Category: West Africa Road Trip

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Africa Sierra Leone West Africa Road Trip

The Sights of Sierra Leone

From a tourism perspective, Sierra Leone has an optics problem. Namely, the 2006 movie Blood Diamond, featuring a young Leonardo DiCaprio and set during the 1990s civil war. I remember seeing the movie and quite liking it. Unfortunately for Sierra Leone, so did a lot of people, and they’re having a hard time shaking the reputation of being in an active civil war, even though it’s been over two decades since the conflict ended.

I had recently read an article about their push to get more tourists to see beyond their history, and I was excited to visit! First impressions were of a gorgeous, lush countryside. Sorry not sorry for the many photos out the car window.

Most of our time was spent in Freetown, which is their capital. Freetown, like its neighbor Liberia, was founded by freed African Americans and African Canadians, which led to interesting tensions between those founders, the local West African tribes, and the British, who were colonizing it at the time.

I liked Freetown. I found it very interesting. We started by exploring the city center and went to a lot of the historical sites, like the original Fouray Bay College building and the Cotton Tree. We visited a market and then went to the Kroo Bay slum, which is one of the poorer areas of the city. It’s sometimes strange to visit an area where everyone is working, and it’s not designed for tourists – I felt as though I was constantly in the way while we were there, and it’s hard not to feel as though we were gawking, just a little. As an outsider there to observe the local culture, sometimes our presence alone is enough to be uncomfortable for the locals. Nonetheless, I’m glad we did get a chance to see that area as well, and hopefully we weren’t too disruptive to the people who live there.

Freetown is surrounded by hills, which made for a very cool viewpoint to look at the landscape over the city. It was quite a trek up to get to that view.

After exploring the city, we spent a lovely afternoon at the beach! We were at River Number Two Beach, which is genuinely one of the funniest names for a beach that I’ve ever heard. After several very long days in the car, it was amazing to have a nice, chill time, and the beach was great. Beautiful, with drinks and food available, and we had it mostly to ourselves.

Fun fact about their currency – the denominations are quite small relative to the price of items, so every time we had to pay anywhere, it was huge stacks of bills. I watched a woman count the money from our dinner for easily five minutes.

The next morning, we headed east from Freetown. As might be obvious from the Blood Diamond reference, Sierra Leone is known for their diamond mining. They are still one of the top ten producers of diamonds worldwide, and the situation is much better now that the diamonds being produced aren’t “blood diamonds,” or conflict diamonds. We had a chance to visit a diamond mine on the drive between Freetown and the Liberian border, which was a really interesting experience.

What I didn’t expect was how much it looked like panning for gold!

After we left the diamond mine, we promptly got a flat tire. It was a little scary, actually – I’d never been in a car when it got a flat before, and the noise is pretty alarming. We stopped on the side of the road as the driver tried to fix it, but we ended up giving up and loping along on the flat, because the border with Liberia isn’t open that late and we didn’t want to get stuck on the Sierra Leone side.

Sierra Leone also wins for my favorite signs of the whole trip. Across the board, West Africa has great signs – names of shops often are many words long, resembling full sentences and referencing God or Obama or other famous people. The PSAs and the ads are all so different from what I’m used to. I had so much fun spotting the interesting types of billboards and store names out the car window throughout the road trip.

Luckily, after our flat tire situation, we did manage to get to the Liberian border before it closed, and we ended that day in Monrovia, Liberia. We got to the hotel very late, if I remember correctly. Honestly, that’s a safe bet for most of the trip.

I had a very pleasant visit in Sierra Leone. I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop their tourism as they gain more distance from the war and from the public’s perception of them as a war-torn place!

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Africa Guinea West Africa Road Trip

Chasing Waterfalls in Guinea

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Guinea is in an interesting place in its history right now. There was a coup in 2021, and they’re still figuring out what the new government is going to look like. There’s talk that it might look closer to Mali or Burkina Faso, compared to its other neighbors in West Africa. It’s had a somewhat tumultuous political history, only holding its first democratic elections in 2010 after a long history of coups. I’m curious to see where they land in the next couple of years (and yes, I could also say that about the US at the moment).

As I mentioned in an earlier post on the region, Guinea (or Guinea-Conakry) was formerly a French colony. They were one of the earliest countries in Africa to gain their independence, in 1958. This was in a transition of all of the French colonial lands. France held a referendum, in which pretty much all of their colonies either agreed to become “states of the French Community” or were strongly encouraged to do so. Guinea was the lone country that overwhelmingly rejected France in this measure. They refused the French constitution and took their independence. It was a very brave move, because France was super pissed about their choice. They not only left Guinea, but they actually took the time to dismantle as much of Guinea’s infrastructure as they could, to the level of unscrewing lightbulbs and burning medicine rather than leave anything for the Guineans. They even tried to destabilize Guinea with a covert operation called Opération Persil, where they attempted to flood Guinea with forged banknotes in an attempt to cause hyperinflation and economic collapse.

All of this to say – yes, the roads in Guinea kind of sucked, but I’m willing to give them a lot of grace on their lack of development. Their current political situation didn’t impact our visit, probably because we stayed out in the highlands and didn’t head to Conakry. I loved our time in Guinea, and it had my single favorite day of the trip, when we went to the waterfall.

If you look closely, you can see one of our cars driving through a giant puddle

The landscapes of Guinea were gorgeous. We would stop on the side of the road for car trouble or bathroom breaks, and the view would almost make you forget you had a flat tire.

Thank you again to Maria for the drone pictures!

A big highlight of the whole trip for me was the Kambadaga Waterfall. It was unreal to have this to ourselves – we didn’t see a single other tourist, and we were able visit multiple lookouts, go swimming in the river, and stand at the very edge of the falls.

It was such a fun day out, especially in the midst of long driving days through some of the worst roads I’ve ever been on. (On that note, big shoutout to anyone who drives a commercial vehicle through those passes? We saw trucks driving alongside us, and all I can say is, how?)

We visited a market in a town called Koundara, which was interesting but also oppressively hot. We tried and failed to find a shop that sold cold drinks and changed our money into Guinean francs.

We also spent a morning in Kindia visiting their market. The strongest members of our group challenged some of the Guineans at arm wrestling, which made for a fun spectacle.

Fun fact, in Kindia, I rode on a motorcycle for the first time! We took mototaxis back to our hotel from the city center. My guy had to get a little more gas and promptly lost the group, which made me very nervous that we wouldn’t actually know how to get to our final location, but as it turns out, there aren’t a lot of large groups of tourists in Kindia and every passerby on the street could point us in the direction that we needed to go to catch back up.

Guinea is not for every traveler. But for the ones who are willing to forgo some of the traditional comforts, it can be rewarding. Some of my favorite memories of the trip were from this section, despite or even because of the challenges. And when we got to our nicer hotel in Freetown the next day, I appreciated it way more!

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Africa Guinea-Bissau West Africa Road Trip

Driving Across Guinea-Bissau

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Ok so… this is a bit out of order, since some of happened before we got to Bissau, but it made more sense to me to keep the photos of the smaller towns and countryside together. This starts with our experience in the town right on the other side of the border with Senegal, where we refueled, made sure we had enough cash, and got to wander around a little to meet some of the locals.

Also, we saw more of the critically endangered vultures! I’m happy to see that they’re thriving somewhere, since apparently this is the only place they aren’t in population decline.

Across West Africa, the soil has a high iron content, so the soil is this amazing rich reddish color. It leads to some absolutely stunning landscapes, especially where it contrasts with the verdant green of the plants on the side of the road. Most of the roads we were on in Guinea and Guinea-Bissau were dirt roads, which… had its downsides, but was very beautiful when we would stop and take it all in. Or, you know, change a flat tire.

Big thanks to Maria for bringing a drone on this trip!

We spent a lot of time in small towns in Guinea-Bissau as well. One of the coolest experiences we had was going to this village for to watch them dance. This was our first of this kind of experience across the trip, but not the only one, and every time, it was amazing how welcoming the locals were. They were happy to see us, especially the children, and share their culture with us!

I think it’s easy, in today’s day and age, to focus on the overtourism. The locals in Barcelona de-listing their buses off of Google maps and using water guns on tourists; Venice adding extra taxes to try to keep their city from literally sinking; New York deregistering every single Airbnb in the city in one fell swoop. But that isn’t everywhere. In some places, the impact of tourism can be really positive. It’s nice to have that experience.

In one of the towns, we stopped and played soccer with the locals. It felt like every kid in the region showed up to play!

Back in the cars for another long day of driving

We also headed to Bafatá, which is the second largest city in Guinea-Bissau. And by second largest, I would say it still isn’t very large – Wikipedia tells me there are about 22,000 people who live in Bafatá. It was quiet when we arrived, and we didn’t really see anyone walking around during our visit.

Bafatá was the birthplace of Amílcar Cabral, who was very important in the African anti-colonial movement. He helped to free both Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde from Portuguese rule. There’s a small museum, which I believe is the house where he was born and/or grew up in when he lived there. It’s mostly photos, so it was helpful to search out more information on the internet to supplement what we were looking at.

Guinea-Bissau surprised me. Its colorful architecture, even where it was run down, was beautiful and the people were some of the friendliest I’ve met across all my travels. In the moment, when I was on the trip, it was overwhelming – Senegal, by comparison, is much more developed, and so the switch into dirt roads and the confusion around where our cars were taking us made for a bit of a strange introduction. As I look back across the whole trip, Guinea-Bissau didn’t have the “flashy” moments like some of the other countries we visited. We saw no sites that I would expect anyone to recognize and visited towns that most of my friends have never heard of, and that was its charm. Guinea-Bissau isn’t trying to be anything – unlike so many countries that are actively trying to put their best foot forward, the Bissau-Guineans simply are that friendly and open to foreigners. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Africa Guinea-Bissau Senegal West Africa Road Trip

From Banjul to Bissau

Once we left the Gambia, we crossed back into Senegal. The first matter of business was a stop in Ziguinchor to get our visas for Guinea-Bissau. This was a fairly long process. The visas are all hand-written, so multiply that by the number of people in our group and I imagine the workers at the Embassy were happy to see us leave.

From there, we headed to Cap Skirring! We had a nice day at the pool and on the beach, relaxing before the tougher part of the trip began. Guinea-Bissau and Guinea aren’t as developed, both in their infrastructure and their tourism industries. So we knew we would have challenging roads ahead.

A note about Guinea-Bissau and Guinea, since this seems as good a place as any. I often see comments about the number of countries with Guinea in the name, which is a fair question. The word “guinea” was basically a way that Europeans referred to darker-skinned people, which is why it has been applied to several places around the world. The other two countries are Equatorial Guinea and Papua New Guinea, which are both quite a distance away – PNG isn’t even in the same continent.

Guinea-Bissau and Guinea, in colonial days, were Portuguese Guinea and French Guinea, respectively. French Guinea became independent first, in 1958, which is one of the earliest in Africa. Therefore, they got to keep the moniker, and Guinea-Bissau added Bissau, after their capital, to be distinct when they got their independence from Portugal in 1974. In practice, Guinea is also referred to as Guinea-Conakry, after their capital, and sometimes the Guinea is dropped altogether to refer to them as Bissau and Conakry respectively.

Home sweet bus

My next post will include pictures from the countryside of Guinea-Bissau, but for now, I’ll focus on our first night there, which was in the capital of Bissau. Guinea-Bissau, by the way, is the only country on our trip that was Portuguese-speaking! Which was not helpful for my personal ability to communicate with people but was interesting compared to the rest of Francophone and Anglophone West Africa.

After a little research, this is a memorial to the Pidjiguiti Massacre, which took place on August 3, 1959. Between 25 and 50 dockworkers were killed by the police while on strike for higher pay, which was a major turning point in the struggle for independence in the African colonies who had been colonized by Portugal. Ultimately, this led to the realization that non violent protest was not working, and after an 11 year armed struggle, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and the rest of formerly Portuguese-Africa became independent. We didn’t talk about this while I was there, but I thought the memorial was interesting and took a photo. As I was going through my photos, I figured I should learn what it was before I posted it – thank you, Wikipedia!

We arrived after a long day of driving. We had a quick walk around and then headed to dinner. After dinner, we headed to the stadium, which acts as a hub for the city. There are several basketball courts and soccer fields, as well as dancing and a market that is set up outside. We spent the evening there, drinking beer and talking to the locals, which was really pleasant.

Our hotel was fairly nice and had a great pool. A few of us headed there before bed. We had a pretty wide variety of hotels while we were on this trip, but a lot of them had really nice outdoor spaces and pools, which made for some very fun nights on the trip.

The next morning was, in a word, chaotic. We were switching from buses to cars. We all got our assignments for the day, and the plan was to explore the city for a bit before we headed out towards Guinea. Unfortunately, there was some miscommunication, and several of the cars, including mine, immediately headed out of the city. We caught it fairly quickly and ended up stopped on the side of the road at a market for a few minutes while we re-coordinated. It was a nice detour to see a livelier part of the city – there were a ton of food stalls and shops nearby, so the four of us in our car took a quick walk around.

We did make it back to Bissau, luckily! Some cars had never left the city, and others had gotten even farther away than us before they turned around, so we sort of explored the city in waves as we waited for the whole tour group to get back to the same place.

I loved the colonial architecture and bright colors of Bissau – I found it very charming, and some of my favorite pictures that I took were from Guinea-Bissau! It was nice to see some of the capital, but we had a lot left to cover on our trip. Next stop, Bafatá!

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Africa The Gambia West Africa Road Trip

Going to The Gambia

To be honest, my visit to The Gambia didn’t get off to the greatest start. I landed at 11 pm and my hotel didn’t pick me up like they were supposed to, and I had an uncomfortable taxi ride. One of the quirks of The Gambia is that sex tourism is fairly common there, but in an unusual twist, women are the primary consumers. Basically, what Thailand is for older men, The Gambia is for older European women, which means that there’s an extra dynamic in traveling there as a white woman. The locals tend to assume that’s why you’re there, which…. was very much not what I was looking for. My taxi driver kept offering opportunities for us to “party” together while I reiterated that I just wanted to go to my hotel to sleep.

That said, The Gambia is a very popular destination for British people to come for beach vacations, and I can see why. My hotel was really nice, and I had a swim-up room with an ocean view. I had a full day to kill before I was supposed to meet up with my tour group, so I paid a small fee to have my room for the full day and just vibed in the pool for the morning.

The view from my room! I could get used to this swim-in pool option.

From there, I went to go meet our group! People were arriving at staggered times, but the six or seven of us who had arrived first met up and got a cab into downtown Banjul to explore. We started by climbing up to the top of the Banjul arch, which had a nice little exhibit on the history of The Gambia at the top.

It also had some pretty decent views of the city!

From there, we headed to the market. We wandered around for a bit and explored, which gave me a much better sense of Banjul than I’d gotten from the resort.

If you’ve never looked at The Gambia on a map, I’d recommend pulling it up now. It’s one of the more interestingly shaped ones. It’s basically entirely coastline – a tiny bit that borders the Atlantic Ocean, and then the majority of it is along the coast of the Gambia River. The only land border it has is with Senegal, because it essentially takes a chunk out of the middle of Senegal.

What this means is that it’s pretty much entirely wetlands, and therefore it is a very good place for birdwatching if that’s a thing you’re interested in. I am not a birdwatcher, but I am friends with one, and when I see cool birds, I try to get a good picture and send them to my friend Kellen to identify.

This little guy is a hooded vulture, and he is critically endangered! Kellen was absolutely floored that I was able to see one so close. Apparently, The Gambia, southern Senegal (the Casamance region), and Guinea-Bissau are the only place where their population is stable. Globally their population has decreased about 85% over the last 50 years. I saw several of them during this trip, and it was so sad to learn how rare they’ve become, but I’m glad that I had the chance to see them and learn about them through this trip.

Anyway, the next day was the official start of the tour! We had a briefing and then headed off to explore a bit more of the Gambia. We started with a fishing village. Fishing is a huge industry in West Africa and so we got a chance to see the markets and the beautiful painted boats several times as we made our way along the coast.

After a really pleasant lunch on the river, we headed south to the border with Senegal! This one was one of the easier land borders to cross, because most of us were not visa required to enter Senegal. But even an “easy” land border in West Africa can still be very time consuming, as we would learn over the coming days.

All in all, mixed reviews on The Gambia. The main tourist infrastructure, focused on beach resorts and partying, is really not my cup of tea, but when we got away from that and got to the areas like Banjul and the areas en route to the Senegalese border, I had a much more pleasant experience. It doesn’t really appeal to me enough to want to return, but I am happy that critically endangered vulture is thriving somewhere.

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Africa Senegal West Africa Road Trip

Dakar: The Gateway to West Africa

In late October, I flew out to Dakar to start a three-week trip in West Africa! The majority of this was through Wander Expeditions, but I tacked on a few days at the beginning so that I could explore Dakar before meeting up with everyone else in Banjul.

Because of the way that my flights were scheduled, the distance from the airport to the city, and the limited time I had, I ended up booking a private tour for the two days I had so that they could also handle my airport transfers. It was an amazing experience! I felt like I had a chance to see so much of the city and beyond, and my guide and I had some great conversations about Senegalese history, culture, and how Dakar fits into the broader West African landscape. I landed in the morning and we immediately headed out to Gorée Island.

Gorée Island is one of the most famous sites in Senegal. The history there is incredibly dark – it was one of the larger ports for the slave trade. I toured one of the homes that had been used for that and saw the Door of No Return, where countless people last touched African soil after being ripped from their homes and sold into slavery. It was very moving experience. I also appreciated getting African perspectives on this. I’ve learned about the Atlantic slave trade in US history, but that is primarily focused on what happened when enslaved people arrived in the United States and leading into the Civil War, the Civil Rights movements, etc. The exhibits at this museum spoke more about the capture, auctions, and harrowing journey across the ocean.

What makes it such a fascinating place is that despite that dark past, the modern day Gorée Island is charming. It’s chock full of colorful buildings and art galleries, and can absolutely hold its own with the types of islands I’ve been to off the coast of Croatia or Italy for a pleasant day trip. That dichotomy was unexpected.

The people at the gallery above are painting with sand! They’re using glue on their brushes to create the patterns and shapes, and then spreading the different colors of sand to make the pictures. If I wasn’t at the very beginning of the trip, I would have definitely wanted to buy one, but I thought these paintings would be too delicate to survive the itinerary ahead. We had lunch on Gorée Island as well, and walked around for a while. By the time we got back on our ferry to the mainland, I was starting to doze off. Whether that was from the heat or the jet lag was anyone’s guess, but my guide suggested I go back to the hotel, have a restful afternoon, and then we would start a little earlier the next day and get through everything else we had planned.

It was so cool to watch him play this instrument – it sort of seemed like a cross between a harp and a guitar.

I definitely needed the rest. And it was a good call to push the city tour to the next morning when it was cooler, because we started with the African Renaissance Movement! I was super excited to see this, because I had listened to a podcast about it. 99% Invisible did a whole episode on how North Korea has helped fund and produce art for African nations in a very interesting diplomatic move. We headed up the stairs to the top, where I got to see the plaque honoring North Korea’s aid in creating it. From what my guide said, this was designed by a Senegalese architect and then North Korean sculptors helped to create it, then shipped back the pieces for assembly in Dakar.

We visited a few other sites across Dakar before heading north out of the city. Most notable was Pointe des Almadies, which is the westernmost point on mainland Africa! I always find it interesting to see how we mark those types of extremes – sometimes, like the Four Corners in the United States, people will say it’s boring, but it’s also so fun to me that we as a society took the time to both measure and celebrate these rare borders or geographical locations. Earlier this same year had been my very first visit to Africa, and I had been on the complete opposite side of the continent.

From Dakar, our next stop was Kayar, which is a fishing village. I loved this visit. First of all, I was clearly the only tourist. It wasn’t all that far from Dakar, but it was so far removed from the development and bustle of the city that it felt like being in another world.

We walked along the beach and watched the fishermen work. This wasn’t the only fishing village I went to on this trip, but it was my favorite because I was only with the one guide and I felt a little less intrusive than when I was with the big group. I could stay quiet and watch the rhythms of how they worked, the men pushing the ships out to sea or pulling them back in, with the men standing along the shore waiting to haul in the catch and the women working to get the fish ready to sell at the market. It looked like hard work.

The elaborately painted boats were also amazing to see up close. Kayar had so many, as far as the eye could see in both directions. After we had walked along the shore for a bit, we walked through the area where they were drying the fish, and by then the guide and I had gotten a bit lost from where the driver had parked so we walked through town to find a new place to meet up.

After lunch, we headed to Lake Retba, also known as Lac Rose. You may have seen gorgeous pictures of the pink water – those are outdated, as of fall 2022. There’s been flooding and it has diluted the algae and salt levels, so it mostly just looks like a normal lake now. Nonetheless, it was still nice to visit. We did a 4×4 tour along the coast, which was fun, and then a quick boat ride on the lake.

I posted this on Instagram and got a lot of responses of people telling me this janky-looking boat gave them stress. We didn’t sink, I promise!

From there, it was back to the airport and onward to Banjul! A lot of the trip is still left to come, but reflecting after the full three weeks, I would still say that Dakar was one of my favorite destinations from this trip. It’s one of the top places I would recommend to people if they are interested in traveling to West Africa, especially if they are less familiar with the region. The development that I saw in progress makes me really excited for the future of Dakar as well. It was a great start to the trip!