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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Isle
be there No man is an island, but islands are for me. I wonder why - what is the attraction? Which groups of islands? The Falklands are close to the top of the list as somewhere special - I have visited twice from a cruise ship, have explored Port Stanley, watched the albatross colonies on West Point Island and taken afternoon tea from bone china under a corrugated tin roof. I really want to return and spend two full weeks there, exploring and bird watching. The quality of light is great for photography. The islands do have some personal meaning - I lived in Argentina for a couple of years until just before the Falklands War, and was very lucky to escape the hostility many Britons suffered who stayed on in Buenos Aires. Most of them had to leave in a hurry, abandoning their household belongings. We watched the news with incredulity at such a remote war fought in such hostile conditions. South Georgia is a dependency of the Falklands - I spent a few days landing in different bays, mainly to visit penguin colonies but we also did a walk along the old whalers' path from Leith to Stromness, sliding around in the scree and crawling on hands and knees round gale-battered cliff tops. I loved the wildness of Stromness - now a deserted (almost) whaling station, an eerie place inhabited mainly by seals, a torn piece of corrugated iron flapping in the wind and rusted wrecks in the harbour for full theatrical effect. There is a cared-for Norwegian church there and some talk of restoring the former Manager's house to which Shackleton stumbled at the end of his incredible journey. His grave is across the bay - there's a good walk up from there around the reservoir. The whole place is starkly beautiful, bleak and terrifying yet it has such a magnetic pull for me that I am already booked to return in March next year. Still on the theme of starkly beautiful remote islands, let me transport you from around 53 degrees South to 63 degrees North, to the Faroes. Last July I spent ten days travelling around these islands, many of which are linked by tunnels - the rough seas between have often cut off islands during the winter months. They cost a lot to build and the Faroese are not very happily indebted to the Danish as a result. Many still wear national dress. They are mostly a dark-haired and very fair-skinned people. I was expecting Nordic blond hair, but apparently Turkish pirates shipwrecked a couple of hundred years ago have added to the gene pool. The islands are brooding and rocky - some of the walks we did were scary. If it doesn't rain, you are lucky - we did enjoy some bright spells which seemed all the more magic. Wonderful bird life and the famous puffins, which the locals still eat, but it was their year off last summer - for the puffins I mean - stocks are allowed to recover every three years. I don't only do cold islands. Last November I set off for India and boarded a ship at Goa to travel to the Laccadive Islands. These are roughly north of the Maldives, and are a group of around 30 coral islands seven or eight of which are inhabited. The local government (India rules overall) have opened up three of the uninhabited islands to tourists. They don't want us on the others because they are strict Muslims and tourists might corrupt their values - I find it hard to argue with that. The islands we visited were beautiful and sandy with warm seas to swim in, a few trees for shade, millions of hermit crabs, a very few birds. A day on each was enough - they were small enough to walk right around - I'm not very good at sitting on hot beaches as I prefer exploring, but it was well worth the expedition. I could not miss out the Galapagos. I did spend some time wondering whether it was ethical to visit, adding my footprints to thousands of others in a fragile environment. The same is true of Antarctica. Curiosity got the better of me, so off I went. They are making a conscious effort to limit tourism - no more boat licences will be issued, for instance. Two friends who were on different cruise ships this winter were denied access by sea and had to fly from the mainland. This does, of course, help to preserve work for the locals and the small boats they run, as well as reducing the environmental impact of larger ships. Itineraries are carefully controlled to avoid overcrowding and visitors are strictly limited to certain trails. I'm sure you have all seen the wildlife on TV documentaries so I won't describe it all again here, but the islands themselves are refreshingly unspoilt, with only one large town. This summer I'm continuing my exploration of the British Island groups, with trips planned to the Isles of Scilly and the Outer Hebrides - next year I am off to Tristan da Cunha. So what is the attraction to islands? Island communities develop in their own idiosyncratic way. People have migrated to them for various reasons, there's a pioneering feel, and sense of being on the geographical outer limits. Uninhabited islands have that wonderful atmosphere of being untouched and unpolluted, the wildlife undisturbed. Human settlement on islands and the relationships between people in these small communities provides a fascinating theme for trip reading. I have just finished an account of the settlement of Pitcairn Island by the Bounty mutineers - things got off to a very violent beginning but the history of the community is interesting and is still controversial today. In the Galapagos there are the descendants of many German settlers. The five Angermeyer brothers fled Hitler's Germany and sailed to Santa Cruz in a homemade boat. Other Germans settled on Floreana, with conflict and more tales of murder and disappearances. If anyone knows of any further reading on island themes, I would like to hear your recommendations, though, if it is about somewhere I have not visited yet, you will only get me reaching for the atlas... Bon Voyage. My Father's
Island - Johanna Angermeyer (the story of the German brothers on Santa
Cruz) First
published in VISA 79 (Jun08) |