A letter from Max
To all my friends…
I’m writing you from Santiago, one of the 10 islands on Cape Verde, 200 nautical miles off the coast of Senegal. I’ve embarked on a two month sail across the Atlantic, final destination Antigua. Mads and I joined Roselina, the 60-foot mahogany sailboat that we’re on, on the 1st of November on Gran Canaria, the Canary Islands. From there it took 5 days to sail to the Cape Verdes, and now we’re staying here for three weeks in total before we begin our sail across the Atlantic. It takes about two weeks to reach Barbados, and the homeland of rum…
So far it’s been a ‘multi-faced’ trip, so to speak, with both paradise-like islands, reef-snorkling, and surfing, as well as sea-sickness, sleeplessness, and constant humidity (it’s really annoying, all the clothes feel wet all the time). It really is a great adventure, and I’m doing something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. As usual though, I underestimated what I had signed up for. I would never imagine that I would get sea-sick, and I don’t think I quite understood how much the boat would roll back and forth when sailing (even in the nights when I’m trying to sleep! Surprisingly, it doesn’t take breaks…). But, I got over this fairly quickly. It’s just about getting used to doing your day to day things in a different environment (in this case, for example, trying to drink tea and keep your food on your plate at the same time in a 50 degree angle). Now, I noticed, I get sea-sick from stepping onto land instead (could you get too used to things, perhaps?).
We’re soon to take our dinghy and leave Roselina for Praia, the capital of Cape Verde. About 240,000 inhabitants and a former Portuguese fortress, I imagine Malmø with a shade of colonialism (hardihar). We’ve been to three other islands so far. We first visited Sal, home to the international airport and therefore most tourist resorts that exist on Cape Verde (tourism hasn’t quite reached the Verdes yet, although many Italian investors are building hotels and restaurants, trying to attract more spenders). This part of the island is shaped like a half-moon, is fairly flat, and is ideal for wind- and kitesurfing since there aren’t too many waves but a whole lot of wind. Lasse, a guy on the ship, and I decided to keep at a distance, and go to another part and try out some wave-surfing instead. After a couple of hours we got the hang of it and spent the rest of the day perfecting our techniques. There’s a certain terminology which goes hand in hand with surfing, such as ‘dude’, ‘bummer….man’, ‘hang loose’, and so on. Towards the end of the day we were using it more or less successfully without sounding like mere wannabees. Just to feel as genuine as possible we bought a shark-tooth necklace each. Totally radical.
We then sailed on to Boa Vista which is known, not only for its superb surfing, but also for its reef right outside the natural harbour (meaning that we lie by anchor, not by a dock). Perfect opportunity to try out the new harpoon lying around the boat. I pulled on a pair of flippers and a mask, cocked the gun, and got in. I spent two hours feeling like James Bond. The fact that I didn’t manage to spear anything didn’t really matter right then. We then spent rest of the day on the island, and after strolling around for a while I asked a man for directions to a restaurant with cheap lobster. He smiled and told us to follow him. We reached a (by the looks of it) pretty dull building, and after shouting a name a couple of times a man came out and opened a side-door for us. We stepped into a beautiful courtyard decorated with Bougainvillea (which grows everywhere here) and were given a simple menu in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German (I suspect that they do this often with tourists). We spent a couple of hours here, eating grilled swordfish and tuna while being served the locally distilled rum (50 percent transparent ‘mind-clearer’, as the man called it. Hell, it’s hot as it is here). After the rum we naturally thought it appropriate to move on to a local pub, where we happened to meet Cape Verde’s most popular guitarist. After chatting for a while he ran off to fetch his guitar and two friends, who together gave a great live show for two hours in a smoky back room of the pub. They then came along to the local night club where we were introduced to what I would call ‘West African dancing’; that is, using what yo mama gave ya. After what one of the girls did to me there, I could sue (even back home in Sweden). Really cool day.
After leaving Boa Vista we sailed on to the capital of Cape Verde, Praia. The city didn’t look very promising by the looks of the industrial harbour where we laid anchor at arrival, and it definitely didn’t look better after having been denied registration and entry because the official was ‘busy’ (he was talking, laughing, and drinking beers with two friends). The next morning we headed for the city in our little dinghy (often called our umbilical chord to land). I spent the day exploring Praia, which has a heavy colonial touch. Praia was the main trading city of the Portuguese and where most ships heading for the Cape stopped by for bunkering up supplies. The old market, which is more than two hundred years old, is one relic from the successful trading days. I squeezed my way through the crowded main entrance of the Mercado Municipal, entering the chaotic no-man’s-land armed only with my camera. Red, green, purple, yellow, orange, brown, and white vegetables, fruits, and spices; papaya, lemon, mango, lime, pumpkin, lettuce, carrots, apples, oranges, bananas; hubbub, shouting, bargaining, happy faces, angry faces, arguing, and children racing around the stands; goods flying like projectiles, smells (sweet, bitter, strong, weak), tuna, sword fish, shark, red tongue, goats, sheep, piglets. A potpourri for the senses.
This ‘market-feeling’ is apparent in the entire city. Every inner-city street is lined with vendors of all sorts, selling everything from live piglets for immediate slaughter (fast-food!) to fake Hawaiiana flip-flops produced in China.
By now it’s become common practice to explore every aspect of our destinations. This naturally includes night-life. After dinner on board Roselina someone brought out a bottle of rum, and the rest of the crew began fetching glasses and coke in silent consent. We are, however, time after time convinced that rum and coke doesn’t fit in a wagging boat. This time, it all happened to end up on my lap and on the couch. We interpreted this as a divine sign and made our way into town. We found that the capital of Cape Verde differs from that of Denmark in that Wednesdays are generally not as eventful. It took us a total of two hours (including a few stops at pubs along the way) to find an open night-club. We mingled with a crowd of about four people, and surprisingly had a great time dancing, although it took us quite some time to figure out that the girls flattering us with so much attention were prostitutes. This was our first encounter with prostitution on the trip, and so the naïve Nordics ended up leaving the club angry and disappointed.
The next morning we headed for another town on the same island, Santiago. Supposedly the most popular weekend-destination of chic Praia-inhabitants, we found paradise. A rounded, white beach, a reef with an abundance of fish, a beach-volley net, and a picturesque little town with people not too influenced by the increasing tourism. All this, nicely enveloped in a sheltered cove. As if to celebrate the find, Dirk and I took to cooking a huge dinner. It took 4 hours of sweat and tears, and whole lot of Rosemary and wine. The result was a huge success (this is written by one of the cooks, mind you). People were too tired and full after this to follow our common practice of night-time exploration, and so skipper-Troels, Lasse, and I ended up going alone. Paradise wasn’t as impressing on this aspect, and we ended up retreating after only an hour or so. On the way to the beach, the silhouette of a staggering figure approached us and asked, in incomprehensible French, if we could give him a lift to his yellow, slim, luscious, long-distance-racer-boat (a real beauty). It’s an obligation to aid a fellow seaman in need, and so naturally we did the drunken Frenchman the favour. We climbed aboard his boat, and I asked if he (being French) could spare a bottle of wine, perhaps. “Bat, af kaaarse!” Guillome fumbled, tumbled, and fell around for half an hour until he found a bottle, and spent another half an hour finding a cork-screw opener. And so we drank, and tried to remember the French we learned in secondary school, communicating though body-language and a mixture of Spanish and Frenglish. As if to challenge our brain-capacity even further, the Frenchman offered us his captain’s 50% rum from Antigua. Our manners forbade us to deny the offer. We made our way back to Roselina at sunrise.
I spent the following morning and afternoon rehabilitating my body by snorkelling, and gave harpoon-hunting another go. Finally, two hours of work paid off. Three fish in total. I was James Bond that day.
In the late afternoon we decided to try to get to the mountains and villages that we saw in the distance. We rented an ‘Alluger’ for three hours (a pick-up truck; the word more or less means ‘for rent’), and began the “I’ve-seen-the-light” drive up the mountains (the roads were clinging on to the near vertical mountainsides, something that our driver ignored when he put the petal to the metal). We entered a completely different Cape Verde – a landscape that rather made the jungles of South America come to mind than the infertile volcanic earth that is so common on Cape Verde. At sunset we sailed for Fogo, home to the only active volcano on Cape Verde.
Fogo’s inhabitants have a bittersweet, love-hate relationship with the volcano. She is the main appeal of the island, and therefore the main source of income, but also the main reason for the immediate poverty. She erupted last in 1995 for a whole year, devastating villages and farm-land, and posed a huge challenge for the government which was already struggling with a small budget. We decided to rent a jeep to take a closer look at her. It naturally never came to mind to bring a fleece, boots, and a water-proof jacket along to the top of a volcano (magma and extreme degrees come to mind), panting in the heat while considering our choices of clothes. How wrong where we. The temperature dropped to five degrees at 3200 metres, and the rain didn’t improve things on the back of the chilling pick-up. In shorts and a t-shirt. When we reached the base of the hike to the crater we remarkably found a small village of around 20 huts and grape-plantations. We took one look at the steep 3-hour climb, and another at Linne who was near shaking from hypothermia, and decided to abandon the thought of hard work in the wind and rain, and instead strolled over to the wine-tasting café just around the corner. Wine made from grapes grown in volcanic earth. Exotic, but tastes like crap. After some fake smiling and empty compliments we bought our way out of the house. It cost us about 30 euros and the future pain of having to drink four bottles of exotic, crap-tasting wine.
We sailed on to Cape Verdes 2nd largest city, Mindelo, the same day. The arrival wasn’t as exciting as the sail itself: on my night watch at three in the morning, we spot a thunder and lightning storm ahead, exactly in line with our course. The skipper tells us to carry on, “usually these storms have more bark than bite.” Fair enough, he knows what he’s talking about. I mean, he’s been sailing professionally for fifteen years. Ten minutes later, he then pops his head up from his weather-charts and says (somewhat nervously I thought, but that might just have been me), “You should probably gear up.” We put on water-proofs, harnesses, and life-jackets. Seems reasonable, wouldn’t want to get wet in the rain. He then hurries up on deck, and takes diving equipment (already tightly secured to the railing in a huge bag), sail covers, the fishing rod, and anything ‘that might be washed off’ down below. “Just in case”, he says reassuringly. Heh. The lightning is getting closer, soon we’ll be right below it. The mast lights are turned on, and three of the crew get up on deck to take down the main- and genua-sail while I’m asked to steer the boat up against the wind. I can handle this, no problem! NOTE: the following text may be tainted by the obligatory exaggerating quality of seafarers. The storm hit us in an instant. The seas roared and frothed, threw us around, and the rain staring falling, hitting the deck like huge hail. In reality nothing really happened. We just had a short shower of rain and a bit more wind, but the build-up to the anti-climax was cool.
We reached Mindelo in the morning. The main reason for sailing here was to drop of the skipper so that he could catch a plane to another Sal where he was to meet his girlfriend. The problem was that he hadn’t booked a ticket, relying on a free space on stand-by. Unfortunately this didn’t work out, and the only solution seemed to be to sail him there. Half the crew was keener on checking out Mindelo, though, and decided to stay back for the four days that the journey would take. This allowed for a four-day long glimpse into the rock-and-roll lifestyle. Six of us checked into a cheap old colonial-style hotel and loaded up with rum and coke, books and music. In the nights we did town, and in the days we relaxed at Casa Café Mindelo over a cup of cappuccino and a book. Very chic.
One of the obvious high-lights of Mindelo is its status as caopeira-centre. Capoeira is a Brazilian mixture of war-dance and martial arts, and spontaneous ‘battles’, where two fighters challenge each other, can be seen around the city on streets and squares. We were drawn into a crowd circled around two fighters, and stayed for the half-hour that the session lasted, enjoying the traditional rhythmical music and insane acrobatic stunts.
At the moment grocery-bags and crates are flying around my head – we’re in the lengthy process of bunkering up supplies for our two-week sail across the Atlantic. Spirits are high, but it’s difficult to make out any expectations amongst the crew. None of us know what to expect. We will leave Mindelo harbour in four hours with a mixture of fear, adrenaline, and respect for the great obstacle that lies ahead.
Max