Equatorial Guinea

Arrive at Malabo International on Bioko, and meet the fixer who will make the rest of the week possible. The afternoon walks the old Spanish town, which is small and startling: Santa Isabel Cathedral with its neo-Gothic twin towers over the Plaza de la Independencia, the wrought-iron balconies of the colonial streets, the Casa Verde, and the Paseo Marítimo along the harbour the British built. A first briefing over dinner on what may and may not be photographed here, which matters more than it does in most places.

Up the mountain that is the island. The road climbs from sea level through banana and cocoa smallholdings into montane forest and then into permanent cloud, with a permit checked at the military post partway up. Along the way there are endemic birds the guides will stop for, the Virgen de Bisila shrine on the shoulder, and, if the morning is one of the clear ones, the view north across the strait to Mount Cameroon standing out of the sea. Back down for the afternoon in Malabo and the market at Semu.

South across the island to Moka at 1,400 metres, where the climate changes completely: cool grassland, cloud forest and the Bubi villages that have farmed this plateau for centuries. The day walks into the Biao caldera, a crater lake ringed with primary forest, on a rough trail with local guides; this is where Bioko's primates actually are, and drills, black colobus and Preuss's monkeys are all realistic sightings. Night in the highlands, which is cold enough for a jacket and a fire.

The long push to the southern tip of the island, on a track that gives out and becomes a walk through forest to the coast. Ureca takes something like ten metres of rain a year, the greenest and most saturated place on the continent, and the black-sand beaches below it are a major nesting ground for four species of sea turtle. From November to February the nesting is nightly and the leatherbacks are extraordinary; outside that window it is the walk, the waterfalls straight into the sea, and a coastline nobody photographs. Back to Malabo in the evening.

The morning flight south across the Gulf of Guinea to Bata, the country's largest city and the capital of its mainland third. It is a wholly different place from Malabo: hotter, flatter, Fang-speaking, and strung along a seafront promenade that is genuinely one of the pleasant surprises of West Africa. The afternoon covers the cathedral, the Torre de la Libertad, the Mondoasi market and the fishing beach, and the evening is on the paseo, where the whole city walks at sunset.

Inland to Monte Alén, two thousand square kilometres of primary Congo Basin rainforest that holds forest elephant, western lowland gorilla, chimpanzee and mandrill, and that sees a handful of visitors a year. You walk the forest with park guides: the Río Laña, the canopy and the sheer density of it, the tracks and the sounds rather than guaranteed sightings, because this is unhabituated forest and nobody should promise you a gorilla. On the way back, the surreal new jungle capital at Ciudad de la Paz. Night in Bata.

The last morning is shaped around your onward flight. Bata has direct international services and there is also the option of returning to Malabo, which has the wider network; we route whichever suits your ticket, with margin. If there is time, the morning goes to the artisan market and a last hour on the paseo. Equatorial Guinea connects easily to our Gabon, São Tomé & Príncipe and Cameroon expeditions, and we are glad to sequence any of them.