São Tomé City

São Tomé sits on an island the equator practically signs: the line crosses the little Ilhéu das Rolas just off the southern tip, so you can stand with a hemisphere under each foot before lunch. The town itself is pastel Portuguese colonial around a bay, running on 'leve-leve' — slow-slow, the national philosophy —, and behind it the island rises into mist forests, abandoned-and-reborn cocoa plantations, and the Cão Grande: a volcanic needle six hundred meters high that looks borrowed from a dream.

The sensible traveller takes the town in a morning — the cathedral, the fort museum, the market's fish-and-banana argument —; then obeys the island: the roças, the grand old plantation houses where the world's finest cocoa grew and excellent chocolate is again being made — taste at the source —; the road south past fishing villages to the Cão Grande viewpoint; and the boat to Rolas to straddle the equator, which is a tourist ritual the Guide endorses without irony.

The Guide's honesty: leve-leve is the timetable — the plane, the boat and the kitchen all obey it: build slack and lower your shoulders —; the roads narrow as the island greens: a driver-guide is worth the dobras; euros are welcome nearly everywhere; malaria prevention is a doctor's conversation; and the chocolate is genuinely world-class — buy it from the makers, and declare nothing else at customs but joy.