Village

The village of Toubab Dialao sits on the cliff plateau, in a dozen lanes of red sand where you meet more goats than cars. The houses are low, often built of local stone and mud brick, with terraces looking at the sea thirty metres below; between them are pottery, batik and drum workshops, and hand-painted signs advertising dance classes.

Its centre of gravity is Sobo Badè, the house the Haitian playwright and ceramicist Gérard Chenet began building in 1975 and never really finished: mosaic staircases, vaults, corbelled terraces, a performance hall open to the drop. Percussionists rehearse there most days and the sound carries across the whole village — it is the place's soundtrack, from morning until sunset.

Below, the beach is short and enclosed, with pirogues, rocks at low tide and a path running north along the cliff. Fish is ordered in the morning for lunch; there is no supermarket, only corner shops selling bread, rice, eggs and sugar.

At night the village is dark: street lighting stops at the two main lanes and you walk between houses with a torch. That is worth knowing before you book — as is the fact that water and power can drop for a few hours, which everyone here handles without giving it a thought.

Percussion lessons are taken by the hour or by the week, the instrument is hired on site, and most of the teachers are village musicians who also play concerts in the evening. Plenty of travellers arrive for three days and leave ten days later, which is the best available description of the place. Practicalities: no cash machine, no supermarket, a single pharmacy out on the Yenne road, and decent phone coverage but a connection that crawls. Come with cash, a torch and something to read: the evenings here are long, and there is no television anywhere in the village.