The Chocolate Islands

We’re rolling down the spine of an ancient volcano, tumbling to the sea. Beyond the window there’s nothing but the colors of deep earth, the pigments of an island that’s been turned inside out, exposing its fertile guts and dark green belly. Giant palm fronds whip the car as we twist along the track. 50 Cent and Lucky Dube are on the radio. “Good things come to those / who go out and make them happen,” Lucky croons. Clearly he never tried to find a road to the beach on the west coast of São Tomé.

“I think it’s here,” says John Micheletti. “The bay we saw on the map.” He’s pointing out the window but all we can see is the same thick ribbon of jungle that’s hemmed us in for the past hour. He turns off the road onto a narrow trail that cuts into the bush. Branches claw the doors as he nudges the car further down the footpath, which is barely wide enough for two people to walk along shoulder to shoulder. 

“I don’t think this is a road,” quips Beyrick de Vries from the backseat. There’s a hollow thud as the chassis connects with a hump of rock, followed by a grinding sound. John steps harder on the accelerator and we break free from the obstacle, then catapult into a clearing. Ahead of us lies the beach, where impossibly tall palms dip down to the shoreline. Beyond that an onshore breeze licks the back of a wedging beachbreak. 

“Ramps!” shouts Beyrick.

*

São Tomé, located off the west coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, is a dark speck rising abruptly from the sea. Along with its smaller twin, Príncipe, the islands form part of the Cameroon Line, a 900-mile chain of volcanoes that stretch from the hinterlands of Nigeria into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. 

The entire island is in fact a volcano, formed by fluid magma that has steadily bubbled up from the Earth’s mantle over millennia. The same type of volcanic activity forged the islands of Hawaii, and it has imbued São Tomé with its dark soil and wrinkled coastline. A coastline that, for the most part, remains unexplored.

The exception is along the east coast, where our crew had convened like the start of a bad joke: William Aliotti, a Frenchman raised in the Caribbean Islands, Beyrick de Vries from South Africa, and John Micheletti from Nigeria. We were hardly the first surfers to visit this former Portuguese colony, however. Back in 2001, Sam George and Randy Rarick made their way here with photographer John Callahan. George wrote that he thought they were pioneering the fun, right-hand pointbreaks they found, until he was joined in the water by a gaggle of São Toméan kids, riding boards fashioned from wood. It was a startling discovery. 

Lying 200 miles from the mainland, São Tomé is isolated. Yet here was a wave-riding culture that George hypothesized had evolved independently of Polynesian influence. He claimed the island holds definitive proof that surfing is an authentic African tradition. Proof like the board 12-year-old Jardel Félix holds under his arm when we meet him on the first day of our trip. It’s 4 feet long with thin, pinched rails and a rolled-bottom deck that ends in a sharp squaretail. The wide nose is rounded and mostly symmetrical, except for a kink on the left rail where the wood has splintered.

“Este é meu tambua,” says Jardel proudly. This is my board. 

It’s late afternoon and the tropical sun has unclenched its boiling fist. The air is warm but pleasant. We’re still wet from surfing a zippy point in front of the village of Santana where a group of kids on a flotilla of surf craft joined us. Two were riding the snapped halves of a thruster. Another pair shared an old bodyboard and a block of Styrofoam. The rest were on tambuas, rough-hewn boards made from acacia. 

We had heard about São Tomé’s homegrown surf scene and expected to find these local surfers in the water. We had not expected to find them busting airs. Unlike the young kids on the inside, 17-year-old Jéjé Camblé was riding a fresh 6’0″ Chili. Every time he did a big turn or hucked a frontside reverse, the small pack erupted in cheers. His face stretched into a broad grin when he paddled up to us and introduced himself in Portuguese. 

Jéjé started surfing on a tambua after seeing an expat named Peter riding waves outside of his village. “When I saw surfing for the first time,” he says, “I thought it was some kind of magic. Like walking on water.” He soon discovered São Tomé had its own waveriders and, with their help, carved his own board. He started bellyboarding in the whitewash, then catching open faces.

“For a long time I thought our generation was the first to surf using wooden boards in São Tomé,” he says. “But then I started asking the adults. One of them told me no, we were surfing these boards long ago, when I was 7. Then I asked a man who was 50, and he said the same. He said when they were kids they were surfing with wooden boards already. Then I asked my grandmother. She is 77 and she said back in the days, when she was my age, younger people surfed with wooden boards. They rode waves
just for fun.”

Aside from a trickle of tourists, São Tomé remains largely cutoff from the outside world. Swathes of the island have no electricity and the economy relies on fishing and cash crops. The few scraps of modern surf equipment come by way of the occasional airline pilot and a handful of Portuguese expats. Surprisingly, it’s also the landing point for a deep-sea fiber optic cable linking Africa to Europe, and has excellent connectivity. 

We spot the Santana crew hanging out on the wall of an old whitewashed church on the water’s edge the following morning. They aren’t drawn there solely by their piousness. The spot offers the perfect vantage point to check the waves, while also picking up Wi-Fi from the church’s signal. With thumbs scrolling they sit glued to their phones, connected to their heroes around the world courtesy of the Lord’s bounty. 

“If I want to train my rail, I watch Tom Curren, or Mick Fanning,” says Jéjé. “If I want to progress in surf, I watch videos of Julian Wilson and Gabriel Medina. If I want to be inspired, I watch Andy Irons.” He pronounces Irons’ name with reverence, his Portuguese accent drawing the syllables out in a long shhh. 

*

From Santana the road hugs the coastline heading south, giving way to impenetrable bays that we circumnavigate by driving inland. We’d scoured the same coastline on Google Earth before arriving, marking off potential setups, logging GPS co-ordinates. But on the ground, amongst the crush of thick foliage, we’re quickly disorientated. 

John takes command, matching up the maps with his phone GPS, guiding the car west along the twisting dirt roads until we find a path to the beach or can drive no further. Then we get out and hike.

“Are you kidding me?” says Beyrick at the end of a sortie on foot. 

A band of dense bush gives way to a crescent-shaped bay. To our left is a rocky outcrop where a blowhole shoots plumes of water into the air as swells hit the headland, then refract into a left bowl. The wind is onshore but the waves are surprisingly well formed and powerful. 

That night, back in Santana, we tell Joao, a Portuguese expat who occasionally guides visiting surfers around the island, that we found the wave at the blowhole. He looks at us quizzically and shrugs. “I don’t know this wave,” he says.  

The next morning we make our way to the market where we find a bootlegged copy of 50 Cent and Lucky Dube amongst piles fish and fruit. Our iPhones are useless on our vehicle’s old sound system, a front-loader and tape deck combo. The bootleg becomes our soundtrack as we navigate São Tomé’s hidden coast. We’re unsure if we’re the first to ride these waves on our modern tambuas. We wonder what the punchy wedges would do in the dry season offshores and contemplate the slabs we’d heard about further north. Mostly we just surf and hunt fish along the reefs, which are dark and rich like the jungle, forged from the same volcanic basalt that the island is built upon. 

*

“I’m the diamond in the dirt / that ain’t been found,” Fiddy spits as we climb higher into the interior. The sea has gone flat so we are making our way inland, cutting deep into the belly of the island, throwing faux gangsta shakas as we go.  Eventually we reach Pico Cão Grande, the highest peak on the island. The needle of rock twisting into the sky was formed when a volcanic plug exploded abruptly, hinting at the powerful forces bubbling just beneath the surface. On the way back to the coast John points out the cacao plants that grow along the sides of the road, their bulging orange pods dangling on thin stalks. 

Cacao makes up 95 percent of São Tomé’s exports, a throwback from its colonial past, when it was cultivated on large plantations that remain dotted around the island. The seeds are plucked from the pod and shipped around the world where they are processed into chocolate and other dark delights. Here in the jungle, the plants grow wild and free. 

When the swell rises again, we head to Radiation Point north of Santana, where George and Rarick found the loping right-hander that would come to define São Tomé ’s surf potential. The tarred road disintegrates until we’re bumping along a rutted track where wooden clapboard houses lie squashed against one another, piled up in a settlement that runs down to the sea. The bad road forces us to drive slowly, a few miles an hour. A stream of kids run out the houses as we pass by, pushing their homemade skateboards behind the car.

When we come to a stop, they gather round, showing us the boards. The deck of the “rolling car” or trote is made from a block of wood joined to trucks made from smoothed-out branches. Old wheel-bearings have been fitted onto each end of the branch, which has to be carefully selected: too thin, and the branch will snap or the makeshift wheels will wiggle off. Too thick, and the wheels won’t be able to turn around on the wooden trucks.

The kids squeal with laughter as Beyrick and William give the boards a go, jerking stiffly from side to side down the road. “Oleo, oleo!” shouts a tiny boy, no older than 8. He whips a small plastic bottle from his shorts and grabs one of the boards, squeezing a few drops of used motor oil onto the bearings. Then he flips it over and skates expertly around in circles, the steel wheels hammering the ground loudly.

*

Radiation Point gets its name from the towering radio beacon that dominates the peninsula, perched on undeveloped government land. We duck under a dilapidated fence and make the 20-minute walk through tall, yellow grass the color of wheat, catching glimpses of the wave until we get to the shoreline. 

“No, no!” shouts one of the local surfers as we start walking over the rocks to paddle out. He points down to a fat clump of urchins wedged between the boulders, then motions for us to follow him to a gully where we slip easily into deeper water.

A handful of São Toméan surfers are out the back, riding hand-me-down surfboards, some with no fins that they still manage to rip gracefully. The wave runs for about a hundred yards from the outside to the inside, a mellow pocket that accommodates noserides as much as big turns, much like an African version of Malibu.  

Back in the water at Santana, Jéjé tells us that surfers from his village and Radiation Point rarely surf together. The long, hour-and-a-half walk between the two spots makes it difficult. None of them has a car. But when one of them does make the trek, the local surfers are stoked to see each other. “There are not many surfers in São Tomé,” he says. “Modern surfing is just beginning here. We see each other, we learn together.” 

A set rolls in and Beyrick takes off, races down the line, and launches a frontside air. Jéjé lets out a loud whoop before stroking into the next wave and attempts a huge alley-oop, almost landing the maneuver. The kids on the inside go wild as they watch this tit-for-tat unfold, then go back to bellyboarding the reforms. One of them starts nudging further up the point, his eyes fixed on Jéjé and Beyrick. His little arms paddle hard and he kicks his legs off the back of his wooden tambua as the past and the present draw together.

[Feature image: The rapid evolution of surfing in São Tomé, as represented by the wooden tambua on the right, to the hand-me-down thruster, left.]