Region of West and Equatorial Africa is really great place. It has its atmosphere, history and unique culture. It is clear that it is at focus travelers who are looking of possibility to be off-beaten track.
But not all of them will reach this part of the world. If you start to plan trip here you will easily find that there is lack of information. Well some kind of general information is easy to find but if you need something special or up-to-date info it is really difficult to get one even impossible. If you start to plan to go to Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville or Congo-Kinshasa you can easily be at situation that you do not know what is true and what is the current situation. Most problems are with political situation, security and logistic of course. Livingstone times are over when he can travel for “years” without knowing date of return. Most of us have some jobs and need to make reasonable time planning to be at time back home/job. I know that this feeling is maybe just my personal problem but when I start to make plans for CAR or Congo I mostly felt to situation that security is maybe ok but I have no idea about logistic and reasonable times for covering interesting region.
I already visited this region several times (Cameroon, Benin, Niger, Mali, Senegal) so now I know more about it but starting wasn’t so easy if I compare it with Asia for example. In near future I would like to go to CAR and Congo and I am still looking for information to make interesting and safe trip at reasonable time with reasonable cost. I will try to gather information from several sources and place them on this web. At the beginning I started (like always) with Lonely Planet guides, but they are too brief for Central Africa countries. I also checked ThornTree at LP web sites – some interesting info is there. I found more useful Bradt Travel Guides and also French guides from Petit Futé.
If you have any interesting info let me know. It would be useful to share it with others.
