Lonely Planet West Africa ** Read and Referred to before Ghana, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Sao Tome e Principe trips in 2022

Not very accurate as far as I could tell. The real reason I'm giving this such a bad rating is the nasty things they said about the country I lived in during the Peace Corps. They called Mauritania the place to avoid..the pits. Okay, so it is the pits and a place to avoid, but still there are positive things to say about it. Especially since they said good thing about Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cote D'Ivoire, which are all war-torn hellholes.

I think I got this one the year before a new edition came out. The Lonely Planet guides to less-traveled third-world locales (e.g. West Africa) can be sadly deficient once they reach 4 and 5 years old.

Solid input for planning our trip to Ghana - Burkina Faso - Mali

This book is a useful resource for planning my trip to West Africa.

Having visited Ghana and Nigeria, I found the chapters on these countries to be fairly comprehensive. My only criticism was that some of the websites listed in the book were no longer active.

I still hope to take in Mali, Benin, Togo and Cameroon on future trips.

Too out of date to be useful, particularly after Covid.

I usually get a lot from Lonely Planet guides. This one I found to be lacking. Some of the information was helpful, but I also found more dischord than usual between reality and Lonely Planet representation. That said, I only used the section of the book about Ghana.

The only West Africa tour book (DK does not have one)

I've only "thoroughly" explored this for Mali and Senegal, and for a guide book it's great. Things in every backwater that surely cannot have a thing to see or do, reliable and varied food suggestions, and sleeping on every budget. You really can do all your planning directly out of a Lonely Planet guide, which I knew already and really appreciate. Their 3-day, 1-week, 2-week, etc prioritized itineraries are spot on, and I taught myself basic getting-around Amharic out of the language guide for Ethiopia a few years ago.

What inspired me to write a review of this book, however, was when my partner and I were sitting around a table in the Siné-Saloum Delta in Senegal and he started reading the short country histories at the start of each chapter. In the span of an hour or two of reading and talking, he--someone who had never studied West Africa or read much about it, on is first visit to the region-- got a thorough introduction to the people, cultures, art, colonial histories, and recent wars of a large handful of individual countries, each given space and depth, respect in its turn. Impressed, I read the 150 pages of background materials in the front and back of the book, and will try to read the introductions to the rest of the West African countries (years studying and some time living in the region and I still know nothing about Togo except that Mali's football team should and can crush them). Overview-level but such a diverse choice of information to summarize, and a million book recommendations for further reading on everything (including photo books for art and a ton of literature I've never heard of, which proved very helpful in the African Lit section of a Dakar bookstore as I stared at a wall of West African authors and was overwhelmed by the newly accesessible francophone world opening up because of improving language skills and the plummeting sadness of the lack of good bookstores [that I've heard of] in Bamako, which is what 'imports' are for, I guess, thank you Senegal vacay!). My only complaint is the health section, where they chose to list off a terrifying array of tropical diseases at the expense of foregrounding the basic but vital actions one can take to avoid and treat most of them at once. I would have moved the health section to the front, as well, since travelers could easily miss it tucked in the back but you really should not attempt travel in West Africa without a solid understanding of the mechanisms of spread of water- and food-born illnesses and malaria.

Overall, it's just really well done, much more than a travel guide, this book enables you to be informed, culturally sensitive, and adventurous without being totally blind.