Varela - pizza and the beach

About 4 hours from Bissau on the seafront border with Senegal is the charming beach village of only decent get-away from Bissau that requires neither a boat nor a passport.  Do not be fooled, Varela is, for all intents and purposes, a shabby village that is not on the beach but actually a couple of kilometres inland.  It has exactly nothing to do, nowhere to go, except for (1) the beach and (2) Chez Helene, run by you guessed it, Helene Fatima, and her Italian husband.  Which is a major reason to come here.

The rooms are, well, a half-step above camping.  The guests are all people you work with in Bissau.  But the pizza crust is - actually real pizza crust.  Done in a wood-burning oven (as much due to necessity as to a tradionalist approach to baking), the fresh bread in the morning and the pizza for lunch/dinner are the best in the country - and this from someone who lives in Italy (They also have seafood, which was nowhere nearly as good as at "the Senegalese" in Bissau).  Oh, and their pasta is cooked al dente.  But still, have the pizza.  And who cares if your shower was cold. 

PS - say hi to the cows on the beach.