The Wandering Scot

An occasional travel journal

  • São Tomé

    Olá from the island nation of São Tomé e Príncipe!

    I was surprised to learn that despite being only about 150 miles from the African mainland, São Tomé was uninhabited when it was discovered by the Portuguese around 1470.  So it was one of the rare colonial settlements that was genuinely on “vacant land”.

    It retains many traces of its Portuguese colonial past, such as Forte de São Sebastião, originating from around 1566.

    To my surprise I ran across a colonial-era memorial to Prince Henry the Navigator that is identical to one I saw half the world away in East Timor.  A reminder of the range of the Portuguese territories in the Age of Exploration!

    The island’s iconic image is the narrow tower of the Pico Cão Grande, an old volcano core, now rising 370 meters above the surrounding land.  It is quite striking, and my through-the-clouds photo does it poor justice!

  • Across the Mighty Congo

    I took a successful ferry ride across the Mighty Congo River, from Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) to Brazzaville (Republic of Congo).  I had carefully propitiated the river god with a delicious raisin pastry at breakfast, and was rewarded with smooth waters.

    Sadly, even a river god can’t help with the DRC bureaucracy.  This crossing is notorious for weird regulations and officials who deny all knowledge of English.  Fortunately I had a Francophone tour guide, and he had hired a “fixer” to make Customary Arrangements.  Even with that it took about an hour on each side and much patience to get through.

    The river ride was in a “pirogue” (canoe) which fortunately turned out to mean a small fast ferry.  It was all tolerably safe.  We were even required to wear life-jackets. Which I think was a good sign.

    To be honest, there aren’t very many tourists sights in either Kinshasa or Brazzaville, so I can’t really recommend them, but I did want to see the Mighty Congo itself, and the ferry was a good way to do it!

    The Mighty and Benevolent Congo

  • “Baggage Thieves Stole My KitKat!”

    I’m travelling in South-West Africa.

    At Luanda Airport arrivals, my bag arrived late, all by itself, which was rather suspicious. When I opened it, it had clearly been aggressively rummaged through.  I don’t carry any valuables in there, but to my dismay I discovered my Emergency Snack Supplies had vanished!

    Yes, the baggage thieves had stolen a KitKat and some Fig Newtons. The dogs!  But I guess even baggage thieves like to “have a break and a KitKat”.

    Since I had to fly back out of that same airport, I resorted to having my bag film wrapped. Which looks silly and won’t stop a determined thief, but it does at least help my bag blend in with many other similar ones. Grump.

  • Namib Desert

    I’m on a short excursion to the Namib desert.  This is the tail end of the rainy season and there was a lot of rain last week, so there was a lot of green around the edges of the desert and the Sand Sea itself was somewhat muddy.  But there was also a lot of real sand and imposing pinkish dunes.

    The area is definitely very scenic, with a contrast between a ground level of scrubby green, pink dunes, and blue skies.

  • Fiji: “Tour to Cannibal Cave With Lunch”

    I’m on a short stopover in Fiji.

    Inspired by some friends’ recent trip, I signed up for a “Tour to Cannibal Cave With Lunch”.  This one went into the Naihehe Cave, supposedly a tribal refuge and sacrifice center, where many people were killed in a final stand in the 19th c. 

    I was a little nervous about the tour, but I saw there was one very plump lady on it, so I thought I’d be OK.

    Visiting the cave requires wading in through a very low, very defensible, entrance, but then widens out into a large rambling system, with some fine limestone formations, including the so-called “Cannibal Oven”.

    Lunch was OK, although the meat tasted suspiciously like beef.

  • Nauru: WWII guns, an aggressive dog

    The Pacific island nation of Nauru fits conveniently in a single photo.  It has scenic limestone spires, lots of greenery, and a central area devastated by phosphate mining,

    There are various WWII artifacts scattered around.  I had to search in wild forest to hunt down one particular Japanese six inch gun.  While I was trying to find a way back to the road, a guard dog expressed the strong opinion that I was getting too close to her family’s home.  Growl, growl, bark, bark, etc.  But waving a large stick deterred her and I thought I’d passed safely by.

    But then I unwisely turned my back (a classic mistake) and she ran up behind me for a Parthian bite.  Sigh.

    Yep, a deep bite in my lower calf through my hiking pants, oozing blood.

    So I drove to Nauru’s (only) health center, the RON Hospital.  A nurse and then a doctor saw me quickly.  They assured me there is no risk of rabies or lycanthropy, but gave me a tetanus booster and a supply of antibiotics.  Healthcare on Nauru is free for residents, and they happily applied that to me too!

    All’s well that ends reasonably well.  I am still annoyed that I let myself get sucker-bitten by the Bad Dog, but I was impressed by my encounter with the local Hospital 

  • Yap: Land of Stone Money

    Last week I was on Palau, where I visited a Yapese quarry site. Today I’m 280 miles away on Yap itself, inspecting the resulting money hoards.

    There are hundred of surviving “coins”, ranging from 2′ to 8′ across. Some are held communally and displayed in village Money Banks. Some are held by families and displayed in front of houses.

    Among the surviving stones, a very few seem to be shiny marble-like rock and maybe that’s how the whole craze started. But many seem to be rather dull gray, even under the weathered surface.

    The true history of the stone money is hard to figure out. They seem to have originated about 500 years ago as rare prestige items, obtained with great effort and great risk from across an ocean voyage. As with many status items, there seems to have been a subsequent social one-upmanship pressure to obtain more, bigger, and better ones.

    Presumably the prestige came from the great effort of having quarried and fetched them all the way from Palau. So when David O’Keefe started mass production and importing in the late 19th c, the prestige evaporated and the bottom dropped out of the market.  I suspect many of the larger surviving coins are from the O’Keefe phase, but it’s hard to tell.

    P.S.  Since I had been a good and diligent tourist, my hotel rewarded me with a Stone Money Cookie with my lunchtime coffee.  🙂

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