Celebration Time (C’mon!) Landing in São Tomé on New Year’s Eve was nothing short of a miracle (many, actually), and serious cause for celebration. São Tomé and Principe was country #162 for me, and ceremoniously, the last of seven new countries on this end-of-year mid-pandemic West African adventure. I won’t spend time re-hashing the horror…
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I Walk the Line As I walked into the Sierra Leone border checkpoint, I breathed a sigh a relief to see the glass windows and booths where travelers present their passports to get stamped in – a sign that maybe this country was just a little more developed and had more of a normal “system”…
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Mission: Impossible My strut onto flight HC202 from Dakar, Senegal felt more like a victory lap, as I showed my ticket and took a seat among 100-plus Africans dressed in colorful dresses and boubous. I was the only gringo on the flight, and that’s just the way I like it. Flying into Guinea was nothing…
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I’m so Excited (and I Just Can’t Hide it) I have a ton of photos, but first, some text. I need to preface this blog by explaining why I was so amped to see Guinea Bissau. Of all seven new countries on this December 2020 mid-pandemic West African itinerary, I was most pumped up about…
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Bissau, the capital of Guinea Bissau, is one of the least visited countries in the world, and one of the hardest places to get in and out of, due to an obscene lack of flights servicing OXB. In all of my travel experience (162 countries to date), I’ve never had a more difficult time visiting…
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Well, hello #158! The Gambia was part of my December 2020 mid-pandemic West African end-of-year journey. I arrived into Banjul from Casablanca just before 2AM. My driver Kemo was waiting for me at the airport. We exchanged pleasantries on the way to my hotel. We’d have a lot more time to get to know each…
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Welcome to Liberia I wasn’t too excited about an overnight flight into my 157th country, but if you thought routes and schedules were bad in normal times, traveling West Africa during the pandemic–on a tight schedule–is nearly impossible. It’s amazing how small and close all these little nations are to each other, yet how difficult…
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I was really geeked out about this one. Western Sahara is actually not part of the infamous “193” list of fully UN-recognized nations. But it is part of the five “partially” recognized countries, often included in some people’s “197” or “198” list of countries. Let me explain… There are 193 fully recognized members of the…
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