When it came to traveling to Africa, we felt we were being cheated. Deceived by the mentality prevailing in our part of the world, which includes the perception of Africa.
Something wasn’t right for us, the “Wild Africa” type didn’t work for us.
We decided to check it for ourselves. Proposed solution wrong? If it is really that bad there, we decide to shorten our stay or go to a country perceived as “more civilized”, e.g. Morocco.
Before we left, there were many threats, fueled by our dead, who were making bets on what would be stolen from us: either just photographic devices or money. Concerns were also fueled by random, incompetent pseudo-travelers who appeared on the wards.
To this day, she will reveal that one of such people told us that in Senegal she saw it in the only shop. This, of course, is absolute nonsense, there are shops everywhere.
Before we boarded the plane, we protected ourselves in every possible way. We divided the money and hid it in various places, including our children’s socks. We printed fake ID cards with the word “press” on them so that we would be treated better in the event of a kidnapping. We gave our relatives and employees clear instructions on what to do in the event of our disappearance… Now we are ashamed of it.
Here, of course, it should be mentioned that in Africa, like on every other continent, there are extremely dangerous places. Everyone must weigh safety for themselves.
Apart from safety concerns, there are also some cultural differences, but we still have a lot in common.
Most of the beaches we visited turned into one big playground at sunset. Every time our children came up and asked to join the game, they were welcomed with great joy.
We choose the direction of our travels similarly to many travelers: the prices of airline tickets are a determinant. It was like that this time too. We knew we wanted to visit Africa. We have set up price alerts on popular cheap flight search engines. From time to time, we searched manually ourselves, because alerts usually show ticket prices without checked baggage, which is unfortunately not possible when traveling with children.
One day, completely by accident, we found a reasonable price for tickets from Warsaw to Dakar. In post-Covid times, a tolerable price is unfortunately still a high price, one that we would never even consider. However, we managed to buy tickets for under PLN 10,000. PLN for the four of us with checked luggage.
Expensive. But we had to face it.
Then we quickly started delving into the map. We were going for a few weeks, so Senegal itself seemed a bit too small for active sightseeing. Gambia, due to its location surrounded by Senegal, is a country automatically included in the list of countries to visit. And then we traced the map further south. That’s how we found a country that we didn’t even know existed before.
We knew that Guinea existed. But what is this country with a similar name and the addition of “Bissau”? Over the next few days, we tried to find as much information about this country as possible, but there are not many sources. The information we received was rather uninteresting: “a failed country”, “a country ruled by drug gangs”, “a country without infrastructure”.
What made us decide to go to Guinea-Bissau was the average level of security risk assessed by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, additionally, the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs (which usually provides much more detailed and up-to-date information about a given country). There was one more thing that assured us before our departure that Guinea-Bissau couldn’t be bad: even though it is one of the least visited countries in the world, it is one of the few in the world that organizes trips there… a travel agency operating in Poland
Several elements of our equipment turned out to be crucial, without which we cannot imagine its success. It was equipment related to spending the night: our own mosquito nets that we could hang on the ceiling instead of hotel ones, which may be very worn out.
But it was mainly a summer, thin sleeping bag for all four of us. Such a sleeping bag that smells like home gives you a feeling of comfort regardless of the geographical location.
Preparation for the expedition also involved a travel plan. Although our plan was quite loose in terms of places and dates (we did not book any hotel before starting the trip), we precisely marked the points we wanted to visit during our trip.
Basically, we have created our own system for planning such points: on any application with off-line maps, we mark with colors the points that qualify for must-see – in blue, those that are interesting to see (nice to see) – in red and those , which seem to be worth seeing only if we are nearby – in yellow. Additionally, we mark interesting beaches and trekking places with different colors. Where do we get information about these places? This involves carefully reading guidebooks, watching travel videos and reading blogs.
If anything could go wrong during our trip, it happened at the worst place and time. One of our sons had a close brush with death in Africa.
When you open the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ information about Guinea-Bissau, you will learn that health care is unavailable in this country and there is a complete lack of consular care, which will make any assistance or evacuation in the event of illness or accident impossible.
The accident happened on one of the islands of the Bijagos archipelago, 3 hours away. by speedboat from the mainland.
Imagine the most beautiful, paradise island. You share the endless, snow-white sand only with local cows who come to the beach to cool off.
Imagine the shallow waters of the Atlantic Ocean heated by the scorching sun. We planned to spend three days in such natural surroundings, during which we were to forget about the hardships of traveling around Africa.
Bubaque Island, however, turned out to be as idyllic as it was dangerous.