The Bijagós are eighty-eight islands of a drowned river delta off Guinea-Bissau, and twice a day the sea walks out of them. As the tide drops, hundreds of square kilometres of mudflat surface where there was open water an hour before, thick with worms, crabs and shellfish. Bijagó women walk out to gather by hand. Through the northern winter those flats hold hundreds of thousands of waders down from the Arctic: godwits, knots and whimbrels probing the ooze in flocks that run to the horizon. When the water pushes back in they lift together and pack onto the last dry sand, close enough that you hear the wings. Getting between the islands means a narrow wooden pirogue, the only real transport there is. Departures follow the water, not a timetable, so the wait on the beach is part of your trip. Mangrove walls slide past, spray comes over the bow, and the helmsman reads channels that shifted with the last tide.
On Orango the hippos are among the few anywhere that tolerate salt water, swimming between islands and grazing the coastal grassland. You reach them on foot, a guided walk across savanna and palm to the Anor lagoons. Nothing is promised: the animals move between lagoon and mangrove as they please. Over the paths you walk, male weavers knot palm ribbons, beak and claw, into hundreds of ball-shaped nests hanging from one tree like fruit. The females inspect the work and reject what they do not like. In Bijagó villages the houses and the land pass down the maternal line, and a woman settles on a husband by cooking a dish and setting it down at his door. The biggest green-turtle nursery in Africa is on one small island here, protected by taboo long before any park existed. Only initiated men could land, women never, and every visit had to be brief. On the heaviest nights of the season the tracks cross tracks until the beach looks ploughed, and the men out counting them are from the community whose rules kept everyone off it.