Bonthe's great pleasure is its decay. Grand 19th-century houses still line the streets, their wooden verandas sagging, their masonry softened by tropical damp and creeping green. These are the villas of the town's glory days, when Bonthe was a thriving British trading hub and the region's main port. Many follow the Krio board-house style found across the Sierra Leone coast: two storeys, wide verandas, a stone base beneath timber walls. They are beautiful in the way that abandoned things often are, and exploring them is the chief reason to come. The town was laid out on a grid, much like Freetown, so wandering is easy and getting lost is nearly impossible.

Bonthe was settled in the 17th century by the Royal African Company, which used the island as a trading base - and later, after abolition, as a staging point for operations against illegal slave traders working this coast. A graveyard in the town holds the remains of British soldiers who died here, far from home in a place few of them would have chosen. The headstones are a sobering counterpoint to the easy peace of the modern town, a reminder that this quiet shore was once a front line in one of history's great struggles. Standing among the graves, it is worth pausing on the full weight of what happened on these shores: first the trade in enslaved people, then the long effort to stop it.

Reaching Bonthe is an adventure in itself, and a slow one. From Bo you take a shared taxi or minibus to Mattru Jong on the mainland, then wait for the next day's transport boat out to the island. There is no rushing it. Once on Sherbro there are no roads beyond the town, so a guide is essential and the waterways do the work of highways. You can hire a bicycle to roll around Bonthe, but the island's true sights, its remote fishing villages and quiet creeks, are reached by boat. Ask around in town; someone always knows a boatman.

Beyond the town, Sherbro Island unfolds in rice paddies, mangroves, and astonishing birdlife. Storks and pelicans wade the shallows; tropical species flit through the trees. Hire a boat and you can drift between fishing villages that see few outsiders, the whole island wrapped in a peace that is genuinely rare. And if Bonthe still feels too connected, the Turtle Islands lie off the tip of Sherbro, scattered and barely inhabited, with only the most basic accommodation. They are about as far off the grid as Sierra Leone gets, the place you go when remote stops being remote enough.