01 Eighty-eight islands and a million birds
It is worth starting with what this is not. Bissau, the capital, is seen in a couple of days: it has no monumental ensemble, no museums to fill an afternoon and no scene that justifies staying. If the trip ends in the city, the trip has been left half done. What brings people here is opposite, across the water.
The combination is what makes this destination singular: it is not merely a beautiful archipelago, it is an archipelago with a social organisation of its own — four matrilineal clans, communal land management — that is recognised as one of the reasons the environment has reached the present in the state it is in.
02 The turtles
The archipelago's most emphatic figure is the one for the green turtle: these islands are the most important nesting site in the whole of West Africa. The sand beaches of a few small islands concentrate most of the nests, and the ensemble is protected precisely because of that.
The most important green turtle nesting site in West Africa is in a country almost nobody visits, a few hours by boat from its capital.
It is worth saying plainly: the most sensitive nesting areas are protected and access is restricted or requires a permit and an escort. This is not an open spectacle or an outing you book at the quayside. Anyone looking for guarantees, or unwilling to accept that protection comes ahead of visiting, will be disappointed.
Alongside the turtles sits the other major argument: birds. The archipelago is West Africa's second site for migratory species, with around a million birds a year using the shallows and the mudflats exposed by the tide. For anyone travelling with binoculars, that alone justifies the trip.
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03 Travelling with the tide
The logistics of this trip come down to one word: tide. The channels between the islands are shallow and the mudflats are uncovered and covered several times a day, so boat departures are organised not by timetable but by water level. Waiting half a day for it to rise is normal.
There are no bridges, no airports on the islands and on most of them no roads. You arrive by boat from Bissau and hop from island to island by pirogue. That means the itinerary cannot be rigid and that missing a connection costs a whole day, not an hour.
04 How the trip is put together
Eight to ten days is the minimum sensible measure, and it is best not to fill them. Two days for the capital and the arrangements, and the rest for two or three islands, always allowing a spare day in case the boat does not run. Trying four islands in a week is the surest way to spend the trip waiting on a quay.
The month has a clear answer: November to April. It is the dry season — December 0.2 millimetres, January 0.1, February and March 0.0 — and it is when the sea is calm and the crossings are reliable. From July to September 371, 468 and 364 millimetres fall, and the archipelago stops being normally accessible.
And the warning that decides it, which here is harsher than for almost any other destination in this series. Guinea-Bissau receives very few travellers and has nothing prepared for them: lodging on the islands is very basic, electricity is limited, there is no medical assistance nearby and almost nothing can be booked in advance from abroad.
If that strikes you as a reasonable price for travelling eighty-eight protected islands where half a region's green turtles nest and where you will not meet another traveller, this is one of the most extraordinary destinations left on Africa's Atlantic coast. If not, almost anywhere else will treat you better.
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