I'd like to go travel around West Africa for a few months

Dunno about West Africa in general, but Morocco is a fairly cheap country. You can get a good room for $15-40 a night. Most of the hotels are riads, beautiful traditional houses converted to hotels. They're usually family-run and nice and clean.

>>1228541
Care to explain a little bit about your wast africa trip? How did you line up the work?

West Africa is expensive cause its so savage, there isn't the tourism infrastructure like in east Africa. Depends what countries you had in mind as obviously some are more stable.
But from what I have heard from people who went there, you are usually in some compound in a rich gated area and you just don't really go anywhere other than where your work requires.
If you want to stay with locals, you need somebody as an "in" to get you in touch with others and it can snowball from there.

As anyone ever been to Senegal? My French isn't bad and I actually know someone who is from there, studying in my home country.

Also, flights don't look to be to expensive, coming from Europe.

Hotels aren't that expensive; it's just that the places which cater to locals don't have an online presence so you won't find them on booking.com or wherever.
That being said, like the other guy mentioned tourist infrastructure is just overall really shitty in many places so you can't expect to find a hotel at all.

>>1228546
I once stayed in a Moroccan hotel that cost $2. I definitely wished more than once that night that I'd splurged on a riad.

>>1228681
I'm going in two weeks. It's definitely the cheapest sub-Saharan country to access from Europe. Mali and Bissau look more interesting, though, so I'll probably cross some borders while I'm there.

>>1228687
I hope that you will post about your experience in some Africa thread.