Freetown,  May 2
Let me preface this by saying two things.
First, I love Freetown. I really, really love it. A few years back, I schemed madly to find a way to convince The Globe and Mail to put its new Africa bureau here. In the end, I gave up, for reasons that will become clear below.
But this remains my favourite city on the continent, this choked, teeming, boisterous sprawl over the jungly hills.
I love the soda-pop cadences of Krio, the national language.
I love the ingenuity of people struggling to survive in what the United Nations says is the world's least-developed country - give a young man a thousand leones (about 25 cents) and he will find a place to charge your cell phone, or physically stake out a rare and precious parking space until you get a car into it, or arrange to get your clothes washed in one of the streams that snake down the hillsides into the sea. 
I love the warmth of friends who greet me with the highest compliment, "You're so fat! Ooh, you're fat! Fat!" (That took a little getting used to.)
Second, this country has the most beautiful beaches that I've seen anywhere in the world, an order of magnitude more lovely than I had ever even dreamed a beach could be. From the deserted white sands of Freetown's rather pedestrianly-named  Beach No. 3, I once launched into cyan seawater and found myself in the middle of a school of tiny fish flashing silver in the sunlight. It was like swimming inside a disco ball.
So you will understand when I say, in broad principle, that I think everyone should visit.
But I also feel it's only fair to relate the following small travel story, so that when you book your next March Break in Sierra Leone, you know what to expect.
I am meant, as I write this, to be in Monrovia, the capital of next-door Liberia. But I've been here for four days now because when my connecting flight touched down on Monday, and I disembarked to transfer to the flight to Monrovia, the airport staff burst into laughter.
There were no flights to Monrovia. Hadn't been for days - maybe weeks. They thought the ticket I had purchased that very morning in Dakar for a flight, scheduled at 5 pm, to Monrovia, was one of the funniest things they had ever seen.
Eventually my good friend Benjamin Franklin (and the basic kindness of the aforementioned airport staff) helped me get around the fact that I had no visa for Sierra Leone, and I set off for town.
Since then, I have spent an inordinate amount of time talking to employees of various airlines with which you may not be familiar, such as Slok Air. Slok is meant to have a flight to Monrovia a couple of times a week, but a rowdy pilot apparently cracked the windscreen of their plane and so they are grounded. Elysian Airlines is inexplicably not running, its staff a bit vague about why that is.
I tried to go overland, but no one could agree on whether Freetown to Liberia takes one day, or three. And a British military officer I know, stationed here to help train the country's new armed forces, muttered darkly about how things "are still a bit hairy" around the border.
And so finally I abandoned all hope of reaching Monrovia and tried to get back to Dakar, where I have reporting for other stories waiting. Lagos-based Bellview Airlines, the people who got me into this mess in the first place, sold me a ticket (yes, I had to pay, even though they marooned me here) for a flight that was variously reported as leaving at 1, 2, 4 or 5 p.m. today.
Now until quite recently you could reach Lungi International Airport by helicopter from the city. But apparently Sierra Leone's recently removed Minister of Transport was somewhat undiscerning in his willingness to register aircraft (dozens of them) with the national call letters, aircraft now operating in drug- and gun-running businesses in other parts of the world - that's the story in Freetown these days, anyway. So the country has been suspended by international air transport authorities, and there is no helicopter. So if you want to get to Lungi, it's overland or nothing.
I set out from my holiday on Freetown's Signal Hill in the early morning, in order to spend hours snaking through the go-slow, with the car mostly gridlocked and turned off, on one of the capitals half-dozen main arteries - roads barely wide enough for one lane of traffic, let alone two plus innumerable handcarts, hawkers and women with jerrry cans of water on their heads.
We reached the ferry dock - about 5 kilometres from the hotel - just before the 11 a.m. ferry.  The boat has recently had a smart coat of orange paint courtesy of one of the fiercely competing cellphone companies, but has nevertheless clearly seen better decades. I sat up top, in the shade but open to the breeze - until an itinerant Muslim preacher in an emerald green embroidered polyester ensemble set up his bullhorn next to me, at which point I retreated downstairs to "first class" (cost: $2) for the hour-long crossing.
(An aside: the cabin has a resident DJ, who uses a cheap Chinese-made DVD player to spin full-volume tunes with videos on a wall-mounted TV. First there was some fantastic local music, and then a moving retrospective of the great works of Whitney Houston -- "The Greatest Love of All" seemed to send the whole packed cabin into wistful melancholy. Then the DJ played – three times – "We are the World." There were Cyndi Lauper, Kenny Rogers, Huey Lewis, Michael Jackson, belting it out for the starving children. And I noticed something in the video that I never had before – the singers perform in front of a huge banner reading "USA for Africa." The irony seemed a little dark, as a hundred Sierra Leoneans quietly hummed along: the U.S. never intervened in Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war, even though its battleships were often stationed within sight of the Atlantic coast. More than 70,000 people died. But I digress.)
When the ferry docked on the other side of the lagoon, I got into another rickety taxi for the half-hour drive to the airport - where there was no sign of check-in staff. Would-be passengers had lined up their luggage in an orderly queue while they flaked out against the walls in the stifling heat. One fellow in a uniform told me the flight to Dakar was canceled. Another told me it left in two hours. A third told me it would fly in the evening. I found a piece of wall to lean on myself.
Two hours later, a voice on the intercom announced check-in - at which point the orderly queue of luggage became a Lord of the Flies-style scramble for the doorway. Two more hours of shuffling along, and an alarmingly thorough body search later, I was in the departure lounge - where there is a truly wonderful if deeply improbable French restaurant. Another hour, and a Bellview plane landed. Another hour, and I was aboard it.
Then we sat on the tarmac for two hours. If you've ever sat simmering on a grounded Air Canada flight while the staff studiously avoids telling you anything about what's going on, let me tell you, an Air Canada employee has got nothing on a Nigerian airline employee for sullen, tooth-stucking obstinacy. On the other hand, a planeload of Canadians will sit and mutter quiet, bitter recrimination to their seatmates - but when half the passengers are Nigerian businesspeople with deals to do, they resort, before very long, to full-volume,  windmilling-arm, near-violent physical confrontation with the cabin attendants, which tends to be somewhat more effective in getting the information flowing.
Paperwork, we were told in end. Didn't have it, now they did, we are leaving.
And 13 hours after I left the hotel, about 20 km away, the flight is taking off for Dakar.
The moral of this story? Come to Sierra Leone - it's a magical place. But bring some good books, and some Benjamins, in your hand luggage.