22-Day West Africa Overland Expedition from Cotonou to Banjul

Land in Cotonou, where your driver meets you at the airport and takes you straight to the hotel. Nothing else is planned: the day is yours to recover from the flight, so book whatever arrival time suits you.

Out in the morning to Calavi and across Lake Nokoué by pirogue to Ganvié, where thirty thousand people live on stilts in the lagoon, in a place founded because the Dahomey raiders would not follow anyone onto the water. Then continue about an hour west to Ouidah for lunch.

In the afternoon, walk the Route des Esclaves past the slave posts out to the Gate of No Return on the beach, marked at every stage of what was done along it. Continue to the Sacred Forest, the Ouidah monument, and the salt village.

Travel about two and a half hours inland to the old heart of Dahomey. Visit the Chameleon Temple first, then the underground village at Bohicon, dug as a refuge during the wars of the kingdom.

Continue to the Royal Palace Museum in Abomey, a UNESCO site and the seat of the Dahomey kings, whose wealth came largely from the trade you walked through yesterday. Return to Ouidah for the night.

Spend the morning in Ouidah at the Cathedral and the Temple of the Sacred Pythons, which face each other across the square. Then cross the first border at Hillacondji and enter Togo.

Take a pirogue across Lake Togo to Togoville, where the 1884 German protectorate treaty was signed and where the vodun shrines are still in daily use. Stop at the preserved slave house in Agbodrafo before the last stretch into Lomé.

Spend the morning in Lomé visiting the fishing harbour, the fetish market, where healers and vodun practitioners buy their herbs and carved figures, Independence Square, and the Grand Marché.

After lunch, cross at Aflao, minutes from the centre in the only capital in Africa that sits directly on its own border, then continue about three and a half hours along the coast road to Accra.

Spend a full day in Ghana's capital. Visit Osu Castle, the old Danish fort that became the seat of government, then Makola Market, the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, and Jamestown, the oldest neighbourhood in the city, where you climb the lighthouse above the fishing beach.

Finish at Black Star Square, where the nation holds its parades.

Enjoy a slow last morning in Accra, then take the short flight west to Abidjan, a little over an hour, where the Ivorian convoy is waiting. The language changes to French.

Abidjan in the afternoon is towers, lagoon ferries, the Plateau skyline, and traffic, and the evening is in Treichville.

Head north out of Abidjan on good tar to the political capital that Félix Houphouët-Boigny built out of his home village, and to the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace standing in the bush at the end of it.

Spend the afternoon there under a dome that answers St Peter's, with room inside for eighteen thousand people and rarely more than a handful.

Travel west into Guro country in the morning for the Zaouli, a masked dance performed at a speed the eye cannot resolve, the dancer's feet blurring under a carved face that never moves. Watch it in a village that keeps it rather than on a stage.

Then continue west through Daloa to Man, a town ringed by forested hills close to the Liberian border, for the night.

This is the day the flight used to take, now driven. Leave Man early, cross the hills to Danané and the border into Liberia, then continue from Ganta south on the paved road through Gbarnga to Monrovia, arriving as the light goes.

With the border, it is a ten- to twelve-hour day, and we say so plainly. Monrovia is where the hard half of the expedition begins.

Liberia's capital rewards a slow day. Visit Providence Island, where the first settlers from America landed in 1822, the Waterside market, the burnt-out Ducor Hotel on its hill above the city, and street names that read like a road map of the American east coast.

You also re-provision here, because the hardest week of the route starts tomorrow.

This is the defining overland day of the expedition. Travel north-west from Monrovia to the Mano River, cross into Sierra Leone, and continue through the rice country to Freetown, arriving in the dark if the border is slow.

It is a long, hot, uncertain day, and we do not pretend otherwise. It is also the reason the line on the map holds together.

Spend a day in one place. The morning is in the city: the Cotton Tree, the Krio board houses on the hillsides, and the market streets that run straight downhill to the water.

In the afternoon, head to the peninsula beaches south of town, at Tokeh or River Number Two, which is where Freetown goes on a Sunday and where the convoy crews catch up on sleep.

Set out along the peninsula road, with the city on its steep green hills above one of the largest natural harbours in the world behind you, then continue north into Guinea.

Past the border, the road runs inland to Kindia, at the foot of the highlands, where you leave the coast for the next four nights.

Head north onto the plateau on the long climb to Labé, passing through the mining towns and the mango belt, with the temperature dropping as the altitude rises.

By the afternoon, you are in the Fouta Djalon: plateau grassland, waterfalls off the escarpment edges, and air ten degrees cooler than the coast. Labé, the capital of the highlands, is where you sleep for two nights.

Spend a day out of the vehicles. Walk a section of the escarpment with a local guide, down through terraced Fula smallholdings to one of the falls, and back up in the afternoon.

The highlands are the reason to come to Guinea and the reason you do not simply drive through them, which is what almost every crossing of this region does.

Face the hardest border on the route, so leave Labé early and give it the middle of the day. The road comes down off the plateau toward Guinea-Bissau.

On the far side, Gabú, a Fula trading town at the edge of the plateau country, hot and busy and entirely unvisited, is where you sleep. The paperwork is put in order here for the rest of the run to the coast.

Travel west toward the Atlantic again, stopping en route at Bafatá, the colonial river town where Amílcar Cabral was born.

Bissau at the end of it is a city of collapsing Portuguese facades, bougainvillea growing out of the plasterwork, and a waterfront that has stopped pretending to be a port. It is one of the strangest capitals in Africa.

Head north through cashew country on a road that alternates without warning between tar and red earth, to the crossing at São Domingos.

Senegal changes character below the Gambia River: the Casamance is green, slow, and threaded with mangrove creeks, and it has spent decades feeling separate from Dakar. Finish on the Atlantic at Cap Skirring, in time for the sunset, which is the best on this stretch of the ocean.

This is a light day on purpose, after the borders behind you. The morning is for the coast: the fishing beach, the palm line, and whatever the tide has left.

Then take a short run east on back roads through Diola villages and stands of sacred forest to Ziguinchor, the old river port, reaching the waterfront at dusk.

Travel north out of the Casamance on the last crossing of the trip, a gentle one by the standards of what is behind you, and into The Gambia.

Banjul, the smallest capital on the Atlantic coast of Africa, is where the convoy stops after three weeks and ten countries, and the last evening is spent together on the riverfront.

Enjoy a last morning to walk Albert Market and the riverfront before transfers to the airport. The expedition ends here, at the mouth of the Gambia River.

Book departures from early afternoon onward.