When we told people we were going to Cape Verde they would say ooh
how lovely, imagining parasols in a Thomson brochure. We had a different fantasy in mind – thousand-foot cliffs, fearsome crags, vertiginous narrow mule tracks clinging to precipices – more like Tolkien’s Mordor.
The Cape Verde islands are a set of volcanic islands off Senegal; smaller,
wilder and very different from the Canaries. Some islands are near-deserts; one is even an active volcano