Santa Luzia, Dali and Shamans

Otra Vida at anchor, Santa Luzia

Santa Luzia is an unpopulated island, a rare thing indeed these days.  I don´t mean an unpopulated rock, of which there are plenty in the world, but a true island with hills, valleys, beaches.  People have lived here in the past, but life was hard due to limited fresh water, and the island was abandoned in the late 19^th century with the population moving to other islands in the Cape Verdes. 


We anchored off Santa Luzia for five days.  Landing by dinghy is challenging due to the surf and we only did so once, anchoring the dinghy outside the surfline and swimming ashore.  I also snorkelled off a rocky outcrop near the boat which promised lobster and garoupa but delivered neither, and the spear gun remained in the dinghy.


Sunset

Dali-esque dream landscape

With the warm sunshine and the moderate cooling breezes this was a special stop.  The hammock got plenty of use.  Late afternoon sun turned the slopes of the island into a Dali-esqe dreamscape of endless sand, boulders with long sharp shadows, and black folds of volcanic rock highlighted in the fading light. 



Strange clouds over Santa Luzia

There is a tangible familiarity to this view, a clear recognition of the forms and shapes and colours and shadows here in some of Dali´s paintings.  This comforting recognition will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in the Alt Emporda area – Dali´s paintings are peppered with iconic visual quotations from Port Lligat, Cadaques and Cabo de Creus – rocks, bays, fishing boats, the curve of a hill.  But there are other landscapes in Dali´s paintings too, and they are not from that area.  It is many years since I read a lot about Dali but as I recall he did little travel in his early life beyond his journeys to and from Paris, and I certainly can´t imagine him having made a journey to the Cape Verdes – in those days a considerable undertaking indeed.






Full moon rising over the island

Now Santa Luzia surely isn’t the only place in the world that has reddish-orange volcanic gravel, black volcanic hills, boulders, and an aspect open to the setting sun.  But the point is that the places Dali visited physically, as far as I know, have nothing close to such a landscape.  Where did it come from, and in such detail?  Dali, Breton, Bunuel and the other surrealists were trying to access dreams and report back what they found each in their own way.  Dali may not have visited these landscapes physically, but somehow in his dream life he did, and what he found in his dream life seems not to have been based on any likely experience he had in his waking life.  It came from somewhere else.





Watching the sun go down behind Sao Vicente

Jung would point to the collective unconscious.  Others would point to astral travel or any number of new age or ancient wisdom explanations.  There are interesting parallels between these concepts and the worldview of shamanic tribes that I am reading about in preparation for travel to the Amazon basin in the next months.  Oversimplifying considerably, our modern day western view of reality seems to offer two broad choices: the existentialist view of a dead universe of random combinations entirely without meaning, or the religious view of a supervised duality requiring uncritical subservience and largely dismissing direct experience.   The surrealists and the shamanic tribes both seem to point to a possible third choice.  It is shaping up to be an interesting few months.



The French Count´s Legacy

Pico de Fogo dominates the valley

Fogo is the highest island in the Cape Verdes, and naturally its volcano was on our hiking list.  There are no good anchorages around the island´s steep-to shores, and we left Otra Vida anchored in the small port of Furna on the adjacent island of Brava with a local person watching over her, and took the inter-island ferry to Sao Felipe, Fogo.  A pleasant treat to be on a boat knowing someone else is responsible for navigation.


Fogo has a unique settlement in the caldera of the volcano, founded by an interesting Frenchman, the Count de Montrond.  He arrived in 1870 in circumstances that remain vague – either he killed someone in France, or his lifestyle was too scandalous even for a French aristocrat.  Either way, his family decided that his monthly allowance was contingent on him remaining outside France.



The village, squeezed between lava flows and the caldera rim

Part of the vineyard in Cha de Caldeiras

Having decided to settle in the uninhabited caldera, far away from prying French eyes, he wasted no time sorting out life as he wanted it.  Vines were planted, coffee too, and winemaking and production of goat cheese started.  The Count also began his lifelong project of populating the valley with the help of the 47 wives he collected.  Most of the people in Cha de Caldeiras today are descended from the Count, some more directly than others, including the owner of the small guest house we stayed in, Cecilio Montrond.



Cecilio described the interesting family arrangements of the caldera, still influenced by the Count´s example.  Unlike his father (2 wives, 24 children), or his uncle (5 wives), Cecilio emphasised how modern he was, having “only” one wife.  Elena, as is typical in the caldera, has children by more than one man, and all six children (three by Cecilio) live together in Cecilio´s house.   Everyone seems to get along fine.



Early morning hike up the peak

Our guide for the hike up the volcano, Azuko, was born and raised in the caldera, and has African features and a noticeably pale skin.  His great-great-grandfather came up here to work for the Count … and somewhere along the line the Count’s genes got mixed in with one of his daughters.

 

After our early morning hike up the volcano and a wonderfully child-like descent in giant steps down steep volcanic sand we were keen to sample the local wines.  We saw what looked like stray vines growing in clusters on our drive up in an aluguer (shared pick-up truck) the previous day.  It took a little time to realise that these bush vines are actually part of the vineyard, along with some more densely planted areas, all impossibly green against the black volcanic sand background. 


Maret coming down the volcanic black sand, dust trail blazing behind.  Much, much steeper and more fun than this photo makes it look.

We sat at an outdoor table at one of the simple restaurants in the village and ordered the local red wine, Manecom.  The doce (sweet) version is preferred locally but the seco (dry) was more to our taste. It´s over-extracted, jammy, tannic, very minerally, and oxidised -  am I selling this well! - and perhaps it wouldn’t work outside the caldera, but here looking up at the volcano and surrounded by lava flows it goes down easily and is very agreeable indeed, especially with the caldera´s salty barnyardy quiejo fresco (fresh goats cheese).

Approaching the village



Soon a rather well served French guy who lives in the village started talking to us, the latest tourist novelties on the terrace.  His English and Spanish were even worse than my French, so the rhetoric he directed our way was aided by a good amount of gesticulation. He talked of England and how General de Gaulle spent time there which redeemed the country in his eyes.  Next up is Guy Debord whose name is on the T-shirt I am wearing.  Debord and the soixante-huitards are not to his taste … he wildly mimicks Debord as a charlatan and poseur, arms flying, eyes rolling.  After a few more glasses of wine he gets a little rowdy, running to the road shaking his fist and shouting in French at some American-Cape Verdians touring their ancestral country on quad bikes, equipped with imported impatience at a 30 minute wait for lunch, expensive sunglasses, youthful energy and designer t-shirts - an intrusion of reality into the Frenchman´s de Gaullian world of judgementalism, order and hierarchy. We learn little of him other than his politics and that he lives here now.

Casa Ramiro

After a pleasant lunch of cremated fish and smoky grilled chicken we stroll down the village´s only road to Casa Ramiro, a supply shop and bar run by another descendant of the Count, looking like a displaced Breton fisherman stranded in the mountains.  The bar is the local place for live music.  Among the patrons is a visitor from Paris, also part of the Count´s gene pool, with dreadlocks and sunglasses and the relaxed urbane sophistication of a successful musician returning home, playing guitar and singing impressively with a half dozen other local people on various instruments.  This is not a concert, just Sunday afternoon at the pub.  The music gets louder and more energetic, and people start dancing.  

As the afternoon sun gets low a white guy walks into the bar and starts a conversation with us.  He is vague on many things, and that is just fine – one´s past here is but a detail.  He finally admits he is Canadian, with the enigmatic comment “that is close enough”.  We talk about the Cape Verdes and then about South America and the Amazon and northern Brazil, looking for insights and tips for our travels in the next few months.  His answers continue to be rather non specific, like he doesn’t want to be tied down to having been in any particular place at any particular time.  He says he has never had to work for money (fortunate guy) and now travels.  I can´t help but feel that there is something more to his story, but am – as I´m sure he intended – no wiser as to what that is after an hour´s conversation.  After sunset he goes outside to stand on a wall and watch dusk.  A few minutes later he suddenly jumps down, sprints over to the window next to our table, and tells us we really must sail to Ushuaia for the scenery.

Sunday afternoon music

Walking back to our little pousada we come across Cecilio in another bar.  He is listening to a football match on a small radio, and relaying information on the eventual triumph of Benfica to others in the bar, along with talking with us in his rapid fire heavily accented English.  After talking for some time I realise that his understanding of English is far more limited than his ability to speak it, and he is finally surprised to learn that we live on a boat … the comprehension only coming when I press my shoddy French into service.  He plys us with more beer and grogue, stories of the village and the volcano, and lots of laughter.  He is the living incarnation of the spirit of the Count, slightly crazy, piratical in demeanour, high energy, unique.

After the hike

The village has no grid electricity or mains water.  Water is collected as run off from the surrounding hills, and what electricity there is comes from small generators run for a few hours in the early evening at a handful of the places in the village, including our pousada.  There is, however, good cellphone coverage and with that good internet access.  I ask Cecilio about the electricity situation and he says it is all about politics.  One can easily imagine why: a French Count arrived in a barren valley, helped himself generously to the local female population, created a tribe, and lived differently.  Life up here continues to be different from life elsewhere in the Cape Verdes.  There is no evidence of police or any of the standard accoutrements of society.  One gets the impression that they do their own thing in the Caldera to their own rules, and the Cape Verdians do their own thing everywhere else, and neither interact much.  Not that there is any obvious tension, rather just that this little community is independent, like a mini country.  It seems like it would be an excellent place to disappear into, and perhaps like the Count that is what some of the people we met here are doing.

The butter hasn´t melted yet...

Normally we like to set off on multi-day passages in the morning, giving us plenty of time to navigate away from land, get into clean air, and get the sails set before dark.  Leaving Tenerife we only got started at 5pm, and motored south in the windshadow of Mount Teide.  The current and the swell collide around the bottom of the island.  Add in very local southerly winds, then the NE trades a little further on, and conditions were uncomfortable to say the least.  Wild rolling, short steep waves from different directions, wind and waves in opposition at times – seasickness conditions par excellence, although with the help of Dramamine this time fortunately neither of us became ill.  It took us about 3 hours to get to relatively orderly waters and more stable winds, by which time it was twilight, so only the genoa went up.  By midnight the sea conditions were normal, and we were into trade wind sailing.  We were both extremely tired though, and getting through each watch was hard work - straight into the starboard passage bunk the minute the other had vacated it. 


The anchorage at Palmeira

By lunchtime we were awake enough to sort out our sails properly and to try a new approach to downwind sailing inspired in part by an idea in Don Street´s Cape Verde pilot.  The 150% roller-reefing genoa is fully extended, and sheeted through a large snatch block on the end of the boom.  On the inner forestay we hoisted our “get us home” jib, a relatively small jib that I had made a few years ago as a backup sail in the event of dismasting – slightly heavier sailcloth, flattish cut, hank on luff.  The jib is poled out slightly forward of the beam using our shorter spinnaker pole.  Both sails were sheeted quite flat and led back to the blocks near the stern we use for gennaker sheets. 

The smaller jib seems to materially reduce induced roll, as well as giving us an extra half knot or so.  The idea with this set up is also that we can reduce sail quite easily if the wind pipes up – just roller-reef the genoa to reduce sail area.  The jib would be fine in a lot of wind … I think 45kts, maybe more … so if we were caught in a nasty squall by rolling the genoa all the way in we have a manageable amount of sail area.


Fresh garoupa

Our speed on the passage averaged 6.7kts, a very respectable performance for Otra Vida, with classic trade winds of 16-28 kts true at our backs.  We felt that we were speeding towards a small new beginning: when landfall came we would no longer be in Europe. When will Otra Vida next see Europe?  I have no idea.  Perhaps 5 years, perhaps 20 years.  There is, literally, a whole world in front of us.  After the Cape Verdes group we’ll cross to northern Brazil – a new continent, new countries, new cultures, new people to meet, new food to eat.   So much to learn, so much to revel in.

3 ½ days into our passage we passed 20N, for me the mental delimiter of the tropics.  At 4.30am it didn´t feel tropical, with an air temperature of about 20C, although the humidity in the cabin notched up from 72% to 80% and cushions felt slightly wet to the touch.  The old sailing directions for crossing the Atlantic to the Caribbean are to sail south until the butter melts, then turn right.  The butter is still solid, and shorts-and-t-shirt night watches haven´t arrived yet, but they are not far away. 

It felt like our first proper ocean passage since returning from the Caribbean.  The difference is the remoteness.  From Rabat to the Canaries we sailed about 500nm, but the route parallels the coast of Morocco some 20-30nm offshore for the first third, and on that portion you can see lighthouses and city lights at night.  This passage, on the other hand, was 200nm+ offshore for the whole of its 760nm – definitely an ocean passage between islands.

We saw almost no traffic.   Just one freighter and one large passenger liner, and nothing else showed up on AIS at 48nm range the whole time.  We became a bit lazier in our watchkeeping, setting the radar on a 20 minute schedule scanning an 8nm radius from us.  We still kept our 100% live watch regime (of course) but the quick scan of radar every time it beeps to life was the norm, with occasional visual lookouts.  There was just nothing out there.  Quite different from the last time I was in this approximate area, crossing the Atlantic as part of the ARC, when I knew there were another 250 or so pleasure boats reasonably close by.



Late night music in the salt pans

The trade wind sailing was easy and lovely. With the new downwind sail approach it was even more comfortable, and maybe half the time the main cabin was so calm it felt like being at anchor, even though we were speeding along at close to 7 knots.  The other half of the time we had some rolling, and it seemed to be caused by apparently random changes in the wave patterns.  I say apparently random because I suspect it might have been related to tidal flow, or perhaps a slight difference in wind angle, or wind intensity.  Even still, the rolling was not so bad – we´ve been in worse anchorages.

Talking of anchorages, a big step forwards in comfort in the Canaries was the use of flopper stoppers.  These are devices that reduce rolling at anchor considerably by providing resistance in one direction only.  We started experimenting with the standard minimum, a bucket filled with water suspended from the boom just at sea level.  When the boat heels away from the bucket, the bucket and water are lifted out, providing say 10kg of weight, whereas when the boat heels towards the bucket, the bucket is submerged and is almost neutral in weight.  Even this has a good effect on rolling.  There are a few designs of flopper stoppers that build on this concept, including a triangle weighted at the tip that dives down, an ingenious proprietary metal folding device, a milk crate with a plastic flap on the bottom, and a metal grid with a plastic flap on top.   After building and testing several options we settled on getting two quite large metal grids fabricated, and covered them with mesh and plastic fabric with two slits.  The result is remarkable.  Untenably swelly anchorages suddenly become acceptable – not just tolerable, but acceptable.  I don’t know how we survived for so long without them.



The view of the fish dock from our favourite bar

We arrived in Palmeira, Sal at 10am local time, a passage of just 4 days 18h for 762nm.  The port is wonderfully sheltered from the swell and waves generated by the trade winds, but the wind itself blows over the low island and across the beach to where Otra Vida is gently swinging to her anchor.   The water is green, the sky blue, a rusty freighter is being unloaded at the dock by stevedores, the watermaker is happily chirping away, our dinghy bobs around behind the boat, nothing much is going on and that is just how it should be.  We went ashore to sort out formalities: finding the port policeman, who was apparently cycling around the town, and then to the airport for immigration and visa stamps.  Coming back we stopped at a bar on the waterfront – a wonderful melange of yachties, travellers, fishermen and local people.   The French guy living on a boat here with his Cape Verdian girlfriend and young kids, who came here a few years ago on another sailboat, didn’t get on with the captain, and decided to stay.  A Cape Verdian women born in Rotterdam, very sociable and somewhat drunk by noon, talking with everyone and anyone.  A Catalan delivery skipper, Rafa, taking a Janneau to northern Columbia for a season.  A local Rasta fisherman speaking good Spanish, giving us advice on where to catch fish.  Two French twenty-somethings, Tif and Clement, who drove down to Dakar and came here on a sailboat, now looking for a ride to the Caribbean.  A Dutch guy living on his boat here when he has money, and returning to Zeeland to work when the money runs out.  And a Brit and an Estonian sipping landfall drinks and soaking it all in.

There’s a feeling of welcome here.  The sea and sky welcome us, the stars shine more brightly in the nighttime tropical sky.  It’s good to be in the tropics again!

 

Steamed Garoupa

• Clean the fish, cut incisions into the flesh diagonally, rub with salt.  Place ginger and salt in the stomach cavity.
• Lay the fish on top of spring onions and coriander stalks.  Steam to a core temperature of 45C.
• Remove the fish and glaze with hot vegetable oil.
• Make a sauce of rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar and white pepper. Heat to just boiling then pour over the fish.
• Garnish with julienne ginger, coriander leaves, finely sliced spring onion, julienne chilli.

Serve with steamed rice.

Seasteading and Survivalists

A little over a decade ago I lived in Leadville, Colorado.  It’s a small high-mountain town in the Rockies, originally making its fortune from silver mining at the end of the 19^th century, surrounded by 14,000 ft peaks.   Once the snow had melted, a treat on Sunday mornings was to get into my Jeep and drive for a couple of hours over Mosquito Pass, a fairly challenging four-wheel-drive road, to the small town of Alma in the next valley.  Alma has two bars, one of which, curiously named Alma’s Only Bar, served great breakfasts on Sundays.  The clientele was interesting, as one would expect from a town in the real-world South Park county, the basis for the cartoon series.  Alma’s few hundred residents included a fair number of survivalists living in isolated cabins in the surrounding hills, and conversations over Huevos Rancheros at the bar often included conspiracy theories, praise for certain of the founding fathers (The Federalist Papers seemed to be the survivalists’ political bible), and discussions about their preparations for “when the government attacked”.  I didn’t find those kind of conversations in the conference rooms of New York and San Francisco where I wiled away my weekdays.  They were interesting Sunday mornings, jollied along by a couple of Bloody Marys, and followed by a gentle drive back home along regular roads through Breckenridge and Frisco.

I recently came across the idea of seasteading reading a blog.  The core of the concept is that, like homesteading, you are living at a kind of frontier, a place beyond, essentially unpopulated, and you are making your own world, your own reality.  Well, yes, there are elements of this that I imagine hit home to every cruising sailor, perhaps the idea of self-reliance when sailing on long passages, the self-sufficiency required for anchoring in remote parts for a week or two, or the high degree of autonomy that voyaging on your own boat has always offered.  But let’s not get carried away : we modern sea gypsies are nothing like the pioneers on land or the cruising pioneers of a century ago – with a few notable exceptions, most of us are doing something closer to dude-ranching.  Nothing wrong with that.

In looking for more information about seasteading I came across several books on Amazon, and an issue of Survivalist magazine dedicated to seasteading.  Now, from my earlier experience with survivalists in Alma, while they are generally a little “special”, the truth is that they are out there living a life that is a whole lot simpler and more self reliant than the life most of us live.  I thought there should be something to learn from their experiences relevant to living on a sailboat.

So ahead I went and bought the magazine issue for Kindle.  I expected some perspectives that were different to the usual yachtie writings.  Did that turn out to be true!

From the start, one has to admire the ambition of the survivalist writers.  Not limiting themselves to sailboats or power boats, one chapter addresses those who are “financially fortunate enough to consider purchasing a decommissioned nuclear-powered submarine”.

If that proves beyond your means another chapter helpfully details methods for “borrowing a boat, even without the intent of returning it”. 

Somewhere between these two extremes, the three page chapter entitled “Building your own boat 101”, after thoughtfully providing would-be seasteaders with definitions for key terms like deck, hull and keel, concludes that “building a boat as a DIY project can be a fun and exciting experience.  Individuals should have some working knowledge of wood and how to safely and effectively handle tools and equipment.”  Sound advice, that.

There’s an implicit assumption that while the government might attack them in a multitude of insidious ways, it would always leave their diesel supplies intact, so there's not much support for sailing.  “Sailing a boat is by far the hardest method of traveling over water. The techniques and procedures are much more complex than using boats powered by inboard or outboard motors.”   This is caused in part, one assumes, by “the color of a sail having no bearing on its performance, name or position on the vessel.”  Furthermore, “sailing is slowly becoming a lost art, with fewer and fewer people appreciating the time and talent it takes to use skills combined with nature, to navigate across the water. It is considered by many to be a more hazardous form of boating, and there are certain risks present on sailboats that are not present on others, such as shifting sails and yardarms, as well as riding the vessel while it is listing to one side or the other, which poses a greater risk of someone being swept overboard.”

Abandon ship options are explored. Along with lifeboats which “someone should be in charge of deploying”, “non-traditional lifeboat options” such as “Personal Diver Propulsion Systems” are explored for those who enjoy hanging out on their boat in full scuba gear, and jet skis for those who conveniently plan to abandon ship near shore in calm conditions.



Seasteading improperly in Sal, Cape Verdes, without the essential
torpedoes and explosive harpoons

Security gets plenty of coverage, focusing on attacks against the seastead.  Defence against pirates includes the recommendation to have torpedoes and explosive harpoons, along with underwater mines which the author regretfully notes “cannot be purchased by the average seasteading citizen”.  Plenty of semi-automatic and automatic weapons are needed, of course.

I would have expected foraging and water purification to be strong points of the survivalists, and there is plenty about harvesting seaweed, as well as advice on not getting eaten by a shark or stung by a jellyfish while spearing fish.  As for producing drinking water from sea water, the survivalists eschew the modern namby-pamby reverse osmosis stuff and instead work with more robust techniques:

“In the summer, you can make a solar still that will produce drinking water from salt water by linking two bottles together with rubber or plastic tubing. Used plastic soda bottles work well. Use your knife to make a hole in the center of each bottle’s cap, and then force the tubing through each hole. The tubing may be sealed into the holes with duct tape, chewing gum, or tree sap. If you’ve made the holes skillfully enough, you may not need to seal the tubing to the caps. To distill drinking water, fill one bottle three-quarters full with salt water and screw the bottle cap onto the bottle. Leave the other bottle empty and screw its cap on as well. Heat the bottle with salt water by putting it in direct sunlight, and cool the empty bottle by leaving it in shade or weighing it down in a tidal pool. As the salt water in the bottle heats up it will begin to evaporate, and the salt and ocean minerals will be left in the bottle. The steam or evaporated water from the salt water bottle will travel through the tubing to the other bottle where it will cool and condense. This condensation will be pure, fresh drinking water. Fill your canteen with this water as it is collected.”

On the basis that I’d like to drink more than a thimbleful of water a day I’m sticking with Otra Vida’s small watermaker for now.  Perhaps the process with the bottles works better on a nuclear submarine.

Another guilty pleasure on Sunday mornings long ago in the US was watching TV evangelists and laughing crazily.  The first Sunday after I moved to Houston in 1991 included seeing Robert Tilton, a Dallas based preacher, place his open hand in front of the camera and tell his flock to put their hand on their TV screens and “feel the power”.  This was around the time that Genesis had released “Jesus He Knows Me”, and I assumed the TV show was a parody - until it became clear that it wasn’t.  (Presumably in recent years Tilton’s income has been dented by the spread of flat screen TVs without anything like as much static electricity).

In the same vein, I really want to believe this Survivalist guide to seasteading  is a parody. 

But it isn’t.

Oh dear.  Oh dear.

Hungary

It’s 4.15am, Otra Vida is at anchor off the small town of Tarrafal, Sao Nicolau, Cape Verde Islands, and I can’t sleep.  The cabin temperature is a warm 23C, there’s no appreciable wind as the town is on the leeward side of this mountainous island, we’re rocking gently with the swell, and there is one mosquito in our cabin, buzzing around menacingly, which I have so far been unable to find.   I can already feel a few bites on my body, presumably delivered while I was sleeping earlier.

Aside from the mosquito, the other thing that stops me from sleeping Is the news from Hungary – the results of the general election held yesterday.  Once again the right-wing populist Fidesz party won by a significant margin, and looks like retaining it’s 2/3^rds majority in parliament and with it the ability to abuse the Hungarian constitution with impunity for another 4 years.  As if that wasn’t bad enough the second largest party in Hungary now, with a little over 20% of the vote, is the ultra-right Jobbik party, its image carefully softened by one of its candidates posing with kittens (really).  The left was a disaster, unable to find a single credible leader to coalesce around, beset by internal squabbles, and offering a melange of generally unimpressive politicians that one struggles to imagine running a small town, let alone a country.

There will be whining from the left about gerrymandering and maybe some electoral irregularities, all quite possibly true in the psuedo-democracy that Hungary has become, but nowhere near enough to change the outcome of the election.  The far right and the right combined polled about 65% of the vote. The Hungarian people have spoken, and what they have said is not pleasant.  They have voted for four more years of Hungarian exceptionalism, a short-term feel good nationalist tonic that papers over a plethora of issues with operating in the modern world.  Four more years of looking inwards first, then outwards towards the strongmen of the east rather than the democracies of the west, blaming improbable foreign enemies for all woes.  Four more years of revelling in a largely imaginary past glory rather than addressing the present and the future.  Four more years of intolerance of minorities – Roma, Jews, gays, foreigners in general.  Four more years of Putinization. 

I feel terribly sad about my semi-adopted country and the good people I have the honour of knowing there.  At the fall of the Wall Hungary was perhaps the newly-liberated country with the greatest potential.  25 years later and it seems to be heading back to what it tried so hard to escape in 1989 and in 1956.

Yes, Hungary is a small country, and some will say it is small enough to not matter in the bigger picture of the west.  There’s an old saying that if you think something is too small to make a difference try spending the night with a mosquito.  I’m doing that right now.

Canary Islands

Otra Vida’s last visit to the Canaries was in October 2010, just before crossing to St Lucia with the ARC.  It was too short a visit: a memorable week in Graciosa, a few days in Lanzarote, and a couple of frantic weeks in Las Palmas preparing for the crossing and surviving the ARC pre-departure parties.  This time we were determined to spend longer and explore the islands more. 



Maret reflected in the Atlantic on New Year's Day

Landfall at Graciosa was at dawn after a windless 100% motoring four day passage from Rabat - our first New Year at sea, when the VHF came alive with New Year greetings in all kinds of languages: Spanish and French of course, also Russian, English, German, Arabic (I think) and several other languages that we couldn’t recognize.  Maret added Estonian to that mixture.  On board we celebrated with slow-roasted lamb and a reduction sauce, cava, and the Spanish tradition of 12 grapes at midnight - a brilliant piece of Ivy Lee-style marketing to resolve a grape glut in the 1930s that stuck, and which has ensured that no-one in Spain takes photos of each other at New Year’s midnight, as everyone has pouched cheeks with 12 grapes stuffed inside.

Lanzarote from the Graciosa anchorage

This time our visit to Graciosa was tranquil.  The anchorage, which last time had about 30 boats, had just 3.  Last time Wendy, Szilvi and I ended up partying with Dani, the local kingpin, and Rufi, his trusty sidekick, seemingly every night, either ashore, on Otra Vida, or on Dani’s farm in the uplands.  This time they and their boat were not in evidence, giving our livers a pass on the serious workout that would have undoubtedly ensued.

La Graciosa

Following a drizzly week in Las Palmas getting our refrigerator fixed we headed south and started to learn about the very localised nature of high island weather.  Being finally in the trade wind belt the big picture was fairly consistent N-NE-E winds of 12-20kts. However the wind behaviour around the islands is more complex: a bit like water around a rock in a stream.  The water on the upstream side bunches up around the rock … this happens with clouds, so the NE sides of these islands are typically cloudy, and therefore somewhat cooler because of the reduced amount of sunlight.  On the downstream side of the rock there is a slack-water eddy, similarly on the SW side of the islands there are rarely clouds or wind, and it is sunnier and warmer.  On the sides of the rock, the water flows more quickly, logically, as the water bunched upstream of the rock has to go somewhere.  This happens with the wind around the islands too, with “acceleration zones” to the sides where the wind can be 10-20kts higher than the prevailing wind.

Gran Canaria

All this leads to interesting sailing conditions.  Going E or W from the south of an island there are dead calm conditions for the period you are in the wind-shadow of the island, and then suddenly within 500m you are in strong winds, quite often 30+kts.  In anchorages a few hundred meters can make a significant difference in the amount of cloud or the amount of wind you experience, and a 10 or 20 degree change in wind angle can turn an anchorage from comfortable to swelly and untenable.   Anchoring and sailing here is never routine, and I’m grateful we were able to stay long enough to learn about it.  It is knowledge that will be useful in the Cape Verdes and no doubt in island anchorages further afield.

Oops, time to get the sail repair kit out

The biggest effects come from the biggest mountains.  Mount Teide on Tenerife is the highest mountain in the Canaries, and in Spain.  There is a cable car that moves you to 300m below the summit in minutes, and which is, apparently, the #1 tourist attraction in Spain by visitor numbers, a claim I find surprising.  We chose a foot ascent instead, starting a few kilometres away from the cable car, hiking past Montana Blanca … pale yellow rather than white, and impressively stark with eroded hills and almost no vegetation.  After a couple of kilometres of easy walking along pista we started the real ascent up a mountain path.  Nothing difficult but considerably steeper.  3 hours later, passing through patches of snow, we arrived at the refuge, a pleasant enough place as refuges go, bizarrely offering wifi access, electricity and vending machines, but no meals or drinks service.

The following morning we were away by 6.30am, and tramping through frozen snow and ice with crampons we watched the beginnings of sunrise far away over Gran Canaria.  The sky slowly filled in with pink and tangerine as we continued along.  There is only one officially sanctioned path up Teide, from the cable car station, but serendipitously we lost the faint path leading there from the refuge in the half light and decided instead to follow another older path up the steep scree slopes to the summit.  This was nicely challenging, and as we later realised, a much more interesting choice.

On top of Teide, sulphur clouds wafting by

After scrambling the steep, loose last 50m to the summit ridge we were on top.  The summit is wafted in hot sulphury steam from fumaroles in the summit crater and along the ridge – this is a sleeping volcano, not a dead one.   The now fully risen sun cast a perfect shadow of the triangular peak of Teide onto clouds well below us.

Teide's morning shadow

After half an hour on top, and feeling a little nauseous from the sulphur fumes, we descended the official route down to the cable car station, where all other official routes on the massif converge.  The route down is almost like a stairway, built from formidable stones and very well maintained, and designed for people in running shoes or even sandals to go up and down.   Our route up, officially illegal, was far more satisfying.

On arrival at the cable car station we were told that all routes (including the one we had descended from the summit) were closed because of snow!  The rangers would not let us take our chosen onward route to Pico Viejo, or any other route, even with our crampons and faced with the obvious fact that by being there we’d already done some much more challenging walking that morning.  They were apologetic, but said they were under strict instructions from their superiors.  We descended the cable car and walked across the valley bottom through a pretty desert landscape to the Parador, where we had a room booked for the evening.

Teide's caldera

Teide, while still a real mountain and wild in its moonscape ruggedness, has been tamed into a safe, controlled tourist attraction, almost a theme park.  I do understand the desire to avoid accidents in a tourist attraction, but the mountains are a place of freedom, and something has been lost in the process of taming Teide.  I wonder if the core issue here is one of judgement: the rangers could clearly see we were able to handle ourselves in the fairly mild conditions on the mountains, but to let us take a path would have meant a personal judgement, and how to explain that judgement and the potential commercial disruption if one of us had an accident, say a broken ankle?   Ultimately the over-avoidance of risk results in the loss of passion, of pleasure, of adventure.  It’s a balance, of course, and there are plenty of other mountains in the world that are not tourist attractions where we can roam freely.  But still it is a little sad.

After a relaxed day by the pool at the Parador we hiked to the rim of the caldera and did a long, long descent almost to the coast.  The trail took us up into barren high desert, with patches of ice remaining in sheltered places, then through alpine pine forests, a high cloud forest with Spanish moss hanging from the trees, temperate forest, lush tropical shrubs almost like a planned botanical garden, a gorge with German rock climbers on the walls, and finally to a small village where we caught a bus back to the boat.  A lovely day.

Lazy navigation in the wind shadow of La Gomera

La Gomera is one of the smaller, less developed islands of the Canary group.  It’s a day sail from the bottom of Tenerife, and much of the island is uninhabited.  

Valle Gran Rey, on the western side, retains a contingent of aging hippies, mostly German.  Headbands, scarves, baggy pastel-coloured trousers and wire rimmed granny glasses seem de rigueur.  People use skateboards, scooters or highly personalised bikes to get around. On Sundays there is the hippie market near the bus station, selling handicrafts, hand-made jewellery, incense, muesli and hippie clothes.  There’s a gentleness to the place, a feeling of relaxation.  It reminds me of Aspen or Boulder in Colorado.

La Gomera

Sailing into Vueltas, the tiny port near Valle Gran Rey, and looking for a suitable anchorage through binoculars, I saw what appeared to be a person sitting on a stone beach underneath sheer cliffs.  It seemed impossible to get to the beach, so I guessed it was some washed up clothing on a rock.  Several days later Maret was exploring the area and came close to the beach.  She noticed there was a removable ladder, a pair of running shoes with pristine white socks, and … living in a cave … a well-groomed single guy!  So, single ladies, a prospect for you: a waterfront residence with a private beach and an eligible bachelor.  Maret has the details.

La Gomera

Vueltas anchorage, La Gomera

The island rises steeply up 1000m from sea level, then rounds out into a rather gentle and hilly interior plateau.  There have been several major wildfires on the island, wiping out huge areas of shrubs, and leaving charred but mostly living palm trees.  New shrubs have filled in the gaps from older fires, and the most recent, in 2012, has left blackened shrub skeletons against a carpet of pale green moss.  In the steep valleys there are old agricultural terraces in the most unlikely places, often with impossibly green grass.

Charred forest, Garajonay, La Gomera

Hiking in La Gomera was a real highlight.  The trails near the coast are spectacular, scaling seemingly impassable cliff bands through cleverly meandering paths.  From our anchorage it was a short walk to the meditation hotel on the naturist Playa de Argayal, and the path next to it leads up a ravine, entering into a lost world of terraces, cliffs, easy scrambling, finally arriving at a tiny isolated church-ette perched high up on the side of a valley.  Over two days we hiked to the summit of the island, Garajonay, where we had views across to Teide, piercing through the cloud layer and still showing traces of snow near its summit, and to the islands of El Hierro and La Palma, some 40+ miles distant and finely detailed in the ultra-clear air.  Our hike back to Valle Gran Rey was via yet another clever, precipitous, fairly straightforward path down apparently impassable cliff bands.   This is hiking of a very high quality indeed – “dream mountains of our Eden” to borrow a line from Jethro Tull.

Hiking in La Gomera

The Canary Islands are easy for us to spend time in.  It’s 2 ½ months since we arrived, and it would be easy to spend longer here.  We’ve visited just four of the eight islands, and there is still much to explore.  Another six months would be straightforward.  But it is time to get moving.

Liz Clark is a surfer who decided to become a cruiser.  Her wonderful blog, The Voyage of Swell, tells the story and contains much good writing describing her boat challenges, life thoughts and her particular cruising approach (surfing, sunsets and salads).  Unlike most yachties, Captain Lizzy actively seeks out places with great surfing … the rest of us try to avoid them, preferring calm anchorages.  For the New Year she wrote a piece outlining her philosophy of life.  It’s a good read, full of joie de vivre, perhaps edging on naïve at times, but so full of optimism and spirit that it is hard not to be inspired by it.  A sentiment she includes in it: “I say that comfortable is caustic”. 

Tenerife from Garajonay, La Gomera

Our trip since leaving Estonia has been entirely in our civilizational comfort zone.  Iberia is easy to enjoy; Morocco, while certainly different from Europe, is a place of great civilisation; and the Canaries are a variant of Iberia.  There is much to like in all these places, and I’m grateful we have been able to enjoy them, learn from them, and hopefully give something back to the great people we’ve met.

But the time has come to move on.  Perhaps the curse of the Flying Dutchman?  Or perhaps the wanderlust of the rootless cosmopolitan?  Whatever it is, we have spent too long in our comfort zone, and we’re ready to point the boat south.  The first stop is the Cape Verdes, islands which are most definitely not Europe anymore.

Morocco



Arriving in Rabat in calm conditions

I’ve noticed that sometimes borders between cultures can induce a concentration of cultural characteristics, making differences more stark.  This is certainly the case in the area south of Maastricht, where the Dutch and French areas of Belgium come together.  The Flemish villages on the border are more stridently Dutch than in the Netherlands, and the French villages are almost like film sets in their Frenchness.



Bouregreg river between Rabat and Sale

In Rabat one sees this in the relatively few bars in this predominantly Muslim city.   The bars are markedly different to life outside - you walk through the door and enter into another world … rather like the magic realism bar in the Transglobal Underground song Stoyane/Male-Le.    Each bar is different, and each in their respective way has turned the dial up to 11, whether it be a shabby drinking hole that feels like it could get violent or a get-lost-in-here-and-never-leave softly lit womb of warmth.   El Trianon manages to pack three different bars into its two rooms, each with a different atmosphere.  The lighting is low, the TV plays movies silently, the music is great – really great – and the bar staff friendly and mostly female.  The clientele is male and Moroccan.  At the times I’ve visited in 2010 and this year we’ve been the only foreigners there, and the only women not working there have been those in our party.  It’s a bar that would be memorable in any city of the world.

The Medersa in Sale

Arriving there one night in November we sat at one of the bars and asked a few questions about drinks in my schoolboy French.  The bar server didn’t understand my shabby pronunciation, and the Moroccan gentleman sitting next to us tried to help.  After our drinks were served he continued the conversation:

“Vous etes Francais?”  (rather obviously not!)

“No, je suis anglais”

“Ah, then you speak English”



Searching for the spirit of William
Burroughs at Cafe Hafa, Tangier

 

His English was excellent - very proper, well enunciated, not English learned from a book.  We talked about our respective lives, travel, Morocco, sailing.  Aziz was a Moroccan diplomat who was in Budapest for several years, 2005 being the year he left and the year I arrived.  Reminiscences about Hungarian life, restaurants, places, people, politics.  We knew people in common.  He went on to India, then to Dublin, and is now back in Rabat sipping whisky at Le Trianon.

Desert music in the evening

The desire to enjoy, the pursuit of pleasure in these bars, brings to mind the words of the teenage protagonist in Vernon God Little, who, having participated in an evening of extraordinary debauchery in a Mexican roadside bar involving iguana impersonations, muses on how something in America seems to stop people really partying.  I think the same is often true of Europe too.  The falling-down-drunk tedium of Magaluf in the summer or Cancun at spring break doesn’t come close to the real thing.  The crazy bars of Rabat are a little closer.

Sand dunes near the Algerian border

We went exploring the desert close to the Algerian border during a visit from Annamaria.  We hiked sand dunes for sunset and sunrise, tried snowboarding down them (Annamaria, an excellent snowboarder, fared better than Maret and I), and saw amazing landscapes … reminiscent of the US desert southwest, but with different architecture, and very different clothing.  Most of the houses were build from adobe, and when these are not scrupulously maintained they slowly melt away.  In one town we saw a whole neighbourhood that looked biblical in age.  Our guide told us it was the old Jewish quarter, and that the residents had moved away “to build their country” in 1950s and 60s … just 50 years without maintenance and the houses already looked like ancient monuments.   I loved the gentle way he talked about the Jewish residents leaving “to build their country”, and commented on it, which led him to explain the Berber approach to religiosity – how the berber flag symbolises Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and how Berber villages had historically been viewed as safe places for people of all religions.  Would that it was this way everywhere.

The old Jewish quarter, abandoned in the 1950s



Annamaria snowboarding down to our camels

On the train to take Easyjet to the UK for my mother’s 80^th birthday celebrations, we’re sitting in a compartment with a middle aged Moroccan businessman, shoes off, quietly chanting religious devotions that he is reading from his tablet PC propped up on the table.  Although dressed in western clothes, the dark thumb-print mark on his forehead tells that he is a devout Muslim.   His gentle sing-song verses are interrupted from time to time by the aggressive chirping of his mobile phone, which he answers immediately, seamlessly switching from Allah to Mammon for as long as it takes, and then back.

Morocco is modernizing everywhere.  That is its right, of course, and it’s not a bad thing.  My impression is that the government is trying to pull off what Japan has achieved: to become a completely modern place, while not losing their own culture, as all too often modernising equates to westernising.  The results in Morocco are generally good, but there are exceptions.

 

Baggage transport from the taxi to our hotel

After the desert we went to the film studios of Ouarzazate, and then to the real life disaster movie called Marrakech.  Really, what has happened to this place?  Is this even Morocco?  I’ve been here a half dozen times and remain unimpressed.  It seems to me that the way to enjoy Marrakech is to stay in a lovely riad and to rarely leave it, something I did on one occasion.  The city itself has little to offer in architecture and ambience outside of the riads, and Djemma el Fna, the main square that I used to consider the reason for staying one night in town, has become such an unpleasant experience that I can’t say I want to return here again.  Even compared to 2010, the last time I was here, this has deteriorated into more of a circus.  Constant aggression from touts means you are simply unable to walk on the square now … and if you don’t respond to their aggressive interventions you get a stream of insults.  Maret was called racist more than once, I was called German (something I have no problem with, but their tone indicated it was meant as an insult).  Just so unpleasant.

High Atlas morning

Contrast this with our welcome after hiking in the Atlas mountains, arriving late at our small hotel where the owner, a mountain guide, had prepared a room for us with a wood fire to warm it up, and mint tea moments after arrival to fortify us.  We had a similar reception arriving in the high refuge on Toubkal.  Friendly smiles, caring people, almost overwhelming hospitality.

Toubkal summit - a bit chilly up there

In the Atlas mountains we had an interesting time pondering limits.  I am not much of a fan of limits, especially my own, and try to ignore them.  Goethe expressed this with an elegance of language that I lack:  “To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state”.   Our main hike was Jebel Toubkal, the highest peak in the Atlas and in north Africa.  I’ve been up twice before, the first time on skis, the second in late summer, and was relaxed about the territory.  The snow levels were still fairly low, so no avalanche risk, and the forecast was for bluebird skies.  After hiking to the aforementioned refuge at 3200m we set off the following day for the summit, fairly quickly getting into cloud, wind and occasional snow.  By the time we reached the peak, 4167m, it was no longer picnic weather … an estimated 50kts of wind, stinging blowing snow, instant rime on our jackets, an air temperature of perhaps -5C and wind chill very much below that.  Not a place to hang around.

Half an hour off the summit - eyebrows still frozen

The limits question came up during our ascent.  Now, I might dislike limits, but in winter mountaineering you need to stay well within them … things can go from OK to serious to life threatening too quickly in the high mountains in winter, and you need reserves of energy to get out of difficult situations.  (Not wanting to overdramatize, though – after all this was a day hike up a 4000m peak, not a Himalayan expedition).   Whatever that percentage of reserve is (and in my mind it’s 25%) I certainly strayed a little into that territory … worrying for such a modest hike, and evidence of not enough running in the last year or two.  Maret went very much closer to 100% … concerning to me, and we disagreed about whether that was OK.  Ultimately everything was fine, we summited, started down, and although the inflatable santa remained packed and uninflated, 90 minutes later and 800m lower we were sitting in sunshine eating our picnic lunch.



Christmas in Rabat marina

Rabat is a lovely city, and the marina – in a new development of modernity and tradition cleverly combined – is a delight to be in.  The only real downside to the marina is getting in and out – there is a bar across the entrance to the Bouregreg river that is unpassable in more than 2m of swell for anyone not on a surfboard.  Because of the high latitude north Atlantic storms thousands of miles away, 2m or less swell is rather rare in winter months.  We therefore ended up in Rabat longer than expected (as was also the case in 2010).  The main problem with this was that we had agreed to meet some of Maret’s friends in Tenerife for New Year’s Eve – something we were unable to do.  Christmas in Rabat was quiet, as one would expect, although the Catholic cathedral in the center was well lit up, and there were a few shops selling Christmas decorations.  We had a traditional Christmas day : a pre-lunch pub visit, in this case the very swanky Club Nautique overlooking the river, then lunch on board of turkey, roast potatoes, gravy, etc, followed by a Christmas pudding brought back from the UK earlier in December with brandy sauce.   We were finally able to cross the river bar on 30^th December for the 4 day passage to the Canaries, once again in almost zero wind, motoring.  Once in the Canaries we should, theoretically, be in the trade wind belt … let’s see.

The river bar on Christmas day - not a place for yachts