Thank you Creer, I sure will do! I also read up a bit on the center you manage and we think we would like to give you a helping hand for some time when we are there. We do not have an exact plan and/or destination, but we expect to go to Cote D'Ivoire during our trip, so I don't want to promise anything, but I think we will stop by :-)

We've just had some Czech journalists over the last week ... so you might hear more about us soon!

PM me when you're in the sub-region!!

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http://www.west-african-views.blogspot.com

We have just returned after a fantastic half a year of travelling, of which almost all of the time we spent in Africa. By far my favorite trip I have experienced thus far, we had such a great time.

We visited Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Guinee. We had previously planned to go further east, but found out we much more enjoyed to travel relatively slowly and spend more time in the places we liked.

As to my questions from before the trip:
I got the Michelin maps for West Africa and Morocco + Reise maps for Senegal and also West Africa. Did not really use them too much for anything practical. Still happy to have them as I like maps but I think just one would have been sufficient. I used mapy.cz which have free offline topographical maps for all the countries I visited. These proved useful even when we went trekking for a week in Guinea into nature (not perfectly accurate, but good enough). I also had maps.me, but found mapy.cz more useful.
We used the Rough Guide to West Africa and found it really good. Never used a paper guidebook before and really liked this one. Though outdated (2008) I found it well written, informative and at time quite funny. Did see the Lonely Planet Africa guide and found it extremely brief on each country and thus almost useless.

Car: Our 98 VW T4 FWD was perfectly up to the task. There was a minimum of roads that we could not pass and would have liked to (though I did raise the car a bit extra so we have a very generous ground clearance). Also helped that we were there in dry season, I imagine the story would be a lot different if we were in Guinee now. Got stuck twice in sand (my fault, not the car, nothing serious though) and visited a mechanic a few times. The biggest problem was getting the pieces (in Guinee I got a driveshaft from a different VW that +- fits as finding an original was proving quite difficult. Actually enjoyed the time with the mechanics as I helped out on the repairs and learned some stuff and was therefore capable of repairing some more stuff later on myself. There are VW T4s in The Gambia and a bit in Guinee so not so difficult to get parts in these two countries.

Dogs: Our dogs had a great time and handled the trip really well. We got them vaccinated and carried some antiparasite stuff with us (not sure exactly what as my wife took care of this) and they never got sick. They managed the heat ok (although they would for sure prefer it to be colder!) and on the hottest days we planned our day so they could jump into some water to cool down. No problems whatsoever with law enforcement/borders, quite the opposite - the first time our car was checked at the border was going back into Morocco - the border guards always either did not want to check the inside of the car because of the dogs or were so interested in them that they did not car to check the car. It is easy to get dog food in Morocco, Senegal, The Gambia in the more developped parts of the countries. I would assume they also sell dog food in Bissau and Conakry though cannot confirm. When we ran out of doog food in Guinee we cooked rice with oil and dried fish and the dogs loved it. We did not have trouble with the dogs not being allowed into specific places other that the obvious (like a museum), the only place we wanted to go and did not was Niokolo Koba where you cannot enter with a dog. Some children (and adults) really liked the dogs so sometimes even the dogs encountred the warmth of the people there.

To shortly summarize our trip: We had a fantastic time and met so many nice and kind and smilling people that it fells unreal after returning to Europe. We liked every country, but we liked both of the Guineas the most. We are sure we want to return, but next time to plan atleast a year and a half to have enough time to circumnavigate Africa.