San Pedro

The road south from the main highway drops through teak plantation and secondary forest for two hours before the Atlantic appears at the end of it. San Pedro is not a destination most visitors to Ivory Coast include on their itinerary, and the city is entirely indifferent to this fact. The second port of the country handles most of Ivory Coast’s cacao exports — it smells of it, a warm roasted-but-not-quite-chocolate smell that the harbor wind carries through the residential neighborhoods — as well as timber from the forests further north. It is a working port city with a working port city’s temperament: direct, loud in the morning, and not particularly interested in softening itself for anyone’s comfort.

I had come for two reasons: the beaches south of town and the gateway to Taï. On my first morning I walked to the harbour before breakfast, where the pirogue fishermen were hauling in their night catch and the fish market was already in full swing. The variety was extraordinary: barracuda, capitaine, tuna, lobsters the color of rusted iron, sea snails in ceramic-looking shells. The sellers were exclusively women, and the negotiation style — fast, humorous, implacable — reminded me of markets in Senegal. I bought a paper bag of fried crayfish from a woman who was simultaneously conducting three other transactions and watching a soap opera on her phone, and ate them at the harbour wall with the container ships moving behind the breakwater.

The beaches begin about three kilometers south of the port center and run west along the coast in a series of coves separated by rocky headlands. None of them have official names that I could determine, and most were empty on the Tuesday I walked them. The sand here is white, unlike the darker sand further east, and the water is clearer — the kind of Atlantic you can see your feet in for the first meter. There are a few basic beach camp setups run by local families where you can eat grilled fish and drink cold beer under palm shelters, and I found the level of infrastructure exactly right: enough to sustain an afternoon, not enough to change the character of the place.

The logging trucks that rumble through town at all hours are a reminder of what the industry here costs. The forests that Taï National Park protects are the remnant of what once covered this entire region, and San Pedro sits at the boundary between what has been cleared and what has, barely, been saved. This proximity gives the city a certain complicated energy, or perhaps that’s just my projection onto the diesel fumes.

When to go: November through February is the dry season — the best window for beach days and the Taï road. March and April are transitional, warm and sometimes stormy. The May–September rainy season can make the forest roads south impassable but the waterfalls near the park entrance are at their most spectacular.