Horacio Island behind Sofitel in Sipopo
In Equatorial Guinea you need, in addition to your visa, a permit (which looks like this) to take pictures in the country. As soon as I got this, I set off on a trip around the island which took two days.
First off we drove to Sipopo, a small village outside Malabo where known for its cocoa plantation that is no longer in use. The main road, like everywhere on the island was very good and went past some grand, seemingly unused buildings in Sippopo like a mall, conference center and the 54 luxury residences that the president had built for the 54 African presidents when they held and African Union summit.
My host Bindang making a small friend on Horacio island
Next up was a village called Riaba, which had a long and beautiful beach which I unfortunately did not manage to capture with my photo below.
The beach in Riaba
Riaba was also a nice place to stop for a meal at the one and only beach restaurant there.
When we arrived Moca we were halfway around the island. The city was way higher up than the coast so the temperatur there was cool and nice. Moca also had a small museum/wildlife center that was built by the oil company Exxon, where we got to learn a bit about the wildlife in Equatorial Guinea.
The Ureka Waterfall
Moca was not the most interesting. It had an old church, and was a once street kind of town where the buildings were barely holding up. Driving down to Ureka, which was approximately a 60km drive we made a camp on the beach and visited a couple of waterfalls. This is also the only place I was asked for a bribe by the police, which was just three dollars, which was almost fair as we had woken the police up around midnight.
The view over Moca
Luba was the last city we visited, but I would say that there was not really anything interesting to see there. The president has a palace in every province so just like in Malabo and Riaba he also had one there. Far more interesting was the small village called Batete just a short drive from Luba.
The old Spanish Church in a village called Batete outside of Luba
I would say that the roads around the island was impressive, possibly the best roads in Africa after Mauritius and the landscape was much more interesting with lots of green.
The roads are good and the landscape is beautiful. You will see a lot of the National tree called “ceiba”
Our last stop was the highest point in Equatorial Guinea called Pico Basile, where they had built a church with a statue of the virgin lady.
Apparently there are lots of monkeys living up there, but they only come down to the church in the rainy season, so we didnt see any. There was not much of a view as we were over the clouds, but it was a pleasant end to our trip around the Bioko Island.
Last stop was Pico Basile, the highest mountain in Equatorial Guinea