Pico Basilé

Pico Basilé is the volcano that makes the island of Bioko: three thousand and eleven metres of it rising straight from Malabo's back streets into the cloud, the highest point of Equatorial Guinea and one of the few summits in Africa a car can reach — a paved road climbs from the capital through cocoa and then rainforest to the antennas at the top, where the great statue of the Virgin of Bisila, the island's patroness, looks out over the city, the gulf and, on the clear mornings of the dry season, Mount Cameroon on the mainland thirty-two kilometres away. Bioko is Spanish-speaking, the only such island in Africa, and its geography is a staircase: Malabo and its neo-Gothic cathedral of 1916 at the northern tip; the summit; the highland valley of Moka in the south at fourteen hundred metres, with its crater lake Biao and the research station of the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program; the Gran Caldera de Luba, a scientific reserve of virgin forest that holds seven species of monkey — the drill among them — found in this density nowhere else; and Ureca on the south coast, the wettest village in Africa, where the leatherbacks and three other turtles come ashore to nest from November to February.

The traveller flies into Malabo, walks the old Spanish town — the cathedral, the Casa Verde, the seafront — and arranges the permit for the summit through a hotel or a guide, which takes a day of patience; drives up Pico Basilé early, before the cloud closes at ten, for the shrine, the antennas and the view; goes south by the road to Moka for a night in the cool, the walk to the lake and the waterfalls, and the station's guides who know the monkeys' calls; and, with two days more and the season right, drops to Ureca for the beach at night with the turtle patrols, or to Luba for the bay. The table is Spanish-African: pepesup, sukuk, grilled fish, and a coffee on the plaza that could be anywhere in the old empire and is nowhere but here.

The Guide's honesty, gently: Equatorial Guinea asks papers at every door — the visa is homework, the permit for the summit is real and asked for at the checkpoint, the roads have police controls, and photographs of anything official — the palace, the port, the airport, the barracks — are forbidden and enforced —; the prudent traveller checks conditions with their chancellery, carries a copy of every document, and travels with a guide who knows which door to knock on; the country is expensive, the internet is slow, and the cash is CFA; the south's roads wash out in the rains; and the reward is an island that almost nobody visits — a volcano with a road to the top, a caldera of monkeys, a village of turtles, and Spanish spoken under the ceibas — which the Guide sails informed, and gladly.