Kara

The town itself is pleasant rather than remarkable — low, spacious, easy to walk, with a good market, a scattering of places to eat, and the north's most reliable accommodation. Its value is as a base and as a first taste of the north: this is where the country's grain food, its Islamic and traditional practice and its slower rhythm are all comfortably accessible. The reason to give the area a full day is what surrounds it. The Kabye massif rises immediately around the town, and its slopes have been farmed for centuries in stone-walled terraces that follow the contours up entire hillsides — a landscape built by hand, still worked by hand, and utterly unlike the flat cassava country of the coast. Villages sit among the terraces in compounds of round buildings with conical thatch, granaries raised on stones, and paths threading between them. Walking it with a guide from one of the villages is the single best half-day in the region: it costs almost nothing, the walking is moderate, and the terracing is one of those landscapes that becomes more impressive the longer someone explains it to you.

For a week or so each July, the villages around Kara hold Evala, the wrestling that marks the initiation of young Kabye men into adulthood. It is the largest domestic event in northern Togo: bouts are held in village arenas over successive days, families return from across the country, drumming and processions run alongside, and the whole region turns out. Visitors are not unwelcome and the atmosphere is open and good-humoured, but it is an initiation rather than a sporting fixture arranged for spectators, and the difference matters. Go with someone local who can tell you which village is wrestling on which day, stand where you are put, ask before filming, and do not treat the participants as a photo subject — they are in the middle of the most significant week of their lives. Beyond the wrestling itself there is a great deal to watch in the preparation and the aftermath, much of which is not for outsiders to see, and accepting that gracefully is the whole of what is asked of you. Practically: the month is July, the days move, accommodation in and around the town fills weeks ahead, and it is the one time of year to book rather than arrive.

West of the main highway, the country around Bassar was for centuries one of the significant iron-producing areas of this part of West Africa — ore smelted in clay furnaces, worked into tools and blades, and traded across a wide region. The industry is long past its height, but the heritage is visible and visitable: furnace remains on the hillsides, smiths still working forges in the town, and local guides who can walk you through what the process involved and where the ore came from. It is a specialist stop rather than a headline one, and it is genuinely interesting for anyone who likes the history of how things were made. Back on the main road, the highway between the centre and the north passes through the Aledjo cleft — a narrow cutting where the route squeezes through a gap in a rock ridge with walls rising on both sides, tight enough that traffic slows to a crawl and dramatic enough that almost everyone stops to look. It is a two-minute landmark on a long drive and worth knowing about in advance so you do not blink and miss it. What the rest of that drive asks of you — the hours, the shared vehicles and the checkpoints — is worth settling before you set out.

From Kara the highway runs on north through Niamtougou, whose weekly market is one of the biggest in the region and whose airstrip is the north's air link, and then to Kandé, the small town where the road east towards the Benin border turns off. That turning is the way in to Koutammakou, the UNESCO landscape of two-storey earth tower houses that is the reason most visitors come this far, and a place where how you visit matters as much as whether you do. Between Kandé and the border with the far north lies Kéran National Park, straddling the river of the same name: on paper a wildlife reserve, in practice a lightly protected stretch of savanna and gallery forest whose large mammals have thinned severely and whose birdlife remains genuinely good. Treat it as landscape and birding rather than as a safari and it repays a slow morning. The road north of here climbs gradually towards the drier savanna, and the change in the country over that stretch — fewer trees, harder light, longer views — is the last of Togo's transitions.