Before embarking on this trip I had spent many painful hours charting the average rainfall per month and likely duration of the wet season in all of the countries we would be crossing and I had reached one main conclusion. In order to avoid being in the wettest country in West Africa at the wettest [...]
From Makeni we headed South towards the beaches of the Freetown peninsula. After our previous adventures the road was a thing of great beauty, a perfect tarmac conveyer belt that sped us effortlessly towards our final destination, without so much as a pot hole in sight. A large sign declared that it had been built [...]
After our recent adventures crossing remote / non existent borders (see: https://roadless-travel.com/2019/07/09/guinea-bissau-part-1-an-adventurous-border-crossing/) we were looking forward to 300km of good tarmac road and a nice straightforward run from Conakry to Freetown. The day before we were due to leave our friend Bintou had invited us to visit her Grandmother’s village. Aware that we were anxious [...]
I am not religious, but if I was I would imagine hell to be a bit like driving into Conakry during rush hour. The city is located at the end of a 30km long peninsula and there is only one main road, the M1, in or out. Enormous piles of rubbish sit smoking by the [...]
The north of Guinea is known for its spectacular waterfalls; one of the nicest is Sala which is around 30km from Labe. Leon, Jim, Simon, Blanco and I spent an enjoyable couple of days camping at one of the viewpoints above the waterfall. We were told that locals fear the djinn who they believe are [...]
By the time we had obtained our Guinean visas, packed and finished saying our farewells to Milky and his family it was late afternoon. We drove into the dark and then tried to find a place to camp. After searching unsuccessfully for more than an hour we passed a bar and decided to stop. There [...]
Milky invited us to camp at his family’s mango plantation on the outskirts of Bissau. We pitched our tents in a beautiful spot beneath the outstretched branches of the giant trees. In the night we woke to the crashes of mangos raining down from above, exploding as they hit they ground and pelted our tents [...]
When crossing an overland border in Africa the standard procedure is first to visit the immigration office and obtain an exit stamp in your passport to show that you have legally exited the country. Next you visit the ‘Duane’ or customs office and obtain an exit stamp on your Passavant or Carnet De Passage to [...]
We left the Gambia with Chi and Jim (of the famed 6 day Diama border standoff). We decided to take one of the smaller borders between The Gambia and Senegal in the hopes that Jim could avoid a repeat of his earlier standoff. Our plan started well, we got to the border early and quickly [...]
I first met our friend Ebrima on a beach in Dakhla, Western Sahara. We got chatting and soon he was telling me his life story. He told me that he came from a small village in The Gambia. He used to make some money going out into the bush to chop firewood but the government [...]
