Porto Novo, Cape Verde / Fri Mar 29

Today we anchored in Porto Novo which is a small city on Santo Antao Island in the Republic of Cape Verde. It's located about 350 miles off the west coast of Africa and comprised of ten islands - nine of which are populated.

Joe, Karin, Larry and I took a full day ship's tour in a 4x4. Fortunately for us, the local leader of our tour (Norbert) rode in our 4x4 so we were first in the caravan line for the entire trip. Norbert's English was great as he'd spent several years going to school in Rhode Island! We sat on benches in the open bed of the vehicle until it got too dusty. I took lots of pictures standing in the bed and this is why, in many of the photos, you'll see the taxi sign (Aluguer).

This is our 4x4:

Our tour began in the harbor area. There are ferries that take people to and from the other islands with their goods.

We started our tour by driving through Porto Novo which is a pretty town.

We passed through a number of small villages on our tour. The people were very friendly and often waved as we went by. If we stopped, they came out to look at us as much as we were looking at them!

Most villages have a school, a church and some terraced areas for growing vegetables. You can see the locals walking with donkeys carrying things they've bought.

Village church

The terraced areas looked like this ...

Some of the roads were beautifully paved with cobblestones as you can see in the pictures below but as we got to more remote locations, they were just sand or dirt with lots of rocks.

It didn't take long for them to change into dirt roads - some of which were more like paths ....

We all rode in the open bed of the 4x4. Here are Larry and Karin enjoying the ride -

And Karin and Joe ...

The roads were one lane only. Fortunately we didn't see many vehicles coming from the opposite direction but when we did, one car or the other had to back up until the road became wide enough for the vehicles to pass. This was one time when that happened ...

We were parked for quite a while until the workers in this truck packed up and drove to a place where we could pass them. We got some good photos while we were waiting ....

Check out the hair curlers!

Larry and Karin don't like heights so much of the day was challenging for them. Not only were we driving to the highest peaks on the island but there were no guard rails even though it was a very, very steep drop off the edge. More on that later.

We stopped in a couple of small villages. One had a small store. Karin and Joe bought some of the local beer.

And here was something we haven't seen in quite a while ...

The volcanic landscape is breath-taking. The photos below were taken when we were headed to a scenic spot to have our lunch.

And then we came upon the most gorgeous black sand beach. We had lunch there and were able to wander around for a bit before continuing our tour.

Since we were the 'lead' 4x4 there were times when I could turn around and see the others who were following us. Quite the perspective!

After the beach we headed to another part of the island to view the highest peak. This part of the island was more desert. It was pretty desolate but we saw lots of goats!

Here we're looking at the tallest spot on the island.

As these are volcanic islands the vistas are incredibly dramatic. One thing we've learned is that the safety measures in many countries is not at all like what we have in the US. On this excursion we spent much of the time climbing up mountains on curvy, one lane roads with no guard rails even though the drop off was amazingly steep as you can see in the photos below.

Karin spent much of the time hanging on for dear life and looking at the floor while Larry gave a running commentary that can't be repeated here. Enough to say he went down to the floor.