Wildlife: Masked boobies and land crabs

Sunday, March 18 was a frustrating day!  We drove halfway around the island to the site of an abandoned NASA tracking station that was used for the Apollo and Space Shuttle missions.  Most of it was dismantled or destroyed around 1990, but one derelict building and numerous concrete pads remain.  Meg feels strongly that the Americans should have cleaned up their mess.  We then hiked and hiked and hiked through lava, basalt and ash (and most of it downhill meaning the climb back up would not be fun) in hopes of seeing the huge offshore rock - Boatswain Bird Island - that is a very important nesting place for South Atlantic seabirds.  We missed an unmarked path and never saw the island!  We did however reach a place where a seabird called the 'masked booby' nests.  These birds do not abandon their nests and can be closely approached.  Only when one is about six feet away, do they start squawking!  We decided we had earned dinner out that evening, but buying a meal was difficult.  Apart from the over-priced menu at the island's only hotel, the only snack bar open on Sunday is at the NAAFI club at the RAF base.  We chose pizza from the limited menu, but it took 70 minutes to be prepared! On Monday, March 19, we had our lunch party for our fellow South Atlantic travellers.  Some of us carried on to the Village Takeaway in Two Boats (village) for some excellent fish cakes for dinner, made with fresh tuna,  and then went to North East Bay after dark to see the Ascension native land crabs.  We saw hundreds of female crabs who have made their way down from the mountain to disperse their thousands of eggs into the sea.  The orange, yellow or red crabs average about six inches across.  They are so numerous you have to be careful not to step on them!  Meg was more than a bit spooked.  It's an eerie sight in the darkness punctuated by flash photography.

Staying near the top of Green Mountain, Ascension Island

On Thursday, March 15, the only slight excitement as we sailed the calm Atlantic seas was that a large tanker passed within about two miles of us.  On Friday, March 16,  Ascension Island came into view out of the haze and we dropped anchor about half a mile off the Georgetown pierhead.  Again, the drill of lifejackets, down some steep stairs onto a pontoon tied to the ship, jump the gap to a launch, motor in to shore and jump another gap onto the "pier."  The pier is just a concrete pad at sea level with steep steps leading up to the top of the low cliff on which the port sits.  We had arranged to hire a car - a Ford Focus - from Mr. Birdie, the owner of the only petrol station on the island who sent his daughter (?) to meet us at the port.  The daughter, a saint as are most people living on Ascension, was anxious to get back home to finish packing, since she was leaving for St. Helena that evening on the RMS. We then drove to the foothills of the major mountain (extinct volcano) on the island and up the 18 hairpin bend road, nearly to the top at about 2,800 feet, where we have rented Garden Cottage.  It was the residence of the farm manager in the days when there was a farm here,  including 50 milking cows.  With the advent of more frequent supply ships the farm was abandoned about 20 years ago.  The pigsties and cowsheds are derelict and overgrown.  For a week, we are living at a higher elevation than anyone on the island!  The mountain top is usually cloud-covered and has frequent rain showers, so we are living in a tropical jungle.  (Everything  in the cottage is damper than you can possibly imagine!)  That means a variety and abundance of beautiful flowers, ferns, bananas and other plants and a variety of insects, including cockroaches, and geckos.  We also have rabbits and the occasional wild sheep grazing on our lawn!  On Saturday, March 17, we visited the ruins of Fort Hayes in Georgetown.  Ascension was claimed and occupied by the British in 1815 and fortified to defend against any French attempt to use it as a base to rescue Napoleon.  Late that afternoon, we went to the pier in hopes of getting some fresh fish.  One small sport fishing boat did return with two four foot long dorado and some Brits kindly gave us about five pounds of fish, filleted right there on the pier!  We made good use of the fish in a lunch party the following Monday for several fellow-travelers with whom we have been crossing paths on the ship and on St. Helena - a geologist from Dublin, two young men making a film about the flora and fauna of the remaining British Overseas Territories, and a retired man from Northamptonshire and his wife, whose grandfather was once Postmaster in St. Helena.

We leave St. Helena on the RMS

On Monday, March 12, there was, as there always is, great excitement as the RMS St. Helena arrived from Capetown bringing returning saints, tourists, workers from the UK and supplies and shipments of all kinds, including a small bus.  Think "Wells Fargo Wagon" from The Music Man! There will be a rush to buy meat and fresh vegetables before they run out and stores resort to the usual choice of potatoes, onions and rather dejected carrots.  We drove to the southwestern part of the island and climbed High Hill - a steep but manageable trail that climbs 150 m to 707 m.  We finally broke out the video camera, made a video of driving down the steep and narrow Ladder Hill road to Jamestown.  Later, Jack monitored the video camera while Meg interviewed her cousin Caroline about growing up in England and life on St. Helena.  It will be a gift to her son, daughter and grandchildren.  A couple of financial notes:  petrol (gasoline for you Yankees) costs £1.52 per liter which is $8.92 per US gallon.  We heard an ad (local radio is often more like someone reading the newspaper;  in fact, the announcer IS reading the paper!) for a junior government statistician job paying a salary of £5,000 per year, and saw an ad for an accountant at the Bank of St. Helena (the only bank, with only one branch) paying a salary of £12,000 per year.  This is not to say that the cost of living on St. Helena is low.  Food prices seem about the same as the UK and petrol is higher.  Tuesday, March 13, was our last full day on the island.  We spent time in the museum which has at least something on every aspect of St. Helena history and life.  We returned the Toyota 4WD to Hensel who seemed to want to be an intermediary between us and whoever owns the vehicle.  We drove 337 km in 12 days.  We never saw any paperwork nor signed any agreement for the vehicle!  It was a large, heavy and unwieldy vehicle, not one we would have had for choice, but it did enable us to go on roads and tracks we could not otherwise have travelled. We had a final dinner with our cousin Caroline and Hensel with much discussion of the large, if disorganized, collection of family photos and documents that Caroline inherited from her father.  On Wednesday, March 14, we delivered our cabin baggage to the customs house at the requested time of 7 am.  It cannot be a less formal procedure.  One simply hands one's bag to a saint who takes it into the shed that serves as a customs house.  They do put the bags through a scanner (X-ray?) however.  We returned at the requested time of 10 am, said fond farewells to Caroline, Hensel, Nicole and Dax, all of whom came to see us off.  Then, again with minimal formality, there is a brief passport check.  One dons a lifejacket, steps into a ferry boat (at just the moment when the height of the boat rising on the swell matches the height of the dock, with two deckhands there to help), motors out to the RMS St. Helena, makes that step again onto a pontoon tied to the RMS and climbs the steep ladder steps on the side of the RMS.  Shortly before noon the RMS raised anchor, set "sail" for Ascension and the island of St. Helena rapidly disappeared into a watery haze hanging over the South Atlantic.

St. Helena barbecue and High Tea at the Golf Club

Saturday, March 10 (continued), undeterred by our near shipwreck earlier in the day, we went to a barbecue that evening at the new home of Caroline and Hensel's daughter and her husband.  Their driveway is steep and has two hairpins that cannot be negotiated except by reversing down one of them.  However, the house itself is an example of how modern and comfortable a house can be built on the island.  They had a number of their young friends for dinner as well.  One of note was a South African physician who married a saint and is on contract to work at the hospital for two years.  He will not do more than that because facilities and procedures are so limited that he feels he would lose his skills through lack of practice.  He is of note because his parents emigrated from South Africa to the US when he was small.  They went to Western Michigan University, so this young doctor was educated in Kalamazoo until he was 18.  And he is a Wolverines fan!  On Sunday, March 11, Jack started the day by climbing Jacob's Ladder again.  He put in some considerable effort and got to the top in 12 minutes.  Climbing the Ladder is an annual event that draws competitors from around the world.  The current record is just over five minutes which works out to two steps per second.  In the afternoon Jack took up an invitation from a British geologist we met earlier on the ship to attend the award ceremony of a golf tournament held at the island's only (9 hole!) golf course.  The tournament was definitely for saints, not tourists, and Jack met many interesting island characters.  The award ceremony was preceded by beers at the bar and succeeded by "High Tea" - ultrathin British sandwiches, sausage rolls, cheese straws, jam tarts, etc., and tea!

Near disaster at sea! We are ok.

Friday, March 9, we drove to the eastern part of the island and did a walk to Great Stone Top.  The trail is relatively safe, except for the final 20 yards or so.  It starts at 555 m, descends to 370 m and finishes at 494 m at the very edge of the sea cliff.  Great Stone Top is reputedly the highest sea cliff in the South Atlantic Ocean.  If one creeps to the edge, one can look down a 1,500 foot sheer drop to the sea!  We simply hadn't the nerve to make it to the very end of the path.  Some of the boulders along the trail are made of phonolite, i.e., "sound rock."  They ring with a distinct pitch when struck with a fist-sized rock! Saturday, March 10, we joined 18 other passengers for an around the island boat trip with a crew of three.  Being just offshore enables one to see the steep cliffs dropping directly to the sea that comprise almost all of the island's circumference.  (There are only about four places on the perimeter of about 24 miles, none suitable for anything larger than a 50 foot boat and only two are presently in use.)   It was supposedly a moderately calm day, but our 40 foot boat was pitching and rolling severely.  Thanks to doses of meclyzine, Jack was not among the three passengers who were soon "honking" over the side!  Meg gradually began to feel sick, but was saved, ironically, by an unfortunate incident.  About two-thirds of the way around the island, the boat suddenly and rapidly started taking on water.  Then the vessel lost all power.  The crew quickly dropped anchor and started bailing out water, gallon after gallon.  It was then found that a rope, improperly stored in the hold, had floated to the propeller shaft, been wrapped around it many times, catching a hose pumping sea water to the shaft to cool it and tearing the hose off at both ends.  With the hose gone, the pump had filled the engine compartment full of water, killing the engine.  The crew struggled for two hours trying to recover while we bobbed in the sea, in full sun, just off the rocks, but somewhat sheltered from the full swell.  This is what seemed to save Meg from full-blown seasickness!  The captain then gave up and decided to radio for help to be towed back to Jamestown.  The captain was then surprised to find that no one responded to his call because his FM radio couldn't reach anyone.  We were disabled and unable to make radio contact.  The passengers were mostly Brits, so it was "Keep calm and carry on" time!  After another hour and much bailing, we started for Jamestown with the captain lying on his stomach on the engine block, his hand reaching under the engine with a rag plugging up the output side of the pump so the engine wouldn't be swamped again.  We limped home three  hours late.  In compensation, any passenger who would still be on the island the following Saturday was offered a free dolphin-watching sea-trip.  We doubt there was much enthusiasm for it!  Those of us who would not still be on the island the following Saturday thought it would have been nice to have our £15 refunded, but then again... we did get our around the island trip!

Rain, forts, archives and fishcakes on St. Helena

On Wednesday, March 7, we got up early and drove to the northern part of the island, hoping to walk to a lookout point to watch the sun rise.  Instead we found ourselves in cloud and wind-driven rain trying to urge our four wheel drive vehicle up a muddy track on a steep ridge.  This was perhaps the low point of our visit to the island!  We returned to (by then) sunny Jamestown, got the key to the most famous of many forts on the island from the National Trust office (an interesting way to allow access to one of the more prominent tourist sites) and explored the fort, high up on a hill overlooking the island.  The fort is notable for having a 13th century style moat and drawbridge (the moat is now dry and the drawbridge buried), but was mostly built in the 1860s.  What was the builder thinking?  And from whom was he trying to defend the island?  Some have told us the French, but the French were long gone by the 1860s.  On Thursday, March 8, Jack got a haircut.  He waived the arsenic testing!  We went to the government archives . It consists of three rooms on the ground floor of the the government buildings called the "Castle."  The archivist offered to show us some documents.  We looked at handwritten records of government meetings from the 1680s and a newspaper dated 1816?????.  No mention of Napoleon in the 1816 record!  Napoleon and the island's governor were at odds, so maybe it was on purpose.  The documents seem rather too important to be stored in an atmospherically uncontrolled environment about 100 feet from the sea.  We had spicy tuna fishcakes for lunch.  (The 'saint' equivalent of spicy is "bite", e.g. "These fishcakes are made with bite, these ones are without bite.")  Locally caught tuna is the St. Helena equivalent of hamburger! Later in the day we heard about two drinking water problems on St. Helena.  A filter has failed, so the tap water can be a bit brown.  Worse, from some other cause, e. coli has been detected in the drinking water.  Since then we have been boiling all drinking water.  Fortunately, our flat has an English large electric kettle, so it is easy to boil and decant large quantities of water.

Apologies to our blog followers

Dear blog followers, We apologize for the lack of blog posts. Internet on St. Helena and Ascension is slow, expensive and only found at a few places that aren't all that convenient for us to get to. Example: on Ascension, we live up 16 hairpin turns at the top of an old volcano; the internet is at sea level in only one place, the only hotel - if you can call it that - on the island. We will be posting more as soon as we can. Love to all, Jack and Meg

St. Helena 2

6. On Thursday, March 1 we moved to a self-catering flat on Napoleon Street, 30 yards from the one and only roundabout in Jamestown connecting its three streets.... Main Street, Market Street and Napoleon Street.  That evening we encountered the first of many cockroaches with which we are sharing the flat! A highly toxic spray aptly named Dyroach has been put to use.  The next day, we drove our massive Toyota 4WD vehicle up the easier of the only two roads out of Jamestown -- a narrow road that climbs steeply along the cliff-side!  Cars ascending have the right of way.  If one meets one on one's way down, one has to back up to a place where the road is wide enough for two cars.  These places are marked (because they are not altogether obvious!) with a small black and white striped sign. Our destination was Napoleon's places of residence, firstly The Briars, and secondly Longwood.  We had a tour of both houses in which Napoleon lived, and complained, during his exile from 1815 to his death in 1821.    We discovered that a Wi-Fi internet connection, which is very slow, costs £6.60 per hour, at all three places that offer it.  That should explain some of the lateness of these blogs!  We are finding that most of the tourists here are from yachts.  A surprising number of couples, some with children, are sailing around the world.  Imagine being in a 40 foot yacht in mid-Atlantic!  Most aim to complete the voyage in 4 or more years. On the evening of Sunday, March 4, we ascended the 699 steps of Jacob's Ladder, a climb of 600 feet out of Lower Jamestown to the top of the hillside.   Not originally a tourist attraction, it was an inclined plane used to take supplies in and out of Jamestown in the 19th century.  On Monday, March 5, we hiked up Diana's Peak, the highest point on the island at 823 metres.  It provides views of nearly the entire island with its mountainous terrain cut by deep valleys.  On Tuesday, March 6, we had a tour of Plantation House, the St. Helena Governor's residence.  We saw the entire ground floor which has some excellent furniture and paintings.  The front lawn is more of a large paddock and features five giant tortoises, one of which, 440 pound Jonathan, is 180 years old and most likely the oldest living land animal.  Jonathan was moving slowly and munching the long grass contentedly! Later that day, we visited, in a cramped and untidy basement under a pub and only about 40 feet from the sea, the St. Helena distillery.  Yes, there is a Brit here who uses locally grown juniper berries, coffee beans and prickly pear cactus fruit to make gin, coffee liqueur and a curious, 43% alcohol, cactus drink called tungi (toon-ji)!

Arrival in St. Helena

On Tuesday, February 28, the RMS St. Helena arrived at the island of St. Helena.  The island is forbidding, with cliffs rising from the water's edge to a height of 600 feet or more nearly everywhere around the island.  Consequently, there are almost no sandy beaches.  Currently the only landing place anywhere on the island is at the foot of a very narrow valley that leads to the sea.  The capital, Jamestown, is built long and thin within that valley.  It's about a mile long and two streets thin. We were ferried ashore (life jackets again) by a small, twenty-person, open launch.   Again, thankfully in a fairly calm sea!  Customs was cursory:  we handed our forms to a customs agent, who didn't look at them and waved us through.  We walked down the wharf and found Caroline Peters and her husband.  They certainly gave us a warm welcome!  The next day, we walked to a (dry as it turned out) waterfall at the top of a valley.  The vegetation quickly turns to tropical.  In fact, there is often a very light rain or mist.  This trail is likely to be one of the easier ones on the island but was steep and muddy.  Back in Jamestown that afternoon, we found that most businesses, in the English tradition, are closed on Wednesday afternoon.  Jamestown was established at least as early as the first British occupation in 1659.  The buildings are old, but colorfully painted in pale colours as seems to be frequent in tropical climates.  The hotel (where the Duke of Wellington once stayed) in which we stayed for the first two nights has a pane of glass scratched 1781.  Ivy Yon, the proprietress, runs a tight and elegant ship, with frilly bed linen and doilies under everything, and a huge sitting room on the ground floor filled with puffy sofas and armchairs that look rather 1950s.  Everything is terribly English, and she is terribly friendly.  The hotel door stands open all day long.  Being American-trained, we are a little security conscious, but probably have no need to lock our car or our front door.  Crime is at a minimum here, with a couple of drunks in the lock-up every now and then.  

Late report on Ascension

Ascension Island is a principal nesting place for green turtles.  We had a night-time tour organized by two Ph.D.s from the University of Exeter.  The turtles, which average 3 feet long and 400 pounds and live to be about 100 years old, crawl out of the sea at night onto the beach, dig enormous holes with their flippers, lay about 100 golf ball size squishy eggs, and then cover them with dry sand before returning to the sea.  By next morning, the eggs are rather like large ping pong balls.  One can tell this, because a few are accidentally improperly covered, and birds circle the beach the next morning looking for eggs to eat.  The birds eat the contents and leave the ping pong ball shell.  The thousands of turtles that come to Ascension swim back to Brazil after laying several batches of eggs and spend the rest of the year eating sea grasses off the coast there. The best food on the island may well be at the Village Takeaway in Two Boats.  It's just a kitchen with a postage-stamp sized inside area for customers to give their orders, and a few tables outside.  Run by Phyllis, a friendly St. Helenian, we had tuna fish cakes one night and goat curry another!  We had pizza (what else!) at the public cafeteria at the USAF base and went to a Friday night fish fry (including eel, grouper and tuna) at the NAAFI on the RAF base. Petrol (gasoline for you Yankees!) is 98 p. per litre.  We'll let you convert to $/US gallon.  Considering the location, it seems cheap!

Voyage to St. Helena

On Sunday, 26 February, we packed our bags and delivered them to the pier head by 8 am as required.  They passed through a scanner but no one checked our passports or tickets!  After breakfast, we attended a service at the Anglican church (fulfilling our promise to the vicar, whom we met the night before at a going away party for the St. Helenian who had showed us around on day one in Ascension).  The congregation prayed for, among a few others, those travelling by sea!  We reported back to the pier at 1 pm, waited a while, were asked to show our passports (but not tickets), put on life jackets, waited some more, and boarded a civilized (it had a canopy) launch for the RMS (Royal Mail Ship) St. Helena anchored about ten minutes away out to sea.  (Yes, there is no deep water port at Ascension.)  Fortunately, the sea was calm and we managed the gaps from shore to launch, launch to pontoon and pontoon to the ship's steep ladder steps without incident. The St. Helenian shore crew (stevedores) were in no hurry to ferry and load the ship, so a desired 2 pm departure became a 3:30 pm actual set off.  Most of the 54 passengers were St. Helenians.  There were about 20, all Brits but Jack, who are travelling, mainly for business.  The purser, who sat at our table at dinner, told us that there were six actual tourists. This gives you an idea of just how few tourists visit the island.  The RMS St. Helena is a comfortable and modern ship but at 100 meters long and 7,000 tons, certainly not a cruise ship.  Thankfully the seas were calm and we fell into the over-eating routine typical of ship life immediately!

Driving and swimming on Ascension

On Wednesday, 22 February, we drove up the main, long extinct, volcano —  Green Mountain.  Alarmingly steep, the road features numerous hairpin bends.  In contrast to the cinder cones over most of the rest of the island, and the searing heat that radiates off them, the mountain is covered with wild ginger, grasses and various imported trees.  There is a thick bamboo stand at the top, which is shrouded in fog most of the time.  You can see the clouds of fog sweeping up the mountain from the south. We also drove to an ARIANE tracking station.  Apparently a single pointable dish antenna is sufficient to receive telemetry from the European Space Agency launches from Guyana.  The main employers on Ascension are the US and UK Air Forces who operate radars to track satellites, Cable & Wireless who provide civilian communication off the island with a link to a satellite and the BBC who receive the World Service by satellite and rebroadcast it to South America and Africa with a forest of antennae on the northern end of the island. A visit to the grocery store on the RAF base — otherwise known as the NAAFI (the "naffy" — the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) — turned up some oranges.  The other shops are out of fruit of any kind.  The one in Two Boats (a village toward the center of the island) has some potatoes, onions and some sweet potatoes that have seen better days! Most of the people who live here are St. Helenians, St. Helena being the closest land at 800 miles away.  Everyone you pass on foot says hello and almost all drivers you meet wave!  Dirt roads are rightly referred to as "dust roads."  The airport is universally called the 'airhead'!  Really. We've been to Comfortless Cove, one of only two safe swimming beaches.  The others are subject to undertow and strong currents — after all, one is jumping off the side of a volcano, even if it is partly under water!  The yellow sand beach in the tiny cove is about fifty feet across between the black rocks.  We had it all to ourselves all day, although we shared the water with small black (with a blue stripe) tropical fish who seemed to like to swim with us!  There wasn't an ounce of shade and the sun was fierce.  We applied sunscreen liberally, but still missed one or two spots.  The beach is called Comfortless because of the mid-1800s fever victims who were brought here from ships to recover but mostly died.  A small, grim, volcanic rock cemetery is nearby, with a few derelict stone and wooden grave markers, of which only one was really legible.