City square in Lome We got lucky again with our cab drive to the Togolese border with Benin. The driver was willing to negotiate a very reasonable rate for us to continue driving on to Lomé. We had opted not to visit Togoville after getting a warning from some of the truck members who’d visited previously – plus it was easily one of the hottest, most humid days we’d experienced on the southern coast of West Africa – probably 38 degrees centigrade. We got through the border

The Door of No Return monument on the beach in Ouidah Ouidah is a significant town on the beautiful Benin coastline because of its historically significant slave trade sites. Among these is a famous “Tree of Forgetting” that captured slaves would walk around in circles – men nine times and women seven times, in an attempt to forget and leave behind their memories of their West African lives before being forced into slavery. The tree marks the spot from which there was a wel

The Stilt Village of Ganvie The bus journey was actually quite comfortable. If you can stand the fact that they insisted on blaring loud gospel music for hours starting at 6am, followed by God-awful Benin-ois soap operas played back to back for hours on end, all of which had essentially the exact same plot. There would be a room of men shouting at one guy, the victim. He would eventually get beaten with a stick and have his shirt taken from him while all the men continued

Beautiful bird in Penjari The night in Fada N’Gourma luckily passed without incident, unless you count the fact that Mike and I both got up in the night and had to pee in our shower, since our bathroom was sans toilet. We had to get transport to Pama and then onto the border with Benin from there, so the first order was to find a ride to where minibuses were heading south. We had been seeing these tricycle trucks that were flatbed trucks being pulled by a motorcycle, and I

Riding a bicycle around Tiabele Sleeping out on the roof was quite the experience and the stars were absolutely brilliant and shone magically, aided by the lack of streetlights. It will be something I will always remember, especially listening to the village noises in the night. We had heard drumming at around 1 in the morning (apparently there had been a funeral) and a rather upset donkey who brayed at regular intervals through the night, matched only in force by several roo

Entering a traditional home in Tiabele We ordered a private taxi to take us back to Domango where we would pick up a minibus heading back to Tamale and then north from there to the Burkina Fasso border. We asked that he make a stop along the way to a famed mud and stick mosque that’s over 700 years old in Larabanga – and it’s still in use today! Here are the photos. These types of structures are most famous for being located in Mali, but they do occur in other places across t

Finding an empty Tro Tro at side of the road near our hotel...YEAH!!! We grumpily decided we’d need to get an early start that Friday (19th of January) in order to make it back to Accra with plenty of time to collect my passport from Isaac and get to the airport in time for our 3pm flight with Africa World Airlines- an airline name that defies our US president – to Tamale, a northern city that serves as the gateway to Mole National Park – Ghana’s biggest and most famous natio

These places do exist The first section of our independent journey took us to the mountainous region of Lake Volta, close to the border with Togo. Since the area has a bit of altitude, we were promised some cooler breezes, which would be oh so welcome after Accra. First, we had to use the services of the Dragoman “fixer” (essentially a local guy who can arrange things that are difficult/get shit done) to go straight to the Burkina Fasso embassy to arrange for my visa, and hav

The incredible expanse of the Kumasi Market. Photo by Mike Hoeffner We had an incredible Indian meal on arrival in Kumasi – albeit an adventure in travel just trying to get the taxi to get us to the restaurant, which as far as he was concerned – didn’t exist. Having looked up the address, we kept repeating where the restaurant was located, per the guidebook, and he kept pulling over to ask random people if they knew more than he did about what we were muttering. None of the c

At the Cape Coast Slave Castle The next morning I said goodbye to my lovely hut and outdoor toilet to get back on the truck and head east to Cape Coast. I did love my room, however, I had to employ a technique there that I hadn’t used since 2009 when I was in Nicaragua during a particularly hot and muggy spell of weather. Without a fan, which is really essential in the heat of the night, the only way one could fall asleep would be to get in the shower and get completely soake

Elmina had not really been touted as a destination in and of itself by the Dragoman Itinerary or trip description. In fact, almost nothing was mentioned of its stunning harbor that dramatically juxtaposed alongside its famed Slave Castle that I had read about when I was a teenager in high school. It turned out to be the highlight of the trip so far. That morning, all that had been organized for the group was a visit to 3 schools that had been built by a charity that Dragoman

Tuesday the 9th turned into a super long, hot, and frustrating day of driving with a long sweaty border crossing thrown in for good measure. The guards at the Ghana border were quite funny though and kept telling us that all was good because we could finally stop having to talk in French and speak English again. “This is Ghana! We speak English here!” they kept saying. We stopped at a market to do cook team shopping and I caught sight of an exact replica of the very first car

The former president of Cote D’Ivoire, Felix Houphouet-Boigny had an ego problem. In 1985, he decided to spend an inordinate sum of government money building a colossal catholic church in his newly formed capital of Yamassoukro, built on the site of his ancestral village. This Basilica is larger than the Vatican’s St. Peter’s (which is the basis for its design) and is the largest church in the world.It was quite a stunning sight for two reasons. One, just the scope of the bui

Korhogo Textiles Thursday, January 4. It was a treat to stay at our lovely and high standard accommodation of La Rose Blanche Hotel, where we enjoyed our first internet connectivity since we departed on the 19th of December. Having been offline for that long, I was nervous to check my email, messages, bank accounts – by this point, I don’t want to be reminded about anything that has to do with home. I am here, being present, and not futurizing/worrying. Luckily, upon checkin

Roof Surfing on the truck January 1, 2018 turned into the best transit day I’d had yet on the truck. We had been warned that it would be excruciatingly slow going due to the fact that the road from Nzekore to the border with Cote D’Ivoire had taken almost ten hours the last time the truck had made the journey. Lucky for us – the dirt road had been worked on somewhat and although not tarmac’ed yet, we made amazingly good time allowing us to cross the border a day ahead of sc

Vine Bridge in Guinea On the morning of the 29th, I woke up groggy and tired from a very fitful and restless sleep. That day we had some more heavy miles to cover before reaching the town of Gueckedou – only made famous as being the site of patient zero during the Ebola outbreak of 2015 when a young boy got bitten by a bat and came down with the virus. Additionally, we were staying at the Hotel Fatou Rose which was set up as the logistics central point for dealing with the

Beautiful Guinean Landscape On Boxing Day we were scheduled to drive west back to the main road between Freetown and Makeni and then head north-east toward Kabala, staying in a local guesthouse there. Unfortunately, the truck started making some very strange noises on the road and we pulled over several times for Sinead and Mike to get under it and assess what was going on. It seemed that it had to do with the drive shaft and some loose ball bearings (I know nothing of truc

Arriving by canoe on Tiwai Island Tiwai Island is home to the densest population of primates in the world. Red-tailed/black and white colobus monkeys, chimpanzees, and spider monkeys abound. I was looking forward to a respite from the traffic heavy city to a totally natural environment that we had to get to by boat. The drive, as is the case with any overland travel in Africa, was arduous. For those of you unfamiliar with overland truck travel – we travel in a 4x4 overland

River No. 2 Beach, Freetown Peninsula On the morning of the 20th we left for the 90 minute drive to the stunning beach at River No. 2, stopping en-route in one of the most frenetic markets I’ve ever experienced in Africa in a town called Waterloo. In spaces where people are so closely packed that you have to squeeze your physical way through…mini vans arrive blasting their horns causing the already tightly packed crowds to jam ever more tightly together in the space created

Slums of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Mass graves were dug here during the 2015 Ebola outbreak. My flights went without incident and despite being very tired indeed – I landed in Freetown on a hot and humid Sunday night. Having sat next to a very friendly native Sierra Leonean, I felt confident that I would have some help navigating immigration and transport on arrival despite being exhausted. We exited the aircraft and that familiar blast of heat hit me full on and I breathed i