River Number Two Beach lies 25 kilometres down the coast from Freetown, in Sierra Leone. In the 1980s a television advertisement for Bounty chocolate bars was filmed on this sand and sold European viewers "a taste of paradise"; most of them assumed the palm-fringed shore was somewhere in the Caribbean. The beach takes its name from the river that comes off the peninsula's mountains and cuts across the sand on its way to the Atlantic, splitting the beach in two and pooling behind a bar into a shallow, warm lagoon before it goes. The river is there because of the wall of green above it — the Freetown Peninsula catches close to three metres of rain a year, and its ridges hold the last rainforest in western Sierra Leone, protected as a national park since 2012. Those same hills gave the country its name: a Portuguese captain sailing past in 1462 called the range the Lion Mountains, five centuries before the chocolate advert made the beach famous.
Come down through the palms and the crescent opens white and mostly empty, closed at both ends by forest that runs straight into the sea. You can wade the river mouth with fresh water on one side and the ocean's break on the other; dugout canoes, cut from single trunks and painted, lie hauled up between fishing runs, and the day's barracuda goes on the grill at the beach kitchen. Since 1995 all of it has belonged to the village: young men who worked the sand founded the Number Two River Development Association, and around seventy members still hold the huts, boats and kitchen, with what visitors spend staying in the community. They kept the place through the civil war and the Ebola epidemic, which between them emptied Sierra Leone of travellers for the better part of three decades. From August to December humpback whales pass through Whale Bay, just around the point to the south.