Police checkpoints in Guinea-Bissau: two triangles and a stamp that costs money

The road from the Senegal border to Bissau is where you learn the rules,
and the rules are mostly about equipment.

We were stopped repeatedly on that stretch. Every time, the same short list:
the car's temporary import paper, a fire extinguisher, a first aid kit, and
warning triangles. Not a triangle. Two triangles. That detail came up often
enough to stop being a coincidence, and a car that produces both without
hunting for them ends the conversation early.

The import paper attracted a variation. At one stop we were told it needed a
stamp, and that the stamp cost money. It is a neat piece of improvisation:
the document is genuine, the requirement is not, and disputing it costs more
of your afternoon than paying would. That particular invention stopped once
we were further from the border, which tells you what it was.

None of this was frightening. It was a negotiation, repeated, with people
whose main interest in a foreign car was what a foreign car might be
persuaded to hand over. We were carrying everything on the list, we had
time, and we treated each stop as a test of their patience rather than ours.
That is a much easier posture to hold when the kit is genuinely in the boot.

So: carry the extinguisher, carry the kit, carry two triangles, and keep the
vehicle paperwork somewhere you can reach without emptying the car. Expect
several stops before the capital and fewer after it.

The roads improve as you get closer to Bissau. So, oddly, does the reception.