On Liberia’s Shore, Catching
a New Wave 0
WE were less than 30 minutes from our destination of Robertsport, home to Liberia’s nascent surfing scene, and gliding along what one local had accurately described as “the best dirt road in the country,” when my driver, Andrew, and I got into a loud and boisterous fight.
“Whooo? People live on that mountain?” Andrew said incredulously, after I’d idly commented that it might be nice to have a vacation house on Grand Cape Mount. He whistled at the Western nonsense I was spouting after living 25 years in the United States. “No way,” he said. “Not in Liberia. You’ve been in America too long. People will only go to the mountain to make witch or talk to their ancestors.” To drive home his point, Andrew pulled over to ask a man walking along the road his opinion.
Sigh. Next to us stretched Lake Piso, the 40-square-mile, drop-dead beautiful oblong lake that dominates western Liberia, near the Sierra Leone border. Just ahead loomed the lushly green — and in Andrew’s eyes, ominous — Grand Cape Mount, the last natural landmark between us and the big waves at Robertsport. The waves that I would be examining to see whether Liberia, my birth country, could transform itself from poster child for West Africa’s wretched civil wars to travel posters for West Africa’s best surfing.
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