Conakry is one long market

People will tell you to go to Madina, the big market in Conakry, and they are not
wrong so much as thinking too small. Guinea's capital does not contain a market.
It behaves like one. The stalls start in the city and simply carry on, out along
the road east, still going at Coyah fifty kilometres later. At no point does
anyone appear to decide that the market is now over.

We found this out the direct way. Driving around one morning, we turned into the
market itself and kept going, because within about thirty seconds there was
nowhere to turn around. We were the only car in there. Everything else on wheels
was a motorbike, and everything else was a person. So we committed, moved at the
speed of the crowd letting us through, and were absurdly relieved when the road
widened out again.

The rest of the city is thinner than the guidebooks suggest. We went to see the
Grande Mosquée Fayçal and looked at it through the gates, which is as far as we
were allowed – impressive from there, and that was that. We walked, and found
fishermen and their boats pulled up where the city meets the Atlantic. That is
honestly most of it.

Then we tried to leave, which took the rest of the day. A jam near Kindia stopped
us dead. We followed other cars onto the wrong side of the road until that
blocked too, then took a local's offer to guide us through a village – small
roads and alleyways at walking pace for the better part of an hour, emerging
about five hundred metres further along than where we had started, by which time
the jam had begun moving without us.

A hundred and thirty kilometres to the border took seven hours. The market, in
its way, sees you out.