Our speedboat flew across the water carrying shoppers to market – a young tailor going to buy zips, a hotel chef, and me on the hunt for the famous Bijagós basket weavers, who make distinctively shaped baskets to carry fish. We had set off from Rubane, one of 88 islands that make up the remote but beautiful Bijagós archipelago off the coast of Guinea-Bissau.
As we approached the southern end of Rubane, where the thick jungle of the interior met the beach, I saw a stocky man waving at us. As he came running down to meet the boat as it bobbed towards the shore, a young woman appeared from the trees behind him. Dressed in a gold lamé mini-skirt, matching boob tube and gold high heels, she cut quite a figure, sitting serenely on the edge of the boat as we carried on our way. I looked at my salt-stained attire and wondered if I, too, should have dressed up for market on the main island of Bubaque.
The Bijagós archipelago, comprising 18 major islands and dozens of smaller ones, covers 2,500 sq km of ocean. It belongs to Guinea-Bissau, one of those African countries one rarely hears about, a tiny former Portuguese colony wedged between Senegal and Guinea. Life on the islands, which have Unesco Biosphere Reserve status, seems to tick along much as it has done for hundreds of years. While the beaches are pristine and white, there's rarely anyone on them except the odd fisherman.
I had come to Guinea-Bissau as a backpacker in 2003, and it is one of my favourite countries, despite having a fragile political system and wrecked infrastructure. It's still suffering the after-effects of the brutal independence war against Portugal, which ended in the 1970s. But the country is safe to travel around, and the capital, Bissau, is inhabited by generous people who love to party.
This time I was returning to stay in Ponta Anchaca, a luxury hotel on the island of Rubane. Tourist infrastructure had improved since my last visit: a regular, if unpredictable, ferry service from the capital to Bubaque takes around five hours and leaves on Fridays. (The timetable depends on tides but is posted at the port the day before. Just turn up to buy a ticket.) Ponta Anchaca can also organise a speedboat transfer from Bissau. There are also new hotels and family-run guesthouses on Bubaque: the friendly Casa Dora (casadora.yolasite.com) is one of the best.
It's worth spending a few days in Bissau, which is linked by direct flights to Lisbon, ideally for the February carnival, when dozens of ethnic groups come in from the villages and show off their unique cultures of music and dance and everyone drinks and dances till dawn. These ethnic groups – culturally unrelated, speaking different languages and worshipping different gods – live together peacefully day after day, but that is one of those African facts that never make the news. Then plan for a week on the islands to see birds and animals that have been all but chased into extinction elsewhere in west Africa.
On Bubaque, giant turtles bury their eggs in the sand between July and November and it's possible to hire rickety bikes for the 18km ride across the island to see them. Bubaque is also home to the Unesco reserve headquarters, a small building where a guide told me about the rare saltwater hippopotamus, no longer hunted by locals for its meat, which thrives on the westerly island of Orango. The island of João Viera, to the south, is one of the most important places in west Africa for breeding sea turtles and it is possible to visit it by canoe. It's also possible to arrange homestays on Orango or other islands through the reserve headquarters.
I was shown around Bubaque by Sana, a young man from the island who studied languages at the local college. In French, the new language of tourism, Sana told me that only 21 of the 88 islands, are inhabited; the other islands are home only to spirits.
"No one can live on these islands because that is where we do our ceremonies," he said. The kapok tree, for example, is where islanders go to appease the spirits, and if people were to build in these sacred places, it would upset the islands' delicate balance.
Bubaque has a two-room museum and Sana proudly opened the display cases to show me items from Bijagós culture. Here was a headpiece made out of the dried-out body of a puffer fish, with cow horns protruding from the top, used for the circumcision ceremony on the island of Formosa, a few miles to the north. There was also a cabarro mask, shaped like a cow's head, from Uno. "Each island has its own traditions," said Sana, "though they're all linked." Most of the islands have just a single village on them.
At Ponta Anchaca that night, I ate carpaccio of carranque, a large local fish, marinated with onion and lime. The fish had been bought from a passing fisherman in a dugout just that morning. I remembered how in 2003, in total desperation, I ate a stew of monkey meat. Tourism hadn't even taken baby steps back then.
Ponta Anchaca is the only place on Rubane to stay. Its rooms, beautifully made from local wood, have sea views and the restaurant sits on stilts above the beach. The days passed in long beach walks, chats with the locals, swimming in the shallow warm waters and lazing beside the small hotel pool.
The public ferry returns to Bissau from Bubaque on Sundays, again depending on the tide. I was enjoying a lunch of yet more fish when I heard the ferry's horn blowing from Bubaque. I had just enough time to hop in the hotel's speedboat and race across the strait in time for its departure. Looking out from the top deck, I wistfully said goodbye to island life.
• Ponte Anchaca Lodge Hotel (+221 33 993 5161, ponta-anchaca.com) has doubles from €92. TAP (book.flytap.com) flies to Bissau from Heathrow or Gatwick (via Lisbon) from £690
