We could have started anywhere. We started in Cape Verde on purpose.
The first journey needed to be easy enough to reach that nervous first-timers would say yes, and rich enough in soul that they'd come home changed. A few Atlantic islands off the coast of West Africa turned out to be exactly that.
Music you can't fake
Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente, is the country's cultural capital — the home of morna, the aching, ocean-blue music the world knows through Cesária Évora. You don't visit morna. You sit in a room while someone who carries it plays, and you understand something about the islands that no guidebook holds.
That evening became our signature learning experience. Not a show — a doorway.
Mountains that don't look real
An hour by ferry from Mindelo sits Santo Antão: green ridges plunging straight into the sea, terraced valleys, and the Cova crater falling away toward Paúl. It's some of the most dramatic walking anywhere on earth, and almost no one on the digital-nomad circuit has heard of it.
The shape of everything to come
Two islands. Two moods. One settled, one wild. Work where it's easy to work; explore where it's impossible not to. That two-phase shape — which you can read more about in Two phases, one trip — became the template for every CoworkTour after this one.
Cape Verde first, because it teaches you the whole idea in eight days. Everywhere else we go, we'll be trying to recreate the feeling this place gave us for free.