When you google Man in Cote D’Ivoire, two things of interest will come up; the monkey reserves and the waterfall. We chose the latter.

If someday you end up at the waterfall on a wet Sunday in October, this is what it will look like:

There will be a lot of teenagers at the entrance. They will come on foot, on their friends’ motorcycles, or in cabs.

There’ll be people who will pay the 300 CFA gate fee. Others will just crawl in through the bushes.

At the waterfall, there are no less than 200 people, a lot of them teenagers – mostly boys.

Boys are diving, girls too. Every time someone leaps for the water, you fear that they’ll hit their heads on a rock. But they don’t — they know where all the rocks are.

I imagine most of their parents don’t even know they’re here.

I’ve seen this scene in many places. This for me, was holidays back at my hometown. Where we’d pretend to go get water at the stream, only to end up swimming for an hour.

Everytime I raise my phone, someone strikes a pose or does a stunt.

“I wish we came here on Monday,” Toke says.

“I’m glad we came here today” is my response. She and Tosin want to leave still.

We’re on our way back to the entrance, when Toke says “For Fu’ad and Kayode, it’s just people playing. For us, it’s rascals making lewd comments at us.”

Tosin can hear it in their French. The “La Blanc” and the rest of the vulgar spectrum. Teenagers.

Suddenly, Toke’s Monday idea doesn’t seem like a bad one. All the kids would be doing weekday things, and you can have the waterfall to yourself. Or other sensible grown-ups.

What a buzzkill, those boys.