14-Day West Africa Overland Expedition from Abidjan to Banjul

At Félix Houphouët-Boigny Airport, you'll be met by the expedition leader and the drivers, and you'll have the afternoon to recover from your flight. In the early evening, the group meets above the Ebrié Lagoon with the route map on the table, and we talk through the thirteen days ahead and the six frontiers in them.

An easy run north on good tar from Abidjan to Yamoussoukro, arriving with enough daylight left to see the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace while the sun is low, its dome rising alone over the palms. The evening is left unscheduled on purpose: the next two days carry us west to Liberia by road.

The morning belongs to a village in Guro country west of Yamoussoukro and its Zaouli, a Guro mask dance, with one masked dancer and musicians from the village. Then continue west through Daloa to Man, a town ringed by forested hills close to the Liberian border, for the night.

Leave Man early, crossing the hills to Danané and the first border into Liberia. From Ganta, continue south on the paved road through Gbarnga to Monrovia, arriving as the light fades. With the border crossing, this is a ten- to twelve-hour day, and we say so plainly. A different crew is waiting on the Liberian side.

Liberia's capital dates from 1822, when free Black Americans settled here, and that history still shows in the flag, the street names, and the English you hear. The day covers Providence Island, the waterfront neighbourhoods, and Broad Street, with Liberians who were there for the city's recent history and are willing to talk about it.

This is the hardest driving day of the fourteen, alongside the run into Liberia. Cross into Sierra Leone on the Mano River bridge, a border post that is seldom quick, then work your way through the forested south-east, one small river town after another. The kilometres are not many; it is the road surface that costs the time, and Freetown comes into view as the light goes.

The drivers get a day off and we walk: first the stone steps climbed by the settlers of the 1790s, then the packed markets at the east end of town, and after lunch the white-sand beaches down the peninsula. We also call in at a Freetown community project that our supports.

Take a last view of Freetown's green, built-up hills above the Atlantic, then leave early. The Guinean border is the day's open question, and we'd rather have hours in hand there than need them later. Beyond it, the road leaves the coast for Kindia, known around Guinea for its fruit, where we spend our first night in the country.

Head north through wooded valleys and up onto the plateau, pausing where streams spill off its edge and, if the road gives us time, walking down to the foot of a waterfall. You'll notice the cooler air before you notice the height. We sleep in Labé, historically the Fula capital of the plateau, and the evening call to prayer drifts across its red-earth streets.

The road down is the slowest of all fourteen days, and at the bottom of it sits a remote border post. In Guinea-Bissau, the land levels out into open bush. The Kaabu kings ruled from Gabu; today it is a market town at a crossroads, and our simple stop for the night.

Travel through Bafatá and on across savannah, where the open bush slowly turns into cashew plantations, on tarmac that stops and starts. The street signs in Bissau, at the end of the drive, are in Portuguese. There is time before dinner for the old quarter, Bissau Velho, and the port; the city moves slowly, and so do we.

Head north through more cashew trees to the border with Senegal, never a fast one, and into the Casamance, cut off from Dakar and northern Senegal by The Gambia. Cap Skirring, where the road ends, comes in the late afternoon: pirogues lying on the sand under the casuarinas.

Start with a swim or a walk on the beach, then head east through Jola country, with its sacred groves and round impluvium houses, to Ziguinchor on the Casamance River for lunch on the waterfront. Then continue north through paddies and palm groves to Seleti, our sixth and final land border, and into The Gambia, reaching Banjul for the last dinner of the trip by the water at dusk, where the Gambia River meets the ocean.

Breakfast close to the river mouth, then your transfer to Banjul International Airport, timed to your flight. You started beside a lagoon and finish beside an estuary, with seven countries' stamps in your passport between them.