Travel with Indigo

Following an uneventful voyage of 380 nautical miles from Agadir, Morocco to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, I flew to Johannesburg, South Africa to meet up with Kitty and Grant coming from Florida and spend what turned out to be an unexpectedly enjoyable three weeks there. Upon arrival and meeting up with Kitty and Grant, we traveled the short distance to Pretoria where an overnight stay at an inn awaited us.

I knew that Johannesburg, or Joe burg as it is commonly called, is among the world’s cities more notable for its rate of violent and property crimes than for the attractions it offers. Pretoria– nearly a suburb it is so close by—visibly reflected its neighbor’s unsavory reputation. Although our inn had been converted from a fine mansion located on a leafy boulevard amid other fine mansions, many now serving as various embassies, a masonry wall  about 12 feet high topped off with both coiled concertina wire and straight lines of electrified wire surrounded it. Security cameras activated by motion sensors were more numerous than were birds perched in the trees.

Upon arrival outside its gate, the inn’s manager visually inspected us and our car through a viewing port, confirmed our identification and reservation with the driver and approved us for admittance. A solid corrugated steel gate slid back on tracks allowing our car to enter and quickly closed behind us. It was all an unpromising start to our travels in South Africa and carried with it the blatant suggestion that these two cities are not yet fit for safe travel. Seldom has a carefree getaway begun on such discordant notes.

Next day we drove out to the airport to a small terminal building where we boarded a twin prop, 10-seat plane for the hour-long flight to our destination, the Singita Ebony Lodge. Located in the famed Sabi Sand Preserve, a private game preserve of some 140,000 acres surrounded by Swaziland, Mozambique, Botswana and Zimbabwe, it also adjoins the vast Krueger National Park, which at nearly five million acres (7,700 square miles) is one of the world’s largest parks. None of the Preserve or the National Park is fenced off from the other, so for the area’s resident creatures it’s all just one big happy hunting ground if you happen to be a predator or succulent buffet line on which you are a featured item if you’re not. Upon landing on the Lodge’s private airstrip, the manager picked us up in a safari jeep and delivered us a short while later to our rustic two-bedroom cabin complete with large stone fireplace, home for the coming week.

Paved walkways winding through tall grass and scrub trees separate the lodge’s public spaces from its cabins. Lurking on and near these there are after dusk hyenas, leopards and assorted other unfriendly types attracted by the aromas wafting from the lodge kitchen. Management cautioned us that as darkness drew near if we wished to leave the safety of our cabin we should call reception for a guide who, armed solely with a flashlight and experience, would escort us.

Management also cautioned us never to leave our cabin without locking its heavy, solid wood entry door. One of us—that would be me—failed to do this when he left the cabin in broad daylight reasoning that it wasn’t necessary as he’d be gone not more than 20 minutes. Later that afternoon, the housemaid pointed out to us that during that brief period a wily baboon, who had obviously watched me leave without locking the door, had entered through the unlocked door, gone straight to the mini-bar and opened it. From it, he removed a basket of candy bars and other assorted snacks, neatly opened each packet, consumed its contents, replaced the wrappers in the basket and returned the basket to its usual place. It then closed the mini-bar door, left the cabin and closed the cabin door securely behind. Few of us are so fastidious.

As we were to spend a week there—more than the customary two to three days of most guests—the lodge’s management assigned us the most senior and experienced of its guides, a tall, genial, white man of Boer descent with a slightly diffident, professorial manner named Leon. A former high school biology teacher from a village in Zimbabwe with 18 years experience guiding tourists in the African wilds, he had encyclopedic knowledge about Africa and the impressive array of creatures we would encounter. He never failed to guide us to the most interesting of these and describe them in considerable detail.

The daily routine began at 6am, when we reported to the lodge public area for coffee and light snacks before setting out in one of the fine, new open-top Land Rovers specially designed for African animal viewing. We were joined by a black African tracker from a nearby village, who sat on a small fold-up seat mounted on the left front fender from which he spotted game with uncanny perception. I was pleased to note on our first excursion that Leon carried along, as did all the guides, a high powered bolt action rifle loaded with a five-round magazine plus one round in the chamber ready to go if needed. As matters ensued, he didn’t need to use the rifle though he removed it several times from its scabbard when doing so seemed the prudent thing to do.

Following a morning of stalking whatever beasts happened to be out that day, we returned to the lodge for a fine lunch from which the staff often had to chase uninvited marauding monkeys. Lunch and a restful mid-day nap behind us, we set out in the late afternoon for a longer trek into the wilds that extended into the night. During these morning and evening explorations of the African bushveld, we saw just about all the species that inhabit the area that time of year. There were elephants, lions, leopards, black rhinos, and Cape buffalo (collectively known as the Big Five), giraffes, zebras, hyenas, wildebeests, hippos, wild dogs, baboons, and monkeys, all in impressive profusion. In addition, a wide assortment of various antelopes wandered about in what I thought was a foolishly insouciant manner given that many carnivores on whose menu they appear surround them. Among these were the duiker, klipspringer, steenbok, Urdu, springbok, and the abundant impala. These animals, along with some of the strangest birds we ever saw, were so plentiful that you could hardly travel a hundred yards without something or another coming into view, usually up very close.

We sat within fifty feet of a leopard who we watched climb into a low tree and perch himself on one of its limbs for a short nap then descend and amble along a dirt road to another tree that apparently agreed with him more. Leon drove us to a pride of young lions lying indolently upon a dried streambed seemingly asleep in the warm African sun. As we sat there looking at them cautiously from just twenty feet away, one flicked open a cold black eye that suggested hunger, and then opened both, raised its head and stared straight at me. I smiled in a manner intended to offer my high regard for lions and everlasting goodwill toward the species, but he failed to reciprocate. Leon had already unsheathed his rifle and had it ready though I am pleased to say it wasn’t needed.

One morning as we were driving along one of the reserve’s two-rutted tracks a tree full of monkeys began screaming and scrambling up to the highest limbs in obvious alarm. The cause, we soon learned, was that they had spotted a leopard on the hunt. Leon got us into position to watch as the leopard hunkered down and slinked along in the tall grass trying to get near enough to a small herd of impala that he might surprise and nab one for lunch. These frail creatures, not much larger than a goat, are so quick afoot that no leopard can hope to run one down, the local version of fast food. Surprise is the only way to catch an impala and the monkeys’ alarm had blown that chance for him.

At the airstrip where we landed earlier in the week, we watched a pack of vicious wild dogs—a truly wild animal different from the feral version of domesticated dogs—attempt a sneak attack on a young wildebeest only to be thwarted by a vigilante posse of older bulls.

Kitty, Grant and I elected one day to drive ten miles or so over dirt tracks to a hamlet of a thousand or so inhabitants where most of the black lodge staff lived, all of whom belong to a large tribe common in South Africa and once part of the Zulu nation. (The white staff lived on the lodge grounds in quarters provided for them.) With land so plentiful, the clean, modest, masonry homes were set on parcels of a half-acre, neatly fenced against small creatures that might nibble away their gardens. Each home’s yard was tidy as, indeed, was the whole village. A communal standpipe every few blocks provided fresh water and septic tanks were used for sanitary disposal. All the local roads were unpaved but smoothly graded. In the backyard of many homes was a small round one-room, thatched roof hut that served as a private temple for worship to the owner’s gods. It was round so that evil spirits would not have a corner in which to lurk.

Our driver took us around to a few homes where makeshift tourist attractions awaited. At one, three young boys performed a Zulu dance of some sort that involved a lot of stomping on the bare ground and beseeching of some god or another. Other stops revealed local crafts, a male a cappella choral group, that sort of thing. In the area of commercial skills, the natives here have a long way to go.

On the evening before our departure, the Lodge treated the three of us to a delightful outdoor barbecue under the clear African night sky. There, Leon joined us at our table for a fun evening of conversation about his life growing up in Zimbabwe, going to school and later teaching biology there, and now guiding tourists at Singita. The Lodge manager and his wife, too, joined in and helped us learn more about a way of life so different from our own. We noted that brightly glowing kerosene lanterns surrounded our dining area and that a loaded hunting rifle was close to hand, prudent measures we thought.

Upon our return to Joe burg from the Singita wilderness, we boarded the famed Blue Train, South Africa’s version of the Orient Express on which it is modeled, for a one night, two-day trip across vast, sparsely populated plains to our destination in Cape Town. Along the way, the train stopped at the outback town of Kimberley, noted for its diamond mining. There, we, along with most of the train’s passengers, visited a long defunct mine, actually little more than a deep crater, and heard a 10-minute spiel on diamond mining none of which was especially interesting. Although the accommodations and service on the train were suitable approaching luxurious, and the dining and bar cars adequate to their tasks, it was, as you would expect, noisy with the rattling of steel wheels over steel track and cramped. We were happy to have done it the once but would not want to do it again.

Cape Town, widely regarded as one of the world’s most beautiful cities, is, at 3.5 million inhabitants, the second most populous city in South Africa, after Johannesburg. It also is the capital of South Africa and the provincial capital of the Western Cape.

On arrival, we checked into the Cape Grace Hotel sited conveniently on the central harbor attractively developed into a residential and commercial area dense with shops and restaurants and filled most days with locals and tourists alike wandering about in the pleasant sea air. From our balcony, we looked over the looming presence of the 3,300-foot Table Mountain dramatically defined by its sheer vertical cliffs, which together with Lion’s Head and Devil’s Peak forms the city’s topographically theatric backdrop.

On most evenings, a strong onshore wind blowing against the far side of the mountain builds pressure sufficient to push a continuous mass of warm moist air up its steep slope, over the flat surface of its plateau and down the nearside. As the air rises and warms, it forms a thick blanket of banker gray cloud that calls to mind a bad toupee gone awry. As a rule, it arrives at about the cocktail hour and so provides a wholesome spectacle to those seated outdoors at a fine bar in bright sunshine.

During our stay in Cape Town, we visited most of the notable tourist attractions and did a few oddball things too. Grant dived in the frigid waters of the Indian Ocean, safely encaged behind steel bars, as Great White Sharks circled close by, one even knocking into the bars as if to test their resistance. We spent a day having lunch and touring the wine growing region of Stellenbosch, a stunningly beautiful place vastly more appealing than Napa Valley thanks to the enormous, sheer-walled peaks of bare gray rock that define its boundaries and the comparative absence of crowds and traffic. A fine lunch at one or the other of the swank winery restaurants, seated outdoors in a balmy sunshine amid pastoral beauty is about as good as a meal can get. The winery owned by the golfer Ernie Els was especially notable. I learned only later that the son of our good friends Joan and Preston Haskell owns a successful vineyard and winery nearby.

Throughout our stay in South Africa, the ever-affable John Mason, he the former British Army officer and erstwhile managing executive of a security company active in post-war Iraq, and his charming longtime girlfriend Annie and their various local friends and family, joined us. I came to know John when he and a partner served as our security detail onboard Indigo during the passage through the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden. He and his team of highly experienced former military security experts provided (discreetly armed) security for us where it was appropriate. Given the rising rate of violent crime in South Africa, including Cape Town, abetted by the enormous leap in the population of the ghetto-like shantytowns called Townships (on which, more later), it seemed like the prudent choice to hire them, and I do not regret doing so. Their services allowed us to visit some places to which we otherwise would not have ventured but from which we benefited greatly as you will see in due course.

On a magnificent day of brilliant, cloudless blue sky and radiant sun, Kitty, Grant and I drove with John and Annie into the Cape Town countryside where, by prior arrangement organized by John, we went skydiving. Here I should admit that I have had a lifelong mild, but I have always thought entirely sensible, fear of excessive heights. As a kid, I was happy to climb trees, just not too high, and as an adult, I once froze on the roof of our home against a second story dormer window while trying to clean out a gutter. On a weeklong voyage aboard the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower accompanying my brother Tom, a talented Navy fighter pilot, I could force myself no closer than 100 feet from the edge of the flight deck without faltering in senseless fear of plummeting over the side and into the sea hundreds of feet below.

There was no childhood trauma that might explain this fear. It was, like most all such phobias, just an irrational and so inexplicable feature of my being. Although it had never hampered my life in any meaningful sense, other than to preclude mountain climbing as a hobby, I wished to banish it and thought what better way of expunging the demon than to confront it head on. Skydiving seemed like a fine way to do just that even if I was about fifty years tardy in the effort. If not now, when?

Upon our arrival, I did not gain from the appearance of the company’s slightly shabby hangar and fleet of two rickety single-engine planes that note of self-confidence that the skydiver should have for his first encounter. Its instructors seemed a touch youthful and unduly carefree, the parachutes overly worn. After the briefest of instruction, the most senior instructor adopted me as his project for the event, helped me strap into a harness and chute and load into one of the planes. It was supposed to comfort me, but did not, that just a few weeks ago one of the sons of Prince Charles, I forget whom, had jumped successfully with this very outfit. I doubted that unsuccessful jumps were reported much. An unhelpful adage crept to mind: If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.

With Grant and I each shackled at four points to our instructor, along with another instructor who would serve as our videographer, crammed into the aft end of the tiny plane, all of us seated on the floor, we took off and slowly ascended in sweeping arcs to 10,000 feet. From there, the views along the coast were just splendid. Miles of pristine, uninhabited, undeveloped beach ending at one end at Table Mountain and at the other the farthest reaches of the Western Cape. Not a single cloud marred the deep blue sky and winds were calm. You could not have chosen a better day for skydiving.

When one instructor unfastened a latch and rolled up a part of the fuselage revealing nothing but thin air, I tensed, took a deep breath and spoke those words that in such situations come easily to mind: What the hell, why not? I have no idea why, but the fear I expected failed to arrive. I was as calm as it is possible to be before leaping from an airplane. My instructor and I, attached Siamese-like, scooted across the floor to the open doorway where we swung our legs around and hung them out of the plane folded up under the fuselage. When he tapped my shoulder, I pushed off and surrendered to gravity.

After an unexpected somersault or two, the instructor popped open a tiny chute not much bigger than a golf umbrella, which had the desirable effect of orienting our drop head up, feet down. We both extended our arms and legs as though pretending to be Superman, but as far as I could tell this had no effect at all on our trajectory, which was indisputably straight down. Not more than 20 feet in front of us with camera grinding away was our videographer dressed in a costume much like that of Batman. He invited me to waive at the camera as though he were filming the family at an amusement park.

After just a few seconds of this, the instructor yelled in my ear—the noise of wind ripping by is deafening—that we had reached what goes by the ill-chosen expression terminal velocity, about 120 miles per hour. If in the wildness of your youth you have ever stuck your head out the window of a car traveling at this speed, you will have a good idea of the sensation. Earth was approaching at an alarming rate.

When we reached an altitude of 4,000 feet, the instructor pulled the ripcord on my parachute, and I am pleased to report that it opened just as it should. With a yank, it snatched us up from terminal speed to a more leisurely pace of what seemed upon landing like five miles per hour or so. We had free fallen 6,000 feet in 34 thrilling seconds and now would descend the remaining distance to earth in about ten minutes of tranquil sightseeing. As we swooped into the sandy landing area, my legs, longer than the instructors, hit the ground first, surprisingly with such little impact that we remained upright. Soon, Kitty, Grant and John Mason made their successful landings. Thereafter, cold beers were had by all. Another item on the bucket list completed.

One of Cape Town’s most repugnant features is its proliferation of immense, teeming shantytowns, known there by the sanitized evasion Townships. At last count, there were thirteen of these in varying sizes, the largest inhabited by an astonishing 1.4 million people, although the truth is that the number is no more than a speculation. We drove through several of these and strolled on foot through one so that we might gain some understanding of them and their inhabitants all of whom are black Africans from South Africa and neighboring countries come to Cape Town in search of a better life through means both commendable and nefarious.

All of the Townships are on flat, treeless plains outside the city easily visible from one or more major traffic arteries. A few preexisting roads along their periphery are paved but internal roads, most of them not wide enough for vehicles, are dirt tracks. The shanties are almost universally made of corrugated tin sheets stretched and nailed over a primitive box frame made of wood describing a single room about twelve to fifteen feet square, six feet high with an earthen floor. The low, flat roof, too, is made of these tin sheets often held in place by cinder blocks. Each shack is jammed up against the next with barely a foot or two between them. Where the city provides electrical service, power poles linked to the shanties by sagging lines dot the landscape. I can’t say whether the power is free, donated by the city or stolen, but I suspect there is some of all of these. In many Townships, there was no evidence that electrical power is available at all.

Most of them have a fresh water standpipe every few hundred yards, where potable water is gathered and hauled back home in pottery jars or plastic buckets, and a few open air groupings of concrete sinks in which the people wash clothes. Evidently, the city provides trash removal as I never saw piles of refuse suggesting otherwise. None of the shanties has even rudimentary plumbing, so the city in most cases provides large clusters of portable toilets though each cluster is spaced inconveniently far from the others.

Despite what the innocent Westerner might suppose, these Townships bustle with commercial enterprise. At busy street corners, there are lines of open-air barbecue shacks one after the other, with grills blazing, aromatic smoke rising and customers standing in line. Dilapidated shipping containers, their sides and doors crudely hand lettered, serve as beauty parlors, convenience stores, repair shops, flea market stores and more. In short, many of the emporia commonly found in any large community are here and seem to be thriving, although at the most rudimentary level.

By some estimates, somewhere between half and seventy percent of all black Africans carry the HIV virus with an alarming percentage of these cases rapidly developing into AIDS. Without adequate resources to pay for costly treatments, deaths from the disease are at epidemic levels leaving behind a tragic number of orphaned infants and young children. For this reason, there are in all of the Townships a large number of makeshift orphanages scattered throughout their area. Staffing these are ponderous older women long past their childbearing years but thankfully for their young charges still filled with the desire to nurture. They work for little or no pay but it appeared to me get some food and household items in return for their service. Because Kitty and I wanted Grant to see, by the starkest of contrasts, how very fortunate he is, we insisted that he join us in a visit to one of these orphanages. To his credit, he agreed.

The orphanage John Mason chose for us to visit is a modest cinder block, two-story home with additional rooms attached in the rear. Bunk beds fill its cramped spaces accommodating the dozen or so kids housed there, from infant to about eight years old, all apparently living in relative comfort though sadly without either parent.

As we were climbing into John Mason’s SUV to leave, I said that I would like to give the orphanage’s manager a modest cash contribution to this deserving cause. Without a moment’s hesitation, John blurted out in alarm, “Good God man, No! Whatever you do, don’t do that.” He went on to say there are predatory people in this forlorn neighborhood who have observed that we white people of obvious means have visited here and, in keeping with our customary practices, are likely to have left cash behind. They have informants inside the orphanage who will alert them should we be so foolish as to do so, and by the time we get around the next corner, he said, these savage raptors will descend on the orphanage, rip it apart looking for the cash and threaten the staff. They care nothing at all for the children’s welfare. Kitty, Grant and I just sat there, stunned.

A few days later, John and one of his security men escorted the three of us on a walking tour of a Township. I have to admit that the one he chose was one of the more upscale, if that’s the term here, with a few masonry hovels along with the usual tin shacks and wider internal streets, some paved. We got out of John’s SUV to stroll around while one of the security men drove slowly behind us on alert and John walked alongside. Mid-day robberies are commonplace here. We walked into one of the masonry buildings to find squalid, unlit, trash-strewn rooms. Behind one door was a tiny space containing a shabby bunk bed on which laid an obese middle-aged woman. As I entered, she raised her head, looked in my direction for a few seconds then plopped her head back down and closed her eyes without saying a word, this in the middle of a workday.

Back out in the streets, cheerful, runny-nosed kids greeted us and insisted that we hold hands with them. After a few blocks, we came upon the outdoor communal laundry, where women went about their washing chores with impressive vigor combined with a great deal of gossip. Despite the ramshackle insalubrious conditions of the Townships, their inhabitants were always dressed in clean clothes and seemed themselves well scrubbed. That said, John insisted as we departed that we clean our hands thoroughly with sanitary wipes he had thoughtfully brought along. Diseases that we don’t encounter much in the Western world are common here and frequently spread by human contact as simple as holding hands.

It is surprisingly common for Township residents to gain an education and employment, learn to speak and write English fluently and in general move up the socio-economic ladder, yet continue living in the community from which they sprang. They do this both because the cost of living there is considerably less than elsewhere and because they have long standing attachments there.

Like the favellas we saw in Brazil, the Townships are natural breeding grounds for violent criminals, drug dealers and common thieves. Yet, apart from the kids in the orphanages, the Townships and their inhabitants failed to evoke in us any great sympathy for the simple reason that the people were living there voluntarily and with their most basic needs adequately, if barely, met. If life there were so bad, they would pack their meager belongings and go elsewhere as they were free to do. The local government is helping as much as it dares, fearing rightly that if they provide the Townships with too much assistance, the people in them will fail to provide for themselves and quickly become wards of the state, a result with which they already have had many years of regrettable experience. This propensity for readily surrendering to public welfare, known to behavioral economists as moral hazard, is a serious limitation on efforts to relieve suffering. On balance, it seemed to us that the Cape Town government is providing for the throngs of uneducated, unskilled immigrants only recently arrived from the bush about as well as any reasonable person could expect under the circumstances.

Following our nearly three surprisingly delightful weeks in South Africa, Kitty and Grant returned to Florida and the start of Grant’s spring semester, and I returned to Indigo at Tenerife to begin our final preparations for crossing the Atlantic.

THE ATLANTIC CROSSING

The distance from Tenerife to Barbados is 2,617 nautical miles, which we covered at an average of 8.4 nautical miles (9.7 statute miles) per hour in 13 days arriving at our destination with thirty percent of our fuel supply remaining. To put this into a perspective that might hold more meaning for you, imagine driving in a lumbering RV from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco over undulating unpaved rough roads at ten miles per hour never stopping along the way. Jarring as that picture may be, I have to admit that Indigo’s accommodations are an improvement over most RV’s and that waves and chop on the sea are more easily endured than bumps and potholes on the road.

Although Indigo’s radar has a capable range of 48 nautical miles, it cannot see nearly that far due to distortions caused by the earth’s curvature. Consequently, we kept it set at 24-miles throughout the crossing, a range that represents the radius of a circle that its beam sweeps. Over the entire distance of the crossing, we saw on the radar just four other vessels. Doing the math, there were during the period of the crossing just five vessels (the four sighted plus us) within an area of 125,000 square nautical miles. As this suggests, traffic congestion has not yet come to the high seas. There is congestion for sure at chokepoints for marine transport, such as the Panama and Suez canals, the Straits of Malacca, Gibraltar, Torres, Hormuz and Bab el Mandeb in the Red Sea, and in the Gulf of Aden, but apart from these the world’s oceans are roomy and largely free of vessel traffic jams.

Our crossing took place by design at a time when the forecast called for the weather to be about as benign as subtropical crossings get, and it was. Winds blew during the day mostly in the range of 20 to 25 knots, less in the earlier days of the voyage and slightly less at night, generally from east to west. This directed waves at us varying from directly on the stern to as much as 10 to 15 degrees off to either side. The greater our distance from the African coast the greater the expanse of ocean over which the winds blew—called the fetch in nautical lingo—and consequently the greater the wave height. The result was that as we progressed toward our destination in Barbados, we encountered increasingly large waves but nothing extraordinary or discomfiting. Indigo handled the seas quite well as she always has.

Nothing much happened along the way worthy of reporting, except that Engineer Terry managed to catch several dolphins and a nice Wahoo, which chef George turned into tasty dinners. On long passages, a routine quickly develops that for me amounts to rank indolence and for the crew amounts to shift work as they stand periodic watches. I managed to catch up on a great deal of reading, blog writing, emailing and the like, to say nothing of frequent naps.

BARBADOS

It is known as the England of the Caribbean with good reason. Most of its non-native inhabitants, whether permanent or temporary, are Brits and signs of that abound. Most restaurants on Sunday serve a proper English roast dinner with Yorkshire pudding and the bars offer about the same beers, ales and light fare found in any London pub. To give the crew some time off after the crossing, I took a room in a modest resort hotel where I was the only non-Brit guest, all of them there to escape England’s dreary winter.

One night while killing time after dinner in a lively piano bar, I began talking with a jovial man with a slightly cherubic look about him and some of his entourage. It turned out that he was a member of the House of Lords, Lord David Evans. Right away, I could tell he had neither the accent nor the manner that you and I might associate with a hereditary peer, which, as it turned out, he was not. It seems that when the Labor Party reformed Parliament during the administration of Prime Minister Tony Blair, the PM acquired the power to make some political appointments to the House of Lords (Tony’s Cronies, they were called). David Evans, a wealthy contributor to the party who had worked his way up the ladder from printer’s helper to owner of a successful publishing company, was one of these, who became by the stroke of a pen Lord David. He kindly invited me to join him and his friends the next night for drinks at his sumptuous holiday home and dinner at a swish restaurant, which I happily accepted. In a jocular manner, I cautioned him, though, that America fought a war over this royalty business and his side had lost, so as far as I was concerned he can forget about me calling him Lord, title or not. His name to me is David. He chuckled with his good-natured charm and went along with it. It was a memorable night, another of those many fortuitous encounters I have had on this voyage.

During the week or so I was on the island, I drove along its densely developed, traffic choked shores and into its lush interior, visited its few tourist attractions and spent part of a Friday evening at Oisten’s Beach during the weekly festive beach party held there. Like nearly all Caribbean islands, it has some fine beaches and balmy breezes, though, because it is closer to the equator than most, it is sweltering at any time but winter. It was one of the few Caribbean islands I had never visited, and now that I have done so, there is no compelling reason to return.

From Barbados, we traveled west arriving in the lee of the Windward Islands at St. Lucia where we turned north toward home using the mass of these islands to block the wind driven waves coming off the Atlantic. As I had done five years before, we stopped off at various islands both of the Windward, and farther to the north, the Leeward chains. These were generally pleasant interludes in scenic bays and harbors, each stop lasting just a few days. Of these islands, my favorites are St. Lucia and Dominica, which retain much of their pristine splendor not yet spoiled by ill-conceived development. Although we did not visit them this time, my favorite islands of all the Caribbean are the St. Vincent and Grenadines chain.

Eventually, we made our way to Anguilla in the far north extremity of the Lesser Antilles then turned west bypassing the mostly charmless island of Puerto Rico to arrive at Casa de Campo, Dominican Republic then on to Havana, Cuba, the Bahamas and home, subjects of the next blog.