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10 Days 9 Nights
Daily Tour
Unlimited
English
10 days · Freetown, Bunce Island, Monrovia, Providence Island · from $3,290 per person
If your family is Gullah or Geechee — Charleston, Savannah, the Sea Islands — your ancestors most likely did not leave from Ghana. They left from here. South Carolina rice planters specifically sought captives from the Rice Coast because they already knew how to grow it. Bunce Island was the supplier.
An hour up the Sierra Leone River, the ruins of the British slave castle still stand in the bush — the fort, the cells, the graves. It is the single most direct ancestral site for Gullah-Geechee families anywhere in Africa, and almost nobody brings groups here. We do, with a Sierra Leonean historian who works on the Gullah connection.
The other half of the story: the republic founded by free and formerly enslaved African Americans who returned in 1822. Providence Island in Monrovia is where they landed. It is a complicated history and we do not flatten it — you will hear from Liberian historians about what the settlement meant for the people already living there.
Freetown and King’s Yard Gate, where liberated Africans were brought ashore. The Cotton Tree and the Sierra Leone National Museum. Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary. Two days on the Freetown Peninsula beaches, which are among the best in West Africa and almost empty.
Included: 9 nights accommodation, daily breakfast and 7 dinners, Freetown–Monrovia flight, all ground transport, boat charter to Bunce Island, historian guides, all entrances, airport transfers.
Not included: international flights, visas, insurance, gratuities.
Arrival at Lungi, water taxi across the estuary to Freetown, welcome dinner and orientation.
King's Yard Gate, the Cotton Tree, the National Museum, and the Krio settler quarter with a local historian.
Boat up the Sierra Leone River to Bunce Island. A full guided morning in the ruins, with time set aside for reflection and libation. Return late afternoon.
Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in the morning, then River Number Two beach for the afternoon.
Overland to Bo, visiting a Mende village and a traditional weaving cooperative.
Return to the coast, free afternoon, evening group discussion with a Gullah-Geechee heritage researcher.
Morning flight to Liberia. Afternoon orientation drive through Monrovia.
The landing site of the 1822 settlers, the National Museum of Liberia, and a session with Liberian historians on the settler republic.
Day trip to Robertsport, Liberia's surf coast and fishing communities. Farewell dinner in Monrovia.
Breakfast and transfer to Roberts International Airport.
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