São Tomé & Príncipe

Fly in over the reef and land ten minutes from the middle of town. Our team meets you and the afternoon stays deliberately loose, because São Tomé city introduces itself better than any schedule can: a grid of pastel Portuguese colonial buildings running down to the water, the sixteenth-century Fort of São Sebastião on its spit, the cathedral, and a market that smells of breadfruit and dried fish. Dinner is your first encounter with the islands' cooking: grilled fish, breadfruit, palm oil, the fierce local chilli they call óssame.

The north of São Tomé is the dry half of the island and looks nothing like the rest of it: thorn scrub, open savanna and baobabs standing over a coast of black lava. At Lagoa Azul the water turns an implausible blue against the rock, and the snorkelling straight off the shore is the easiest on the island. Afterwards, the enormous ruin of Roça Agostinho Neto (once the grandest cocoa estate here, with its own hospital and railway) where families still live in the workers' quarters and hang washing in the drying yards.

South along the coast road: the blowhole at Boca do Inferno, then the long climb into the interior where the forest closes over the road and Pico Cão Grande finally shows itself, a stone needle standing clear of the canopy. Lunch at São João dos Angolares, in a plantation house turned kitchen where the cooking is the reason people drive two hours. In the late afternoon, the black-sand beaches of the far south and, in season, the turtle nesting beach at Jalé.

A short boat crossing to Iléu das Rolas, the islet off the southern tip where a stone marker sits exactly on the equator, the only place in Africa where the line crosses an island small enough to walk across. The day is spent between the marker, the lighthouse walk and the reef: this is the best snorkelling water on the São Tomé side, warm and clear over coral heads that see almost no traffic. Back on the main island before dark.

Into the interior early, before the cloud sets in. A guided walk climbs through the old plantation edge into true Obô forest (tree ferns, begonias the size of dinner plates, the endemic birds calling from a canopy you rarely see through) on a route matched to your pace rather than a fixed summit. The afternoon belongs to cocoa: a working roça mid-harvest, the fermentation boxes and drying yards, and then a tasting with a small-batch maker who takes the beans all the way to the bar.

The thirty-five-minute hop north to Príncipe is the best short flight in the Gulf of Guinea, the whole island arrives at once, green towers and a green sea. Príncipe has been a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2012 and has roughly eight thousand residents on it. The afternoon goes to Roça Sundy, the plantation whose lawn hosted Eddington's 1919 eclipse expedition, and then to Praia Banana, the crescent of sand below it, for the first swim.

The whole day at sea, down the roadless southern coast to the Bay of Needles, where a skyline of forested volcanic spires falls straight into the water. The boat noses into coves that can only be reached this way, stops for snorkelling over reef that sees a handful of visitors a year, and lands on a beach for lunch. Between July and October humpbacks pass through this water on migration and the crossing turns into a whale watch. Back to the north coast in the late light.

A last morning on Príncipe (the forest track behind Sundy, the old town at Santo António, the smallest city in Africa, or simply the beach) before the flight back to São Tomé and your onward connection. Most international departures leave in the evening, so there is usually time for a final lunch and a shower before the airport. We are glad to add Gabon, Angola or a longer stay on Príncipe to either end.