Pico Cão Grande

Pico Cão Grande is a needle of black rock that rises straight out of the rainforest of southern São Tomé — six hundred and sixty-three metres above the sea, some three hundred and seventy above the trees at its foot — the plug of a volcano whose cone eroded away and left only the core standing, so sheer that moss and cloud cling to it and only a handful of expert climbers have ever reached the top. It stands inside the Obô natural park, a third of the island of forest where birds live that live nowhere else, and it is seen best from the road that runs down the east coast past the cocoa plantations, the roças, to Roça São João, where the Angolares — descendants, the story says, of a shipwreck of Angolan captives — fish and where a famous chef feeds travellers on what the sea and the garden give; beyond, at the island's southern tip, Porto Alegre and the islet of Rolas, which the equator crosses.

The traveller comes down from São Tomé city in two hours on the coast road, stopping at the plantations on the way, and reaches the viewpoint on the EN2 in the morning, before the cloud that the peak wears most afternoons; walks into the Obô forest with a guide from the park for the birds and the giant begonias; eats the long lunch at Roça São João and stays the night in the old plantation house; goes on to Porto Alegre and crosses in a pirogue to Rolas to stand with one foot in each hemisphere; and, from July to October, takes a boat for the humpback whales that calve off this coast — the needle behind them, on a clear day, like a thing drawn on the sky.

The Guide's honesty: the peak is for looking at, not for climbing — its faces are wet, mossy, overhung and home to snakes, and the few who have climbed it were the best in the world with a week of gear; the cloud is a fact of the south, and the traveller who wants the photograph goes early and is patient; the road is paved and slow, and the south has few beds — the roça and a couple of lodges — so book; the forest walks are muddy and the guides are worth it; São Tomé is small, safe, sleepy and Portuguese-speaking, and its rhythm is 'leve-leve' — slowly, slowly — which is the only way the island works; and the chocolate is the reason to carry an extra bag home.