I spent about a week in Mauritania, visiting the cities of Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, Zouerate, and a bunch of small towns over the course of multiple 10+ hour car rides and a train ride. As usual, these are my notes on my experiences and various rabbit holes.
I spent eight days in The Gambia, visiting Banjul, Serrekunda, Georgetown, and driving most of the length of this small country.
I travelled through Benin for about 12 days, visiting Cotonou, Porto Novo, Abomey, Ouidah, and Grand Popo. I spent a decent chunk of my time there writing about Nigeria, so I didn’t dig into Benin quite as much and this piece will be shorter than others.
I want to thank Chris Quintero for all his help on my Nigeria/West Africa trip. If you’re interested in going to Nigeria, definitely check out his guide.
I spent 12 days in Nigeria, and saw the cities of Lagos, Kano, Ibadan, and Abeokuta. Even compared to my other travel writing, I have barely scratched the surface of Nigeria, but these are my notes on what I saw and various historical rabbit holes I went down.
My first big secondary source is Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence, which gives a phenomenal overview of a huge topic with exactly the right amount of summary and detail.
My other big secondary source is Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon which is narrower in scope, but somehow even better at storytelling history.
I also want to give a special thanks to the people who hosted me in Lagos and the person who connected me to them. The trip wouldn’t have been possible without them.
Edits – Various comments based on feedback.
In August, I spent a week in Saudi Arabia. I started in Jeddah, drove to Taif, drove to Abha, and then drove 600 miles to Riyadh. I wanted to go to Mecca and Medina, but as a non-Muslim, it’s haram (at least for part of Medina).
Compared to my other travel writings, this one has a lot more on the history, politics, and economics of its subject. Saudi Arabia has been one of my top travel destinations for years because it’s one of the most unusual countries in the world and it’s currently undergoing a massive transformation. Four years ago, despite possessing a per capita wealth level comparable to Western Europe, Saudi Arabia had:
Today, all of this stuff is gone. Most Westerners could witness the change with their own eyes in 2019 when Saudi Arabia began issuing tourist visas for the first time. Other restrictions, including complete alcohol prohibition and a ban on any religious buildings besides Sunni mosques (there are a few Shia mosques), remain.
I spent almost two months traveling through the Balkans. In order, I went through:
I had already been to Greece and Slovenia, so I skipped them this trip.
This is too many countries for me to write a “Notes On” post for each of them (I started trying with Moldova, but stopped), so I combined it all into one big Balkans post. Given the many generalizations I make about a wide swath of people and countries, take my observations as sort-of-kidding-sort-of-serious, and generally more facetious than usual.
I spent most of April and some of May traveling around Ukraine, visiting the cities of Uzhgorod, Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odessa.
As with my other travels, I’ll write down thoughts and observations from my experiences, conversations, and research that I found interesting. I want to say upfront that I don’t think I have any brilliant insights on Ukraine or the war. If you consider yourself fairly unknowledgeable about the war (like I was before going to Ukraine), hopefully you’ll come away with a better understanding of the nature of the conflict and what it’s like on the ground.
I spent eight days in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, primarily in and around the cities of Cancun, Valladolid, and Merida.
I spent eight days in the Dominican Republic, covering Santo Domingo (the capital), Puerto Plata, Sosua, and Jarabacoa. As with my other travel notes, I’ll try to avoid generic travel blogging stuff and focus on anything unusual I experienced or learned.
I spent one week in Panama this summer. As with Spain and Peru, I took notes while I was there and will try to summarize the most interesting experiences and things I learned in this post. Unfortunately, I think I’m a bit less detailed on Panama than the other two because most of what I did was hike through jungles, which is amazing and highly recommended, but I don’t have much to say about it.
Matt Lakeman 