I spent part of my summer surfing the perfect point breaks of São Tomé together with a small bunch of local surfers who grew up catching waves on their wooden tàbuas, and are now are ripping on regular but usually obsolete foam boards, mostly left behind by the few Portuguese surfers that happened to pass through. The island is in fact a former Portuguese colony. It’s now half of the tiny twin-island African republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, the smallest country in Africa after the Seychelles, sitting some 300km off the coast of Gabon. The islands present themselves to the traveller as a small African version of Hawaii, which to some extent they are, with volcanoes, lush green vegetation and shallow point breaks. The only difference being that the roads are terrible and the electricity is scarce. Here tourism remains an afterthought, which made it all the more intriguing to me.
