Chindini

I had been told the road to Chindini was bad. What I had not been told was that “bad” in this context meant a forty-minute stretch of volcanic track that reduced the taxi’s speed to the walking pace of someone carrying something heavy. We bounced and lurched through a landscape that grew progressively more extraordinary as we went — the vegetation thinning to low coastal scrub, the land flattening toward the sea, the black lava fields from historic Karthala eruptions emerging on both sides of the track like frozen weather. My fellow passenger, a young man going home to the village, slept through all of it with the deep comfort of a person who has made this journey too many times to find it interesting.

Chindini itself is a small fishing village of perhaps a few hundred people, where the houses are built from concrete block and coral stone and the boats are pulled up on a beach of dark volcanic sand mixed with crushed coral. The beach is not conventionally beautiful in the way of Mitsamiouli — the sand is dark, the lava rocks intrude at the waterline, the Indian Ocean on the southern tip of Grande Comore arrives with a directness that makes swimming somewhat athletic. But it is one of the most dramatic coastal landscapes I have seen in the Indian Ocean: the black lava plateaus extending south into the sea, the white foam violent and constant against dark rock, the whole thing under a sky that at that latitude feels wider than it should. I stood at the edge of the lava for a long time, watching the waves come in, feeling the spray on my face from metres away.

The village operates on rhythms that have nothing to do with visitors. In the morning the men go out in pirogues before dawn; by eight o’clock the catch is back, laid out on the lava above the tide line — tuna, barracuda, parrotfish, and species I had no names for. Women sort through the fish with practised efficiency. There is a small market selling basic goods, a mosque, and a school. A generator runs in the evenings. I was the only visitor, a state that made me conspicuous enough that two children appointed themselves my guides without being asked and showed me, with solemn authority, a tidepool full of urchins, a place in the lava where the sea forced through a natural arch, and the best spot to see the sunset, which was a flat rock at the southern tip where the wind was so strong I had to lean into it.

That sunset was the reason I stayed an extra night when I had only planned for one. The sky went pink, then orange, then a deep red that reflected off the wet lava and turned the whole coastline into something from outside of ordinary experience. I ate dried fish and rice in the home of a family who offered without my asking, and I slept under a net on a mat on a concrete floor and was grateful for all of it. Chindini does not offer comfort, but it offers the original thing that travel is supposed to deliver, which is the reliable sensation of being somewhere genuinely other.

When to go: The dry season, May through October, makes the access road significantly more manageable — during the wet season, the track can become impassable after heavy rain. There is no formal accommodation in Chindini; ask in the village for someone willing to host, or come equipped to camp. Bring food and water beyond what you expect to need, as the village market is basic. A 4WD vehicle or motorcycle is essential.