Australian travelers on this Intrepid trip: sort your visa before you do anything else

If you're Australian and looking at this trip, please read this before you book flights. The itinerary crosses between Senegal and Gambia four times. Each time you re-enter Senegal you need a valid visa. The standard Senegalese e-visa is single entry, so it's done after your first crossing back. Useless for the rest of the trip. You need a multi-entry visa. Intrepid doesn't mention this anywhere in their booking or pre-departure materials. The Senegalese e-visa portal won't flag it either, their support team will happily send you down the wrong path. Getting the multi-entry visa means physically posting your passport to the Senegalese embassy in Tokyo along with a letter of invitation, supporting documents, application form and the fee. No online option. Give yourself at least a month. The letter of invitation has to come from the ground operator running the tour. On my trip it arrived eleven working days before departure, which happened to fall over a long weekend. Impossible to act on in time. The Gambia border posts don't issue Senegalese visas on arrival. The embassy in Banjul does but only twice a week. I made it through because our tour leader knew people. Most travelers in that situation wouldn't. The trip is genuinely worth doing. Just treat the visa as step one, not something to sort later. Don't wait for Intrepid to remind you because they won't.