Surprise!

December 5th 2012

The David and jenny saga is continuing after a lengthy break in transmission. I apologise to all those who have been waiting,  and say thank you to all those who have been prodding me to get going again. I can not believe that there could be so few hours in a day – even fewer when there is a man around the place! We have been really enjoying ourselves despite a couple of hospital adventures in Gozo and trips to the Gibraltar hospital, and, having fixed ourselves up and the boat up, we have duly set off on the next phase of the Great Adventure.

You will all have to wait for the newsy bits of what we have been up to in the Mediterranean. You will be given flashbacks for entertainment value when I feel you might be tiring of endless tropical sunrise and sunset descriptions. We are now in the Cape Verde Islands, on the island of S.Vicente, at a place called Mindelo. There are some good websites about the islands and also Google earth to look at. We have made a change of plan decision and instead of continuing down to Cape Town and then across the southern Indian Ocean to Hobart, we will be leaving here for the Caribbean and the Pacific to arrive in Brisbane around September next year. That is the plan as of today!

Before we continue I have to introduce you to the editorial panel. Once we are at sea I cannot post onto the blog, so I have a team who will take the text I send over the radio and craft it into the right format and post it.

Interruption.

“What you doing Jen?”

“Writing the blog at long last”

“Why the picture of the Brisbane crowd?”

“They are the editorial team. Dexter is the Senior Editor, Our Kate is technical adviser and King Fred is quality control.”

“Jen, Dexter is a dog”

“Not just any dog. He is an Assistance Dog, and I hear he has been called Assistance Dog Extraordinaire for all the things he can do to help Our Kate. And he goes to University for post graduate studies and spends hours in the library. He used to write poetry but I haven’t seen anything for a while, probably too busy, but he has beaten Kate and me at Scrabble a number of times. He has his own Face Book page too.”

“He is still a dog”

“Well, I have been assured he will be an excellent editor, as long as people understand the occasional references to chicken wings (food) and bush turkeys (torment).”

“And King Fred is a cat”

“His Face Book page has him listed as Monarch. He is a bit more limited in his vocabulary but I hear he is very discerning and will be an excellent quality controller if the editor gets carried away.”

“He is still a cat”

“Time will tell. Just wait and see”.

                                         ................................................................

So. 

Where are we now?

We are at a marina at Mindelo on S. Vicente, one of the Cape Verde islands. We have been here some few weeks now, trying to sort our life out (a never-ending occupation) and waiting for mail and the weather. The weather has arrived in that the trade winds have started, but the mail has disappeared somewhere deep and mysterious. We have made unproductive attempts to trace it, visiting all agencies we can find, getting the girls in the office to ring around for us as there is a big language problem and trying to contact the senders as well. The charts turned up at last, and took a whole day to be extracted from customs. This included Dave and one of the marina staff tramping around a couple of offices in the town to collect paperwork, then out to the airport by taxi. Then back again to pick up me and more documentation, and another taxi to the seaport to pick up a policeman (no kidding) who was to come to the airport with us. Evidently only he can get the charts out of the store. Then it was taxi back after more delays and more paperwork, with the policeman coming back to the boat with us so I could stamp his piece of paper with the boat stamp. Thankfully, I had made one up before we left out of a WH Smith do-it-yourself kit. First time it had been used. So much paperwork, a whole day taken up and a small fortune on taxis and money to pay for the policeman. But at least we have the charts.

It is a very different world here to where we have been up until now. We have left the affluent West and have now arrived in the not so affluent, indeed very poor, part of the world. There is so little here, the supermarkets are really what we would call large corner shops  - there is most of the real necessities of life but not a range of choice, and there are some days when the re-supply has been delayed and there are big gaps on the shelves. There are no High Street stores, there is really no High Street, and the clothing shops are mainly full of T-shirts and flip flops. The poor are everywhere, from the women trying to sell  bananas on the street corners to the men begging as you pass. The contrast with Gibraltar and its huge perfume and jewellery shops is overwhelming – there is no perfume and there are no jewelers. One thing that has struck us also is that there are no push chairs or prams anywhere. In all our weeks here we have only seen 1 push chair and that was off one of the boats. There are no Mothercare type stores, a few shops sell terribly cheap toys. The supermarkets do not sell much baby food at all – there are a few jars on the shelves, but not enough to feed a child regularly. There seem to be very few packets of disposable nappies either. Yet the children are clean and appear well cared for – but there are no overweight youngsters here as there were in Gibraltar and the Mediterranean countries we visited, as well as back in the UK. There are no sweet shops either. The supermarket has a shelf with a couple of bars of chocolate, some Mars bars and a few chocolate biscuits. The biscuit section has 2 varieties of sweet and a couple of savoury. The cheese counter has 3 types of cheese. Vegetables are so very hard to source and the quality is awful on the whole. Green vegetables are virtually non-existent, carrots are very poor indeed, and the potatoes can be great or hopeless. There are yams and sweet potato available, and loads of millet and grain, and lots of tinned vegetables. Meat comes frozen and has been surprisingly good – there is little choice but for our basic cooking it has been fine. There is no butter anywhere, it is all margarine of a parentage unknown to us which is out on ordinary shelves and not refrigerated. Refrigeration space is at a premium and is nearly all freezer space.

The infrastructure of the place seems to be depressed with the water and electricity supply being frequently interrupted. We run the computer on the boat’s 12 V system as the shore power is too erratic and we risk damaging the hardware. The marina runs its own generator at times, but now the number of boats has increased this is struggling. Our clothes were held up for 5 days in the laundry as first off there was no water and then there was no power.

But the people we have met are very kind to us, and the girls in the marina office have helped us enormously to find what we need. I managed to find the last black printer cartridge on the island but no colour one could be found. The church we go to has been jam packed and so vibrant and welcoming. I have managed to run off a side-by-side translation of the Mass and we have our English version of the readings, so the only bit we miss is the sermon. We have had a couple of Sundays when there was a big celebration and the inside of the church was moved out into the street, pews and all, to accommodate the crowds.