Cape Verde

January 2017

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Until recently, I didn’t even know that Cape Verde was a country in its own right. I thought it was still a Portuguese territory. The ‘package holiday’ markets have been pushing this place for some time but I was really just interested in ticking it off. Still, you can’t grumble at £510 for an all-inclusive week at the end of January on the island of Sal.

We flew with Thomas Cook from Gatwick Airport leaving January 25th. The plane was packed and very cramped. Leg room seemed to be irrelevant despite the 6 hour duration. Everything was extra and there was no entertainment centre. Still could be worse. We flew over the sea for many hours, finally spotting one of the eight islands which was just a yellow sandy island. When we few over Sal it was like looking at the same island. .

We arrived mid-afternoon to 25’c sunshine and a small windy airport. Stamped into Cape Verde, luggage pickup, directed by a rep to a bus outside and then to another bus. There were colourful murals on the walls. The 20 minutes transfer south to Santa Maria was an eye opener. One two-laned road with little traffic on it. From the road, you could almost see the Atlantic on both coastlines. The island is just over 30km long and a max of 12km wide. The landscape was just brown, stony plains and desert sands deposited by winds from mainland Africa. .

There is only one guidebook about Cape Verde by Brandt. They introduced it as “About 500km off the coast of West Africa is a scattering of islands called Cape Verde. The dozen islands that make up this former Portuguese colony have recently become a popular package holiday destination.” The description was spot on “Each of these volcanic islands have their own various stages of erosion ranging from 390m to 2800m in height and individual landscapes – volcanic to flat desert, verdant mountains to panoramic white beaches.” Except for the verdant mountains. Nothing grows on Sal (‘Salt’) and the highest peake – Monte Grander in the northeast was only 406 metres tall.

The Islands were discovered in the mid 15th Century (1455-1461) by Portuguese sailors and in the early 19th Century, a salt export business was established but collapsed in the mid 20th Century. The population are mostly part African, part Portuguese. Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini was looking for a site where aircraft could stop to refuel between Europe and South America and Portugal sold him the rights to build an airport on Sal which they bought back in 1945. During the years of apartheid, South African Airways were banned from many African countries and often refuelled here as well. .

With warm and sunny weather all year round, tourism has revitalised the island. Sal’s population has soared from 5,5000 in 1970 to around 20,000 now and it is the main tourist island, two thirds of which are in Santa Maria the main tourist resort on the south coast and our base for the week. .

Brandt described Sal “There can be nowhere on earth as elemental as Sal. Any mountains, streams or vegetation that may have adorned it in the past have been obliterated by the wind over millions of years. Now Sal is just rock, sand and salt,still blasted by the winds.” .

Delivered to our hotel on the outskirts of Sal, the Crioula, we were given a nice quiet ground floor room with a large bed, en suite bathroom and a balcony outside to sit and feed the tame African sparrows. It took a minute to walk to reception and the bar. The bar had a decent beer called Strella and on the all-inclusive, you were limited to the usual spirits (we survived on gin and tonics and rum and cokes). There was also a decent (Portuguese?) red wine at meal times which was hard to refuse. .

The large shallow swimming pool had a casual bar built above it. There were always sun beds available around the pool or sandy areas. At the back of the hotel, you walked out to a wide extensive white sandy beach, a lovely azure coloured sea, crystal clear at the edges. The winds were always strong and kite surfing seemed to be the sport to do here. .

The restaurant had its ups and downs. The breakfasts and lunches were excellent. Kitchen staff served you from behind counters for the main dishes and you helped yourself to everything else. I had bacon, omelettes and croissants most mornings. The lunches had a good variety – different meats, many fish dishes, pizza. But the evening meals were patchy. Sometimes it was excellent roast beef. On other nights, even I was struggling to find something and I eat anything. So we tended to pig out on the lunches and graze in the evenings. But overall, the food was ok. I still gained weight! .

The hotel seemed to be predominantly Italians but maybe that was because they made the most noise. We skipped on the evening entertainment which was usually a team of young ‘Butlins’ type.red coats who organised activities during the day and danced in the evening. With very little to do on Sal, we had already accepted that would be a very quiet and relaxing holiday. Which it was. .

I kicked off the holiday with two days diving at Cape Verde Divers which ironically were based in the next hotel. We were driven to the pier at Santa Maria where we boarded an inflatable boat with two powerful outboard engines. The sea was always choppy.

Dive 1 at Poutinha down to 24m for 40 mins. Sights were 2 lobsters, a stonefish and moray eels. Dive 2 at Farol down to 21m for 50 mins. Sights were 1 small nurse shark in a cave, a sea snake, more stone fish and moray eels.

On Day 2, the sea was very rough. Originally we were going to dive the Russian fishing trawler Kwarcit (‘Boris’) which was confiscated after being caught transporting illegal immigrants from Africa and now sits at 28m. But when we got to the site, the current was too strong. A second site was also abandoned. For Dive 1 We ended up doing a deep dive at Preta Funda down to 31m for 33 mins. Sights were large shoals of yellow sea bream. It was really rough on the surface. Dive 2 at Santa Antao down to 11m for 40 mins was probably the best dive. It was a small 1966 freighter wreck which we could dive through but what was special were the 200+ scorpion fish (like puffer fish) that hung around the wreck. All sizes from babies to adults. I had never seen so many in one place. That was a special dive..

We broke up the ‘monotony’ of sunbathing on the beach in the morning and around the pool after lunch (so we were closer to the bar!). .

One afternoon we walked the kilometre to Santa Maria to get some Escudoes from an ATM (though Euros are accepted). The roads were cobbled with black volcanic lava. Small and unassuming, its coastal road and surrounding ones were lined with low pastel coloured buildings with restaurants, bars and souvenir shops. Poor people lived further inland in half- finished and unpainted houses made of breeze blocks. A couple of communication towers were disguised as tall palm trees. .

On another morning we took a stroll along the 3km of white sand and no rocks to Ponta Sino at far end in west. The beaches were spectacular, the sea looking glorious and when you went swimming you still walked out on sand. .

One day we rented a car for 45 Euros to tour the island. We could have signed onto an organised day tour costing 40 Euros each, but we prefer to do our own thing. We had unlimited mileage on an island with limited mileage! .

We left the cobbled streets of Santa Maria and headed north. The Zoological Gardens and zoo were 5 minutes north of the town. This was a little gem. Nicely displayed vegetation (maybe it looked good because it was the only greenery we saw all week), with parts of it full of palm trees and flowers being grown (for the hotels?). In between the vegetation were a children’s zoo with rabbits, peacocks, guinea fowl, goats, parrots, a couple of moth eaten donkeys and a monkey. .

5 minutes further on, we stopped to take in a rocky coastline with the sea crashing into the low level rocks. The tourist industry heavily promotes the turtles but it was the wrong season. They only come ashore between June and September. The flat barren brown desert landscape continued. “The brown terrain makes Mars look fertile.” (Brandt) .

Just north of the airport was the capital of Sal - Espargos which lay in the centre of the island. We skirted around it and made for Palmeira, the small port. Heading for Buracona the terrain was “about 25 shades of brown (including chocolate, wine-stained and rusted with a few bent over trees”. (Brandt). .

The Brandt guidebook said that Buracona was “an exhilarating natural swimming pool encased in black lava rock over which white foam cascades every few minutes”. There were lots of tour buses outside when we arrived. A wooden walkway took us down to the foaming lagoon where the sea entered, rose in the confined area and crashed up against the back wall. The surges were variable. Sometimes, it was a gentle rising of water before withdrawing. On other occasions, the amount of water was much larger, crashing against the rocks and a follow up soon after. It was quite mesmerising to watch. Nearby was the Blue Eye, an underground tunnel. Everyone was lining up to see a hole in the ground. We didn’t bother. .

We drove around Monte Leste (263m) before heading along a dirt track back towards Espargos. We spotted some tour groups parked up around a scruffy bar in the middle of nowhere. They were all kneeing on the ground and peering into the distance. It turned out to be the mirages at Terra Boa. A large lake seemed to shimmer in the distance, except that it didn’t if you see what I mean. .

After a beer at a popular café in Espargos, we headed east for the imposing volcano crater and salt lake of Pedra de Lume. This is Cape Verde’s prime tourism location and supposedly on the UNESCO waiting list of World Heritage sites. Inside a ring of low mountains lies a “sweeping geometry of saltpans in blue, pink and green depending on their stage of salt formation all separated by stone walls.” (Brandt). Originally bags of salt were strapped to pack animals which had to climb up and down the slopes of the volcano until 1804 when a tunnel was cut through the volcano wall. In 1919 a tramway was built and up to 25 tons of salt an hour was transferred to the port and shipped to Africa. Markets shifted and the saltpans fell into disuse by 1985. .

It is now a place for tourists to come and float in the salty water. I had experienced something similar in the Dead Sea in Israel. But these were just a small salt lakes. Our buoyancy was incredible. I could lay on my stomach and put both of my arms and legs out of the water like a skydiver and not sink. Minutes of fun except if you got any of the water in your eyes. A couple of women had opted for the mud packs at the spa there and looked rather silly when they came to wash off all the black volcanic ‘mud’ off their skin. .

The only problem is that when you come out, you scratch all over from the salt. We put our clothes back on and drove back to the hotel at the other end of the island. Just for a shower. When I handed the car back the following morning, after we went for an early drive around the Santa Maria area, we had done 100km in total. .

I suppose that was all we did in Sal. I think it would be a great place to learn to Kite Surf. Just fly down there for a week of lessons. The diving was average – not the best and not the worst place I’ve done it. The beaches are spectacular. There were no aggressive beach touts. I couldn’t see the point of expensive flights to some of the other islands. Most of them would have been the same. Country 134. Been there, scratched that.