Dalaba

The road to Dalaba climbs through several distinct microclimates, and I watched the landscape change through the taxi window like reading something in slow motion. The coastal scrub gave way to drier savannah, the savannah to higher grassland, and then, as the road switched back through a series of turns that the driver navigated with the calm of a man who has made this drive a hundred times, the trees arrived — not the scrubby plateau trees of the lower Fouta Djallon but tall, moisture-loving trees, their trunks draped in moss, their canopy close enough overhead to change the quality of the light.

Dalaba was established by the French as a hill station, a place where colonial administrators could escape the coast’s heat and live in conditions that approximated what they had left behind in Europe. The bungalows they built are still standing, scattered across forested hillsides, their stone walls now softened by lichen and the decades of rain that fall in these hills. Some have been converted into small guesthouses. I stayed in one that had a fireplace — a fireplace, in West Africa — that the owner lit each evening without apparent surprise, as if fireplaces in Guinea were the most natural thing in the world, which at 1,200 metres they essentially are.

The botanical garden at Dalaba dates from the colonial era and has been allowed to grow into itself with minimal intervention, which in practice means that the paths are sometimes more suggested than actual and the labelling of species is incomplete, but the plants themselves are magnificent. Orchids grow in the crooks of trees. Ferns spread across the lower banks of a small stream that runs through the centre of the garden. I spent a morning there with a cup of tea in a thermos and no particular plan, and the morning lasted longer than mornings usually do.

The waterfalls around Dalaba are the other reason people make the drive. The Voile de la Mariée — the Bridal Veil — drops perhaps thirty metres off a basalt lip into a pool surrounded by ferns and the kind of perpetual cool that comes from permanently wet rock. A path leads to it through a village where children attached themselves to me immediately and provided narration for the entire walk in rapid Pular that I could follow only approximately. They were, I gathered, explaining the correct way to approach the waterfall, which involved taking your shoes off for the last section. They were right.

In the evenings Dalaba is very quiet. The town’s market closes by four, the bungalow owners light their fires, and the mist comes in from the valleys below and sits on the hillsides until morning. I ate dinner two nights running at the same woman’s place — a pot of chicken stew so thick with palm oil it coated the spoon, served with rice cooked in the same pot. She had a radio playing in the other room and occasionally a song came through that made her sing along, and the sound of her voice through the wall was one of the better things about Dalaba.

When to go: November through February brings the coolest, clearest conditions — bring something warm for the evenings. March and April are warmer but still pleasant. The waterfalls are more spectacular in and just after the rains, but the roads can be difficult in the wet season itself.