Robertsport

Robertsport is a town of wooden houses on a forested cape at the far west of Liberia, where Lake Piso — the country's largest lagoon, all mangroves and islands and Vai fishermen — opens into the Atlantic, and where, along the beach south of the cape, the ocean folds over rock and sand into a series of long, slow left-hand point breaks that a documentary called Sliding Liberia showed the world in 2008: Fisherman's Point, Cotton Trees under the huge kapoks, Cassava Point, Shipwrecks. Founded by Americo-Liberian settlers in the 1850s and named for the republic's first president, it kept its Episcopal church and its clapboard houses through the wars, and lives now on fishing, on the lake and on the surfers who sleep in the tents of Nana's Lodge above the sand and learn from the boys of the community surf club. Cape Mount rises behind, three hundred metres of forest; the Sierra Leone border is thirty kilometres up the coast, and Monrovia three hours the other way.

The traveller comes from Monrovia in a hired car or a shared taxi — paved most of the way, then dirt — and takes a tent at Nana's or a room in the town; surfs Cotton Trees at first light, when the wave is longest and the local kids are already out; walks the town for the church, the kapoks and the old houses, and buys fish where the canoes come in; crosses to the lake for a canoe through the mangroves to the islands and a Vai village; climbs into the forest of Cape Mount for the view of the cape between the two waters; and, in the evening, sits on the beach with the club and whatever the day's boat brought, and does it again tomorrow — because Robertsport is a place to stay, not to see.

The Guide's honesty: Liberia is one of the poorest countries on Earth and the peninsula's ease is relative — the road is bad after Klay and impassable in the rains, the lodges are simple, the power is solar and generators, and cash is the only money; the surf is world-class for its length and gentle for its size, and the club welcomes beginners; the sea has currents and no lifeguards; malaria is real — sleep under the net; the town's history, from the settlers to the wars, is complicated and the people who lived it are the ones to ask, gently; the border to Sierra Leone is crossable and slow; and the traveller who comes for the wave and stays for the town, the lake and the boys of the surf club has understood the cape.