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.

  • 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.  🙂

  • Palau: Stone Money Quarry

    I’m on the Pacific island nation of Palau.  Today I was out at the Yapese Quarry at Metuker er a Bisech, where centuries ago brave seafarers from Yap came to quarry out limestone for use as Stone Money.

    One giant piece of money was damaged on the way down from the quarry and lies abandoned. Higher up the trail is a large limestone cave that was supposedly the quarry site.  This has fine stalactites and other scenic limestone formations.  The money was either quarried here or (more likely) on limestone outcrops nearby.

    Centuries back, carving out the stone money and transporting it across 280 miles of open ocean by canoe to Yap was a very arduous and risky venture, justifying the high prestige value associated with the stone money. But by the latter half of the 19th century, modern metal tools and sailing ships made the money both much easier to quarry and much easier to transport. So there was a boom in production. And then an inevitable bust, as the supply outweighed the demand and the perceived value of new money fell.

    Practicalities: You need a boat and guide to reach the quarry.  I had trouble finding a tour company which could arrange this for me.  I thought I had made a reservation with Palau Explorer, but that fell through.  So this morning I went into the Palau Visitors Authority office, who were really helpful.  They contacted an operator and arranged a private tour “if you can leave right now!” for $150.  When I went to the pickup point, it turned out the operator was actually the same Palau Explorer who I’d been trying to contact originally.  Oh well, I guess they had some kind of scheduling conflict.  Anyway, the trip worked out fine in the end!

  • Haiti: Cap-Haitien

    I’m on a short trip to Cap-Haitien, Haiti.

    Cap-Haitien is in the North of Haiti, well away from the troubles in Port-au-Prince. It is tolerably safe and also has some of the most interesting historical sights in Haiti, from the time of the Haitian Revolution, when the slaves overthrew the French and established a free black state.

    The #1 target on my list was Citadelle Laferrière, which was built by King Henri I (née General Henri Christophe) around 1820 to deter a French return. It’s seriously impressive, perched on top of a mountain, with giant walls, and with more that enough cannon to deter any sane general.

    Nearby are the grand ruins of Henri’s palace complex of San Souci. “The greatest palace in the Caribbean.” Designed to impress haughty Europeans.

    I also visited a key revolutionary site at Bois Caiman, where supposedly the first revolutionaries bound themselves in a voodoo ceremony in 1791.  They swore to kill all the French, naturally. There’s nothing left of the original site, but the government have constructed two modern ersatz voodoo sites. Not actually for tourists, but rather to highlight to locals what is seen as a key national-origin story.  (I stumbled and grazed my hand on the way up to the sacred voodoo cave, but I mostly managed not to drip any blood inside. I’m sure nothing bad will happen.)

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