Sao Tome and Principe

Two islands in the Gulf of Guinea, straddling the equator, covered in the kind of rainforest that grows when no one has found a reason to cut it down. Sao Tome and Principe were uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived in the 15th century and became the world's largest producer of sugar, then cocoa - a history written in the rocas, the old plantation estates that now stand in various states of ruin and reinvention across both islands. The chocolate is extraordinary. The pace is the pace of islands that have learned there is no particular urgency.

Our guide is being written from the ground up, with the time this place deserves.

We are still gathering the notes that make a guide worth keeping: roca guesthouse routes, Principe's forest trails, single-origin chocolate makers and the freshwater swimming holes that appear on no map but every local's mental geography.