The Pitons are two spires of volcanic rock that rise straight out of the Caribbean on the southwest coast of Saint Lucia, Gros Piton at 798 metres and Petit Piton at 743, and they are the two triangles on the country's flag. They stand close together above the town of Soufrière, green to the top, with a curve of sand wedged between them, and they are not a volcano themselves but what was left when one fell apart: hard plugs of lava that stayed standing while the softer mountain around them washed away. From a hilltop above Soufrière you get the town, both peaks and the open sea in one view, and at first light in the dry months the two crowns stand clear before the sea breeze stacks cloud on them.
Only Gros Piton can be walked up, and only with a licensed guide from Fond Gens Libre, the village at its foot; the climb is about two hours of steep steps and roots through forest, with Petit Piton across the gap and the whole coast below you at the top. The forest on the two peaks was never cleared for sugar, and it is part of what has kept alive five birds that exist nowhere on Earth but Saint Lucia, the island's parrot among them. Between the peaks, a reef begins a few strokes off the sand at Sugar Beach: coral, sea fans and reef fish in water so sheltered that in the dry season you can see past 30 metres. Inland is the rest of the volcano. At Sulphur Springs you walk up to the steaming floor of a collapsed crater where grey mud boils and the ground hisses, the field the island calls its drive-in volcano, and the warm mud baths beside it run on the same heat. Offshore, humpbacks pass from February to April and sperm whales hold the coast all year. The flag shows the peaks as two triangles; from the water they look exactly like that.