but fascinated by the traditional Liberian dance and the drummer Emmanuel Lavelah, Cooper shuttled back and forth from the band to the porch to stand directly in front of the fan with a glass of ice water, looking pitiful and torn. But I knew “Experience our beaches!” would help that. The next day, we headed on an overnight trip to Libassa, an eco-resort outside Monrovia that came with thatched rondavels, multiple terraced swimming pools, a lagoon, and a “lazy river.” All of this, set to the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean was just as perfect as it could get.