Monrovia, the surf points and the lagoon at Robertsport, the rubber concession at Harbel that has been running since 1926, the ore terminal at Buchanan — then inland along the one continuously paved road in the country to Gbarnga, Ganta and the mining town of Yekepa under the Nimba ridge, where the border with Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire runs along the top of the mountain.
Monrovia
Arrive at Roberts International, which is fifty kilometres out of town at Harbel and takes an hour and a half to leave behind in traffic. Give the afternoon to Providence Island, the sandbank in the Mesurado estuary where the first settlers from the American Colonization Society came ashore in 1822 after being refused a landing further west — the site is being restored and the guides are worth taking. Then the National Museum on Broad Street, which lost most of its collection to looting during the war and says so plainly on the labels.
Ducor Hill, Waterside and the Freeport
Up to the Ducor, the eight-storey hotel that opened in 1960 as the smartest address in West Africa, was stripped to the concrete in the 1990s and still stands empty on the highest ground in the city; access depends on who is at the gate and a small negotiated fee. Below it Waterside market runs down to the Mesurado, and beyond that West Point, a peninsula holding tens of thousands of people that was sealed off by the army for ten days during the Ebola epidemic in August 2014 — go with someone who lives there or not at all. Finish at the Centennial Memorial Pavilion on Ashmun Street, where presidents are inaugurated, and the Masonic Temple above it.
North-west to Robertsport
Out on the Bo Waterside highway, with a detour north at Klay to Tubmanburg, where the Bomi Hills mine took the first iron ore Liberia ever exported and the worked-out pit has filled with water. Then west again and off the tarmac for the last stretch to Robertsport, a small county capital sitting on the sand spit between the Atlantic and Lake Piso, with clapboard houses from the Americo-Liberian settlement period rotting quietly under the mango trees.
Lake Piso and the points
Robertsport has five point breaks along a couple of kilometres of shoreline, three of them consistently surfable — Fisherman's Point closest to town, then Cotton Trees and Cassava Point. The waves are long lefts that break over sand and cobble, the local club rents boards and teaches, and the swell is biggest between roughly April and October, which is also the wet season. Behind the spit, Lake Piso is a brackish lagoon and a Ramsar site: hire a canoe from the fishing beach for the morning. The beach itself belongs to a Fanti community from coastal Ghana whose families have fished this water for generations, and the smoking ovens are the reason the town smells of fish before it smells of anything else.
Back east to the rubber
The long transfer day, and it goes through Monrovia because there is no other way round. Aim to be past the city by early afternoon and out to Harbel, the plantation town Harvey Firestone named after himself and his wife Idabelle. What you drive through for the next half hour is the largest contiguous rubber farm in the world — planted in rows on a grid, tapped before dawn, latex carried in buckets to collection points and on to the factory. The people doing that work to a daily tapping quota, and the weight of the quota — heavy enough that tappers have brought their families out to help meet it — is what years of child-labour complaints and a US federal case against Firestone were about. Ask at the gate before photographing anything; this is private land with its own police force.
Marshall, then down the coast to Buchanan
Marshall sits where the Farmington and Junk rivers meet the sea, a half-hour off the highway, and a boatman will run you through the mangroves to the sandbar. Then south on the paved coast road to Buchanan, Liberia's second port: a grid of streets laid out by settlers in the 1830s, a Fanti fishing quarter, long empty beaches with a serious undertow, and the ore terminal at the north end of the bay — which is where the Nimba railway ends and is loading again.
Inland to Gbarnga
North along the highway and inland at the Roberts Field junction — Kakata, Salala, then Bong County, and the vegetation thickens as the coast drops behind. Gbarnga is the country's main inland town and was Charles Taylor's wartime capital from 1990, run as a parallel state with its own currency and radio station while the government held little more than central Monrovia. Nothing marks it. Cuttington University, founded in 1889 and reopened after the war, is fifteen minutes back down the road at Suakoko.
Kpatawee
Half an hour west towards Totota, then off the tarmac onto a rutted track to the falls at Kpatawee — two of them, a couple of kilometres apart, dropping into pools you can swim in, inside a Ramsar-listed wetland of about 835 hectares. It is the closest thing Liberia has to a domestic tourist site and it is busy at weekends and empty midweek. Guides from the surrounding villages have been trained to work it; take one, and pay the community fee at the entrance rather than negotiating at the water.
Ganta, Sanniquellie and up to Yekepa
East to Ganta on the Guinea border, the busiest trading town in the interior and the place to eat before the last stretch. Then north through Sanniquellie — where Tubman, Nkrumah and Sékou Touré met in July 1959 and drafted the declaration that fed into the founding of the Organisation of African Unity four years later — and up into the hills to Yekepa, at around five hundred metres, where the temperature finally drops.
The mountain
The Nimba range runs north-east along the frontier, and the crest of it is the border: stand on the ridge and Guinea is on one side, Côte d'Ivoire beyond the shoulder, Liberia behind you. The high point of the whole massif, Mount Richard-Molard at 1,752 metres, is not in Liberia at all — it stands on the Guinea–Côte d'Ivoire border and is the summit of both those countries. The Liberian crest runs a few hundred metres lower. From Yekepa the walk up through forest onto the montane grassland and back is a long day, and it is not a walk you arrange at the trailhead: the ground between the town and the ridge sits inside the mining concession and the reserve above it is Forestry Development Authority land, so the guide, the reserve permit and the concession's permission are all fixed in advance, in the Yekepa offices, not on the morning. Start at first light and carry water, because there is none on the ridge. Stay with the guide near the top: the crest is an international frontier and the far side of it is another country's business.
East Nimba, the pit and the company town
The East Nimba Nature Reserve was gazetted in 2003 across about 11,500 hectares. It holds western chimpanzee and Jentink's duiker — Upper Guinean forest animals in trouble across their whole range rather than anything peculiar to this mountain — and two that really do live on this massif and almost nowhere else: the Nimba otter shrew, and the western Nimba toad, which bears live young instead of laying eggs and is one of the very few amphibians anywhere that does. The Nimba flycatcher is here too and takes its name from the mountain, but it is a bird of the Upper Guinean forest generally, not an endemic of this one. Walk a section of the reserve with a reserve guide. Afterwards, the town. LAMCO, the Liberian-American-Swedish consortium, built Yekepa from nothing in the 1960s with schools, a hospital, a swimming pool and a golf course, and took the top off one mountain; it handed the mine to the state company LIMINCO in 1989, and the war stopped the ore trains the year after. It did not stay stopped — ArcelorMittal took the concession in 2005, rebuilt the railway down to Buchanan and was shipping ore again by 2011. So Yekepa is a working company town rather than a ruin: there is a gate, there are shift changes, and how far you can walk depends on the concession that day. The flooded LAMCO pit above the town, the Blue Lake, is deep, cold and an implausible blue, and people swim in it, in a disused open-cast mine with nobody watching the water.
The long run back
Yekepa to Monrovia is around 350 kilometres and takes the best part of a day even though almost all of it is paved — Ganta, Gbarnga, Salala, Kakata, then the traffic on the way into the capital, which is the slowest part of it. Leave at six. If you have a flight out, sleep in Monrovia rather than trying to make it to Roberts International the same evening.
Good to know
Almost everyone outside ECOWAS needs a visa arranged before boarding. Liberia has moved applications onto the Liberia Immigration Service portal and now also issues an electronic pre-approval that you use to board and exchange for the visa itself on landing at Roberts International, which is the only airport where that works. The system is recent enough that the fee, the processing time and the nationalities it covers have each moved more than once, so confirm the current rules on the LIS portal when you book rather than trusting any figure written a year earlier — including the one in the budget below. A yellow fever certificate is demanded of every arrival, not only of travellers from risk countries, and it is checked at the desk; since 2016 the certificate is valid for life. Malaria is the serious medical issue here — transmission is high, year-round and countrywide, including in Monrovia, and no part of this route is above the mosquitoes. Take prophylaxis, and take the fever seriously if you get one within three months of coming home. The dry season is roughly November to April and it is the only sensible window: Monrovia is one of the wettest capitals on earth, and between May and October the unpaved roads that this route touches at Robertsport and Kpatawee turn to mud while the ones it avoids, in the south-east, become genuinely impassable. Of a road network of roughly 10,600 kilometres, the figure usually quoted for the paved part is under 700 — well under a tenth — and that paved part is essentially the spine this itinerary follows: Monrovia to Bo Waterside, Monrovia to Buchanan, and Monrovia through Gbarnga to Ganta on the Guinea border. Self-drive is not realistic. Hire a vehicle with a driver, which is what everyone including resident foreigners does: the driver knows the police checkpoints, the fuel stops and which pothole is a hole, and the day rate including fuel is not far off what a bare rental would cost. Agree with him on the first day that you do not drive between towns after dark, rather than arguing about it at dusk on the long run back from Yekepa — the highway is unlit and unfenced, it is shared with pedestrians and motorbikes, there is no breakdown recovery outside Monrovia, and the checkpoints are harder work at night. Every long stage in this route is written to start early for that reason. Both the Liberian and the United States dollar are legal tender and circulate side by side; prices are quoted in either, change comes in both, and you should carry clean, unmarked US notes. Cards work at a handful of Monrovia hotels and essentially nowhere else, ATMs are a Monrovia phenomenon, and mobile money on Orange or Lonestar Cell MTN is how ordinary transactions actually settle. Buy a SIM at the airport with your passport. Do not photograph the port, the airport, bridges, military or police premises or checkpoints — the sensitivity is real and the argument is not worth having. The Atlantic surf along this whole coast has a heavy undertow and drownings are common; Robertsport's points are the one stretch with people who can read the water. Sapo National Park, in the south-east, cannot be improvised: permits come from the Forestry Development Authority in Monrovia before you set off, rangers and porters are hired at Greenville or Jalay Town, and the whole thing needs a week of its own in the dry season.
Shorter or longer?
Add six days from Buchanan: down the coastal highway to Greenville, which is rough and dry-season-only, then inland via Juarzon to Jalay Town and the park headquarters. Sapo is Liberia's first national park, gazetted in 1983 and enlarged in 2003 to about 1,800 square kilometres — the largest block of intact Upper Guinean rainforest left in Liberia, and in West Africa second only to Taï across the Ivorian border. Pygmy hippopotamus, forest elephant, chimpanzee. Sort the Forestry Development Authority permits in Monrovia at the start of the trip, not at the gate.
Monrovia, Tubmanburg, Robertsport, then Harbel, Marshall and Buchanan, and back. Keeps the city, the surf, the lagoon and the rubber; drops the whole inland leg to Nimba, which is where most of the driving and most of the cost sit.