KEY POINTS:
Boboh village used to do a roaring trade in the "Pa Gbana" cocktail, a mix of fermented local grasses, coconut and lime favoured by tourists to wash down freshly cooked lobster.
Now there is little demand for the drink, named after the village's oldest resident: the only foreigners on Boboh's pristine beaches, south of Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, are development workers taking time out.
The former British colony's 1991-2002 civil war, which killed 50,000 people and horrified the world with images of Kalashnikov-toting child soldiers high on drugs, destroyed what was once a lucrative tourism industry.
In the heyday of the 1980s, more than 30,000 people visited every year, many arriving by helicopter at exclusive beachside hotels.
Since the war, numbers have dwindled to almost zero. Resorts were vandalised by rebels, foreign investors fled and unemployment spiralled.
But hopes are rising that tourists could return again after this year's largely peaceful presidential election, the first since United Nations peacekeepers left after the war and won by an opposition candidate promising to fight corruption.
"The biggest challenge Sierra Leone faces is tackling the negative perceptions caused by years of war," said Bimbola Carrol, a Sierra Leonean keen to leave London and move back home to run his own travel business.
"I love telling everyone how beautiful and misunderstood Sierra Leone is," said Carrol, who created a tourism website, Visit Sierra Leone.
The site had more than two million visits in August, a promising sign for a country where 70 per cent of people live below the poverty line.
"If managed properly, the benefits of tourism can feed directly into local communities and help alleviate poverty," Carrol said.
Five years have passed since the end of the war but the West African country still receives fewer than 4000 tourists a year. The Western Peninsula's 40km of unspoiled beaches south of hot, hilly Freetown stand empty.
Crumbling mud huts line Boboh's shore of white sand and rippling turquoise waters. Men who once earned a living guiding tourists haul green nets on to wooden fishing boats.
"There's nothing for us here now," said harbourmaster Jonathan Kong-chaman. "We used to have jobs before. I want the tourists to come back."
President Ernest Bai Koroma has vowed to shift the small economy's emphasis from mining to agriculture and tourism. His party manifesto promised a focus on nature and heritage tourism, partly to encourage African-Americans to retrace their roots and visit slave-trading sites. Home to rare birds and threatened species such as the pygmy hippopotamus, Diana monkey and chimpanzees, Sierra Leone hopes its rainforests and tiny exotic islands will attract ecotourists and sports fishermen.
The World Travel and Tourism Council predicts tourism growth of 5 per cent a year until 2017. It says the sector will generate US$174.5 million in economic activity this year, accounting for 6.6 per cent of GDP and 65,000 jobs.
- Reuters
