Luba

I left Malabo for Luba on a shared minibus that departed when it was full, which took a while. This is the rhythm of transport on Bioko Island, and once I accepted it — once I stopped checking the time and started watching the street outside the window instead — the wait became part of the trip rather than a tax on it. We rolled south along the island’s western coast on a road that alternates between decent tarmac and stretches that seem to be testing your vehicle’s opinion of itself, past villages where the houses sat close to the road and children waved at the bus with the enthusiasm of people who do not see many strangers.

Luba is a small fishing town, Bioko’s second-largest settlement, occupying a curve of the southwestern coast where a natural harbor shelters a fleet of wooden boats painted in the bright colors that seem to be required by some unspoken fishing community law — blue and white, red and yellow, combinations that look like someone was working from instinct rather than design. The town is quiet without being sleepy. People work here, seriously, and the harbor is the center of that work.

I was awake before dawn to watch the boats come in. This was not organized or announced — I simply walked to the harbor in the dark and waited, which is sometimes all you have to do. The boats began appearing out of the black water one by one, low in the water with their catch, the engines at idle. The fishermen worked fast and without ceremony, offloading into plastic crates that were then carried up the slipway and immediately mobbed by women who had arrived from somewhere with the exact precision of people who have been doing this for decades. The fish moved from boat to hand to crate to head-load and disappeared into the town within minutes. The smell was overwhelming and completely appropriate.

I had breakfast at a spot that did not have a name or a sign — a woman with a charcoal stove who set up every morning at the edge of the market area and made something with eggs and plantain and palm oil that I ate twice a day for the two days I was in Luba. She spoke no Spanish or French, which put us on an equal linguistic footing. We communicated through the universal language of pointing at things and exchanging coins, and the transaction was, every time, satisfying in its simplicity.

The town holds a colonial history that surfaces in a few buildings — old Spanish administrative structures now repurposed or simply fading with dignity, a church with thick walls that keep the interior genuinely cool at midday. I spent time in the church not for religious reasons but because it was the coolest room I found in Luba and the light through the narrow windows came in at an angle that made the stone floor glow. These are the pilgrimages that matter to me more than ruins ever quite manage to.

The coast around Luba has beaches, though the surf is rougher than it looks. West African swells wrap around the island’s southern tip and even the sheltered water carries a roll. I sat on a beach south of town in the late afternoon and watched a fishing boat work offshore in swells that would have worried me and seemed to worry nobody on board. The horizon was the color of pewter. A bird I did not recognize landed briefly on a rock near me and left before I could think about what it was.

When to go: December through February offers the most comfortable conditions on Bioko’s western coast. The harbor is active year-round, but the road from Malabo is best in the dry season. Allow a full day for the journey from the capital if you want to stop along the way, which you should.