W National Park is older than any of the three countries that hold it. France decreed it in 1954, and the line it drew ran around the double bend the Niger river makes on all three banks at once. The letter the river writes on the map is the park's name. Independence arrived six years later and cut what had been declared as one thing into three national parks: Niger's, Benin's, Burkina Faso's. They have been putting it back together ever since, listed and managed across the borders as one block, the largest unbroken run of Sudano-Sahelian savanna left in West Africa. It works on one rhythm. The rains come, the Mekrou and the Tapoa fill, floodwater covers the sand tracks and the grass grows over your head. Then the land dries. By March the Mekrou is a ribbon of shallow water across a wide bed of sand between gallery forest and baobabs, and you could sit out an afternoon while everything that had to drink came down to it. None of it is visited now: armed groups have held the interior since 2020, and no operator works the Niger side.
Where the Mekrou empties into the Niger the ground breaks into wetland and rocky hills, and this is the water that never fails, with hippo pods holding its deep channels through the hottest months. On the hard laterite plateaus above, the scrub grows in dark bands that follow the contour with bare crust between them, which from the air you would read as a striped hide. The stripes are plumbing: the bare ground sheds its rain into the thicket downslope, so the bush can only grow in lines. Strangest of all, the African manatee has pushed hundreds of kilometres up the Niger from the coast to graze weed in the quiet backwaters, in the dry middle of West Africa. The borders, though, have never held anything in. The elephants here are most of the elephants West Africa has left, and they cross all three countries as they please, so a whole day could pass without your seeing one.