The Pitons rise out of the Caribbean off Saint Lucia's southwest coast with no lead-up at all. Two spires of lava, Gros Piton at 798 metres and Petit Piton at 743, each go waterline to summit in one slope. They are the two triangles at the centre of the national flag. Neither is a volcano in its own right: they are what is left of two lava domes that grew on the side of a far bigger one, and when it came apart these stayed upright. The bowl it left holds the town of Soufrière. From a lookout in the hills above the town you get Soufrière, both peaks and the open sea in one view, the angle that separates them. Down on the sand at Sugar Beach, wedged between them, they overlap into one mass. From a boat at its foot Petit Piton goes up out of the water as a sheer green wall, an angle no road can give you.
Fond Gens Libre, the village under Gros Piton, the taller of the two, is where the climb begins and where your guide comes from. The trail is short and relentless, rock and roots, steep almost the whole way, with a platform halfway where plenty of people stop. From the top the whole southwest coast is below you, and Petit Piton, for once, looks small. Back at sea level a reef starts a few strokes off the beach between the peaks — coral heads, sea fans and reef fish in water clear past thirty metres in the dry months. Boats out of Soufrière cross water where sperm whales live all year, with humpbacks from February to April. Inland the rest of the volcano is still hot: at Sulphur Springs the path runs onto the steaming floor of the collapsed crater, grey mud boiling, the ground hissing sulphur. The forest on the two peaks was never cleared. Saint Lucia's gentler ground went under sugar cane, and five birds that live on this island and no other held on up here, in woods no plough could reach.