Howard and I have just returned from a “last minute” 10 day West African cruise,sailing from Tenerife to Banjul in Gambia and Dakar in Senegal before visiting several of the Cape Verde Islands, on the return journey to Tenerife.

The trip brought back memories of  living in Freetown in Sierra Leone when Howard was working for Standard Chartered Bank in the early nineties and where , sadly, living conditions in most West African states has changed little over the past thirty years.

The above photograph was taken with schoolchildren in the Cape Verde Islands, a former Portugese colony, which unlike the West African mainland, appear to have benefited from  Tourism to a far greater extent.