The Lagoon, the Basilica and the Last Forest
East along the Ébrié lagoon from the canal that made Abidjan a port in 1950 to the World Heritage town the same canal is quietly starving of sand, then inland to a basilica built for the president's home village after it was made the capital, west into the eighteen mountains at Man, south to the last large block of primary rainforest in West Africa, and back along the cocoa coast.
Abidjan
Arrive, get a SIM and some CFA francs, and give the day to the Plateau rather than driving out of it. The Musée des Civilisations de Côte d'Ivoire holds the country's standing collection of Baoulé, Senufo, Dan and Gouro work and is a better preparation for the west of this route than anything you will read. St Paul's Cathedral, a few streets away, was designed by the Italian architect Aldo Spirito, finished in 1985 and consecrated by John Paul II that August — a concrete figure leaning back and pulling the roof up on cables behind him. Then walk to the water. Everything in this city is arranged around a lagoon.
Banco, Treichville and the canal
Start at Banco, thirty square kilometres of rainforest gazetted in 1953 and now entirely surrounded by the city. At the entrance the fanicos — several hundred laundrymen, mostly Burkinabè, working a stretch of the Banco river in car tyres sunk into the bed — do by hand what the northern suburbs send them, and it is not a spectacle laid on for anyone. Then Treichville market and the bateau-bus across the lagoon, which costs a few hundred francs and is the cheapest tour of Abidjan there is. Finish at Vridi in the last hour of light, where ships come in through the cut and the whole city makes sense at once.
Grand-Bassam
Forty-five kilometres east, an hour with the traffic. Bassam was the first capital of the colony from 1893 and lost the administration to Bingerville after the yellow fever epidemic of 1899; the wharf trade kept it alive for another half-century until the Vridi canal took that too. The Quartier France is what is left: a grid of colonial commercial houses that nobody had the money to knock down, inscribed by UNESCO in 2012. The Musée National du Costume occupies the old governor's residence. Walk the seaward row and look at the groynes and rock armour — the beach in front of the World Heritage site is being defended, not enjoyed.
Assinie and the Îles Ehotilé
East again to the sand spit between the Aby lagoon and the Atlantic, where Abidjan spends its weekends and where the French first landed in 1687, built Fort Saint-Louis in 1701 and gave it up inside three years. The reason to come is behind the resorts: the Parc National des Îles Ehotilé, six wooded islands in the lagoon gazetted in 1974, which are ancestral burial grounds of the Ehotilé and are visited with a village guide rather than on your own. Take a pirogue from Étuéboué or Adiaké. Swim in the lagoon and not in the sea — the surf along this whole coast has an undertow that kills people every year, including strong swimmers.
Inland to Yamoussoukro
Back through Abidjan and north on the A3, a genuine tolled motorway with a 110 km/h (68 mph) limit and the only road on this route where you can hold it — 225 kilometres of it, opened in stages and now the spine of the country. Most of the five hours is the run out from Assinie and the crossing of Abidjan itself; the motorway part is the easy part. The forest thins into oil palm, then rubber, then the Baoulé farmland of the centre. Yamoussoukro was a village of a few thousand when Félix Houphouët-Boigny was born in it; parliament made it the capital on 21 March 1983. Arrive in time to stand on the basilica esplanade while the light goes.
The basilica, and Kossou
Notre-Dame de la Paix was designed by Pierre Fakhoury, built between 1985 and 1989 and consecrated by John Paul II on 10 September 1990. It holds around eighteen thousand under some 7,400 square metres of stained glass — but only seven thousand of them are seated, the rest stand, and the esplanade outside was built for a further three hundred thousand who have never had a reason to fill it. Guinness still lists it as the largest church building in the world. Houphouët-Boigny insisted it was paid for from his own money; nobody has ever produced the accounts. Afterwards, the six-lane boulevards with nothing on them, and the crocodile lake below the presidential palace — the feeding is a fixed daily performance, and in May 2012 it killed the keeper who had run it for decades. Then drive out to Lake Kossou, the reservoir the Bandama dam filled from 1972, which moved something like seventy-five thousand Baoulé off their land.
West to Man
The longest tarmac day of the route: Yamoussoukro to Daloa, Daloa to Duékoué, Duékoué up to Man — about 335 kilometres and six hours, through the cocoa and coffee districts of the centre-west. Duékoué was the worst single site of the 2011 civil war and the road passes through it without ceremony. Man sits in a bowl at 340 metres with mountains on every side and calls itself the town of the eighteen of them. Arrive, eat, and start early tomorrow.
Tonkoui, the Dent and the liana bridges
Up Mont Tonkoui first — 1,189 metres, the second-highest point in the country after Nimba on the Guinean border, with a track most of the way to the old French relay mast and coffee smallholdings the whole way up. The Dent de Man, 881 metres, is the tooth-shaped one you see from town and is about three hours up and down on foot. In the afternoon go out to one of the liana bridges — Lieupleu and Vatouo are the usual two — which are woven from living creeper across a river, maintained and periodically rebuilt by particular families who hold the hereditary right to do it, and which are ritual objects before they are crossings. There is a village fee and you should pay it at the chief's house, not on the bank.
South to Taï
Down through Duékoué to Guiglo, where the tarmac gives out, and then about a hundred kilometres of laterite through Zagné to the town of Taï on the Cavally, with Liberia on the far bank. Roughly six hours and the hardest driving of the trip; after rain the last stretch is what the 4×4 was hired for. Taï itself is a border town of no particular charm and the point is what starts a few kilometres east of it.
Taï National Park
About 3,300 square kilometres, a biosphere reserve since 1978 and World Heritage since 1982, and the last large block of primary Upper Guinean rainforest anywhere — most of what once ran from Sierra Leone to Ghana is now cocoa. Walk with the OIPR guides, who are compulsory and who are the reason you will see anything. Taï's chimpanzees crack Coula and Panda nuts with stone and wooden hammers on root anvils, a tool tradition documented here since Christophe and Hedwige Boesch began work in 1979 and one of the strongest cases anywhere for culture in a non-human animal. You are unlikely to see them. You will see the forest, which is the older argument, and you may see pygmy hippo tracks in mud. Expect leeches and expect to be wet.
East to Soubré
Back out through Zagné and Guiglo, then south-east past Lake Buyo — the Sassandra dammed in 1980 — and down to Soubré. About 255 kilometres and six and a half hours, most of it in the buffer country where the forest edge and the cocoa frontier are the same line. Soubré sits in Nawa, the region that grows more cocoa than any other in the world's largest cocoa-producing country, and it looks like it: sacks stacked outside every third building, and a Sunday market that is essentially a trading floor. The 275-megawatt hydro station on the Sassandra, commissioned in 2017 and the largest in the country, is visible from the road.
Down to San Pédro
A hundred and fifty kilometres south on decent tarmac, three and a half hours, and the trees change back to rubber and oil palm. San Pédro did not exist as a town before 1968: it was built from nothing as the growth pole for a south-west that had no road, no port and very few people, and it opened in 1971. It now moves more cocoa than any other port on earth. You cannot walk into it, but the corniche gives you the gantries and the bulk sheds, and there are quiet beaches immediately west of town. Almost nobody in San Pédro is from San Pédro: Kroumen and Bakwé villages were here first, and everyone since — Baoulé, Burkinabè, Malians — came for the cocoa frontier inland and stayed for the wage work on the quay.
The coast road to Grand-Lahou
The long way home along the côtière: San Pédro to Sassandra in two and a half hours, then a further 160 kilometres east, about six hours in all with stops and some of it still laterite. Break at Sassandra, which the Portuguese named and the French used as a wharf port until San Pédro made it redundant — the old warehouses are on the river bank and the fishing pirogues come in below them. Sleep at Grand-Lahou, which is the new town. The old one is across the water.
Lahou-Kpanda, then Abidjan
Take a pirogue across the mouth of the Bandama to Lahou-Kpanda, the original Grand-Lahou, which has been abandoned to the sea in stages since the 1970s. There is a ruined mission, a cemetery going into the water and a few dozen people still living among the remains of a town that had a customs post, a wharf and a lighthouse. Then back to the road and 145 kilometres east through Dabou to Abidjan, about three hours — the last of it over the lagoon that all of this has been about.
Good to know
Almost everyone outside ECOWAS needs a visa and the mechanism is unusual: you pre-enrol online before travelling, pay around €73, and the visa itself is issued at Félix-Houphouët-Boigny airport in Abidjan against the receipt. That only works if you arrive by air at Abidjan — coming overland from Ghana, Liberia, Guinea, Mali or Burkina Faso means a visa obtained from an embassy in advance, and people are turned back at land posts for assuming otherwise. A yellow fever certificate is not conditional here: it is required of every traveller aged nine months and over, it is checked on arrival, and since 2016 it is valid for life with no booster. Malaria is year-round and countrywide, Abidjan included, and the west around Man and Taï is the wettest part of a wet country — take prophylaxis for the whole fourteen days rather than for the forest section. The currency is the West African CFA franc, pegged to the euro at 655.957, so conversion is arithmetic rather than guesswork; cards work in Abidjan hotels and almost nowhere else, and the country actually pays for things with mobile money (Orange Money, MTN, Wave), so get a SIM at the airport. Driving is on the right. The A3 motorway from Abidjan to Yamoussoukro is genuinely good and tolled, and tarmac continues through Daloa and Duékoué to Man and down to San Pédro; west and south of Guiglo it is laterite, which is why this route needs high clearance and four-wheel drive rather than merely wanting it. Self-drive is legal with an International Driving Permit and almost nobody does it — checkpoints are frequent and conducted in French, and a local driver turns each one into thirty seconds. Do not drive at night anywhere: unlit lorries and no hard shoulder are the single largest risk on the trip. The south has two wet seasons, roughly May to July and again in October and November, with a drier gap in August; the laterite in the west goes first and the Taï road can be a genuine problem in June. December to February is the harmattan, dusty and hazy but the easiest driving. This route deliberately stops at Yamoussoukro and does not go north. Foreign ministries advise against travel in a strip along the Mali and Burkina Faso borders following jihadist attacks that began with the assault on the army post at Kafolo in June 2020, in which fourteen soldiers were killed, and continued through 2021; Comoé National Park, the largest protected area in West Africa, sits in that corner, as do several of the Sudanese-style mosques inscribed by UNESCO in 2021. Korhogo and the Senufo country are further south and normally open, but check your government's advice the week you travel rather than the month you book. In the south the reference point is Grand-Bassam, where gunmen attacked three beach hotels on 13 March 2016 and killed nineteen people; AQIM claimed it, there has been no repeat, and the beach is visibly policed. Taï is not a drop-in park: permits and compulsory guides go through the Office Ivoirien des Parcs et Réserves and should be arranged from Abidjan before you set off, because turning up at the gate is how people lose two days. Elections are the country's recurring flashpoint — the disputed 2010 presidential result ended in a short civil war and the 2020 vote produced weeks of deadly unrest — so look at the electoral calendar before booking. French is the working language and there is very little English outside Abidjan hotels; Dioula does the rest of the work in markets. Do not photograph the ports, bridges, military or the presidential palace at Yamoussoukro.
Shorter or longer?
Add four days from Yamoussoukro: Katiola for its potters, then Korhogo, the Fakaha painters who make the toiles de Korhogo, and the sacred wood at Lataha. Korhogo sits well south of the border strip that advisories cover. The northern mosques at Tengréla and Kaouara do not — Tengréla sits a few kilometres from Mali and Kaouara about the same from Burkina Faso, and the same advice that keeps Comoé off this route keeps them off it too.
Abidjan, Grand-Bassam, Assinie, Yamoussoukro and Grand-Lahou, all of it on tarmac and none of it more than four hours from the capital. Keeps the canal, the colonial coast, the basilica and the drowned town; cuts Man, Taï and the entire west, which is also most of the driving and most of the cost.