Plateaux

Kpalimé is a small, green, agreeable town built on a slope, and it functions as the base for everything in the region rather than as a destination in itself — though its Friday market is substantial and worth timing for, and there are craft workshops through the town making batik, woven cloth and carved wood, several of them happy to show the process rather than just sell the product. What people actually come for is above the town. The hills around Kouma Konda, twenty minutes up, hold a network of walking paths through forest and cocoa and past small villages, and the butterfly population there is genuinely extraordinary — over a thousand species recorded, with the concentration best in the wet months and in the early morning, and a small centre that guides visitors through what they are seeing. Guides for the walks are arranged in the villages and are worth taking; the paths are unmarked, they branch constantly, and a guide turns a wander into an education about what every plant on the route is for. The air up here is the region's real product: several degrees cooler than the coast, thick with insect noise, and the reason two days become three.

Mount Agou is the highest point in Togo at a little under a thousand metres, and it is climbed rather than conquered — a road runs a good part of the way up and the walking sections pass through villages strung along the slopes, terraced with maize and coffee. From the top on a clear morning the view runs west into Ghana and south towards the sea, and the villages on the way up are the point as much as the summit. Start early: the cloud builds by mid-morning and the view goes. The waterfalls are the region's other set piece, and they need one honest caveat. The most photographed of them, Kpime, sits below a hydroelectric intake, and when water is being held upstream the fall can be reduced to a trickle over bare rock — spectacular after rain, a disappointment in a dry spell, and worth asking about locally on the day rather than driving out on faith. Womé is the more reliable of the pair, reached by a short walk through cocoa farms to a broad curtain and a pool you can swim in, and it is the one to choose if you only do one. Further north-west, near Badou, a third fall drops in stages through thick forest at the end of a longer and better walk, and it sees a fraction of the visitors of the other two.

The slopes around Kpalimé have grown cocoa and coffee for well over a century, and the farms are working smallholdings rather than show plantations — which is why visiting one is genuinely interesting. A farm walk takes you through the growing terraces and then through the processing, which is where the surprise usually is: how much hand labour separates a pod on a tree from anything recognisable, how long fermenting and drying take, and how thin the margins are. Togolese arabica goes to speciality roasters abroad, which has given growers here a market that pays for quality rather than volume, and buying directly from a cooperative is both cheaper and a better cup than anything you will find in a shop. What that coffee then becomes in a Togolese cup belongs with the country's own food and drink. North of Kpalimé, the Danyi plateau is a high, cool tableland with a Benedictine monastery on it that farms its own land and sells what it makes — coffee, jam, cheese, honey — from a shop by the gate, in a setting of pine and eucalyptus that feels nothing like anywhere else in the country. The drive up is worth it for the road alone, and the monastery guesthouse is one of the quietest places to stay in Togo.

The region's administrative capital sits east of the Kpalimé hills, on the main north-south highway, built across a set of steep ridges so that its streets climb and drop constantly and its views open unexpectedly between buildings. It is a working town rather than a tourist one — a large market, a weaving tradition of its own, and a long-standing reputation in the country for cloth — and it is the natural stop for anyone driving north rather than a destination to detour for. It matters geographically more than most travellers notice: this is where the wet, green, forested south ends. North of the town the vegetation thins within an hour, the light changes, and the country begins its transition towards the savanna. Anyone driving the length of Togo should treat this stretch as a section of the trip to stay awake for rather than to sleep through, and the sensible pattern is to break the journey here rather than pushing on tired. Around the town, the hills carry a scatter of small waterfalls and rock formations that see almost no visitors at all, and asking locally is the only way to find them.