Ntingui Peak

Nobody warned me Ntingui would be this much of a workout, and in hindsight I should have guessed from the way our guide Idi laughed when I asked if we needed proper hiking boots. We started before dawn from a village outside Ouani, Lia zipping her rain jacket against a mist that hadn’t decided whether it was fog or drizzle, and within twenty minutes we were walking through ylang-ylang groves, the sweet, almost medicinal smell of the flowers thick enough to taste. Anjouan grows a huge share of the world’s ylang-ylang for perfume, and smelling it at the source, still on the tree rather than distilled in a bottle, completely changed how I think about it.

The trail climbs fast and doesn’t apologize for it. After the ylang-ylang groves came patches of coffee under shade trees, then banana plots tended by families who waved at us without breaking stride from their work, and eventually the cultivated land gave way entirely to real rainforest — thick, dripping, genuinely wild in a way that surprised me on an island this size. Roots crossed the path like tripwires, and at one point Idi stopped us to point out a comoro flying fox gliding between the canopy overhead, wingspan wider than I expected from something I’d only ever pictured as a bat.

By the time we broke out near the summit, at just over 1,500 meters, we were both soaked with sweat and rain in equal measure and I’d stopped caring about my supposedly waterproof boots. The view, when the cloud briefly cleared, was worth every miserable step: the whole spine of Anjouan laid out below, other ridgelines disappearing into mist, and somewhere far off the glint of the Indian Ocean. It didn’t last more than a few minutes before the cloud swallowed everything again, but Lia and I just stood there grinning like idiots, because you don’t get many moments like that.

What stuck with me afterward wasn’t really the summit itself, but how much forest survives up there against the odds. Idi told us, without much drama, how much of Anjouan’s lowland forest has been cleared for farming over the decades, which makes the remnant cloud forest around Ntingui feel less like scenery and more like something worth defending. We came down exhausted, legs shaking on the steep bits, and ate a huge plate of rice and octopus in the village that evening that tasted like the best meal of the trip purely because we’d earned it.

When to go: Aim for June through October, during the dry season, when the trail is less of a mudslide and you actually have a decent shot at clear summit views.