Côte d'Ivoire: Abidjan, Grand-Bassam and the Yamoussoukro basilica

The first thing Abidjan gave me was bass. I'd barely dropped my bag when coupé-décalé started thumping out of a battered speaker across the street, and the whole block seemed to lean into it — a woman frying plantain, two guys arguing over a moto, a kid dancing without quite meaning to. I'd read the brochure lines: economic capital, the New York of West Africa, all towers and traffic. None of that prepared me for how alive it felt at street level, how the city wears its money and its noise and its lagoon all at once.

I gave myself just over a week, and I let it sprawl: a few days in Abidjan to find my footing, an easy run east to Grand-Bassam and its faded colonial bones, then the long road inland to Yamoussoukro to stand under a basilica I genuinely couldn't picture until I was there. Côte d'Ivoire is the world's biggest cocoa producer, French-speaking, paid in CFA francs, and far more layered than the single story usually told about it. I came to listen, eat well, and let the maquis do the talking.

Abidjan, lagoon city

Abidjan is built around the Ébrié lagoon, and you feel it everywhere — the water cutting between districts, the bridges stitching them back together. I started on the Plateau, the business heart, where glass towers and the bold concrete spire of Saint Paul's Cathedral rise over a grid that empties strangely on Sundays. Then I crossed to Treichville for the markets, a dense, generous tangle of fabric and spice and fish, and to Cocody for a slower, leafier version of the city. Everywhere, the same soundtrack: coupé-décalé leaking from shops and taxis, the genre this city basically invented and still owns.

But the real Abidjan, for me, happened in the maquis — those open-air, no-fuss eateries where you sit on plastic chairs under a tarp and eat with your hands. I worked my way through attiéké, the grated cassava couscous that comes with almost everything, and garba, that brilliant cheap plate of attiéké with fried tuna that students live on. Grilled fish, a cold drink, the lagoon somewhere behind the heat haze, a table full of strangers becoming less strange by the plate — that's the version of the city I keep returning to in my head.

« Abidjan greeted me in bass, fed me with its hands, and never once pretended to be quiet. »

On the practical side, this is where staying connected is easiest. In Abidjan and the larger towns the signal held up well — fine for maps across the bridges, for messaging, for sorting a taxi or checking which maquis was worth the detour. I'll be honest that it doesn't stay this smooth everywhere, and I'll come to that. But in the city I rarely had to think about it, which is exactly how it should be: there when you reach for it, invisible the rest of the time.

Grand-Bassam, the faded first capital

An hour east of Abidjan, Grand-Bassam is where the country slows right down. It was the first colonial capital, and its old administrative district — the Quartier France, now a UNESCO World Heritage site — is a stretch of crumbling colonial buildings the colour of old paper, pastel facades peeling under the sun, verandas sagging gently into the past. I wandered it slowly in the morning light, half museum, half ghost, the Atlantic breathing a few streets over.

Then the beach took over. Grand-Bassam is where Abidjan comes to exhale at the weekend, and the shoreline fills with grilled fish, cold drinks and that loose, unhurried coastal energy. I want to be plain about one thing the place teaches you: this is a working stretch of ocean with real currents, so I kept to where locals swam and treated the water with respect rather than bravado. Sat with my feet in the sand, fish on a plate, the old town at my back — it was the gentlest day of the trip, and the one I'd repeat first.

The road inland and Yamoussoukro's basilica

Yamoussoukro is the political capital — a planned city of wide, often empty boulevards a few hours inland — and it holds something I still struggle to describe at scale: the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace. Modelled on St Peter's in Rome and counted among the largest churches in the world, it rises out of the savannah like a mirage, an enormous dome over marble and stained glass, set in grounds far too big for the handful of us wandering them. I stood under that dome feeling the particular vertigo of human ambition, and I'll let it stay strange rather than pretend I made sense of it.

Out west, where I didn't make it this time, the land climbs into the green hills and waterfalls around Man — and that's exactly where I'd point anyone with more days than I had. It's also where I'd issue the gentlest warning, because it doubles as a connectivity one: inland, and especially in the mountainous west, the signal gets moody. On the road to Yamoussoukro it came and went, and the further you push from the big towns, the more you should assume stretches with nothing at all.

What I take away

Côte d'Ivoire gave me a country that refuses to be one thing — the bass and bridges of Abidjan, the paper-coloured calm of Grand-Bassam, the impossible dome at Yamoussoukro, all held together by attiéké and a beat. I came braced for a single headline and left with a plateful of contradictions I'd happily go back and eat again. Some places you visit; this one I kept ending up dancing in.

— Malik, somewhere between the lagoon and a plate of garba, still humming.