At the end of the pier is the famous landing, with several ropes hanging from a bar like an over-sized swing set. The ropes are not really for swinging ashore, although it may feel like that during a storm. Instead, the ropes just provide something firm to hold onto while stepping between the heaving ferry to the slippery concrete on the pier.
Once ashore a the jungle gym dock, we filled our water jugs (Only 3 in the picture are ours) and took a trip via the yacht club and on to Customs and Immigration (a relatively pain free process).
Inward clearance is pretty easy in St. Helena. All of the officialdom is in one building at the head of the pier. The only thing closer is the yacht club, which is currently being run by volunteers from another cruising boat that couldn’t bring themselves to leave just yet. We later found that the walk from the end of the pier to Customs was one of only two places on the island where it is possible to walk on level ground, the other being the beach at Sandy Bay. Locals are so used to leaning into a hill that they all fall over when they get to this part.
Our first hour around Jamestown proper revealed a lovely little town, and included a stop for tea and cake! We also learned that Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail around the world solo, had visited here as part of that adventure (visiting in 1898).
Since our fast passage had us arriving early, Maryanne and I had intended to clear in and then have a shortish day orienting ourselves in Jamestown and then maybe having a meal out before retuning to Begonia. Once we were ashore, though, I took one look at Jacob’s Ladder and what appeared to be a really nice viewpoint at the top and decided maybe it would be nice to climb the 699 steps to have a look.
Alas, the stairs were closed for maintenance. We later heard many locals complain about this, “They had the whole pandemic to do the work. Instead, they start now, right when the tourists are coming back.”
Undaunted, we decided we would get to the top via the adjacent and very narrow single-lane road. The lookout gave areal views of Jamestown, but Begonia was just around the corner, so we poked around unsuccessfully for a gap, hoping for a view. We found mostly thick bushes or people’s private gardens.
Jamestown got a lot smaller as we climbed the steep and narrow road up to Half Tree Hollow
Once in Half Tree Holow we ambled around the crumbling Ladder Hill Fort and got a view of the tiny boats below
We were now at the bottom of St. Helena’s geographically largest settlement, Half Tree Hollow; its population being larger than its neighbour Jamestown since it is on top of the ridge and not hemmed in by steep canyon walls. At the other, high end stood what looked like a church. I figured I could get Maryanne to go for making the climb since I know she always enjoys having a look around churches. Beyond, a ring of stones marked a viewpoint on top of the hill there, so that looked like a good goal for the day’s turn-around point.
It didn’t take long for the climb to start wearing on us. The asphalt was sloped at a relentless 20% grade that never let up for even one step. Our quads were burning and the midday sun wasn’t helping by baking us in the shadeless heat. Plus, neither of us had had a chance to get any sleep since our last night watches and we had kinda skipped breakfast in our haste to get ashore when Customs summoned us.
The church never materialized. The view kept being blocked by the intervening houses and where we got to where we expected it to be, we couldn’t find it. Perhaps the road curved away as we weren’t looking. There was also a weird looking house that had Amityville Horror style windows that may have looked like a church from a distance.
Maryanne was making noises about getting a taxi. I was also miserable, but I also didn’t want to have to redo the walk on another day later, it really didn't seem like that much further, so I implored her to push on for a bit. Luckily, we came across Andy’s Store, where we were able to buy many cold drinks and sit on their shaded verandah eating ice cream bars.
Newly refreshed, we joined the road and resumed our climb. We hadn’t made it more than a hundred paces or so before a car stopped to pick us up. It turned out Maryanne had not been so determined to feel the sense of accomplishment for going the whole way and had stuck her thumb out.
It was a good thing she did. The ring of stones that I had been looking at was not the border of a viewpoint parking area but in fact a sizeable fort, High Knoll Fort. The walls were not four feet high, they were four stories high and thus a lot farther away than I had believed. To get there, the road went quite a bit beyond and then doubled back, all at the same relentless gradient. Our new best friend’s Audi made short work of it.
Exploring High Knoll Fort which we found in surprisingly good condition
It started to rain intermittently as we arrived, so we alternated poking around the ruins with enjoying the views over the parapets, which showed us pretty much the whole island. Once we felt we got all we could from the experience, we started the much easier walk several miles back downhill to the pier.
We spoted our first Saint Helena plover in the fort. The locals call it the wirebird. At the bottom of the hill to the fort we found one much easier to spot..
Well, at least the downhill treck started off quite pleasantly. The hill was steep enough that it gave our quads and knees a pretty good workout on the way down as well. By the time we got to the less steep streets of Jamestown we were relieved to feel like we were having a level stroll through a park. Unfortunately, by then it was getting late in the day and all the restaurants in town were shut. Our dreams of a relaxing pub meal to celebrate our arrival would have to wait another day.
Downhill back to Jamestown, a stroll by (and into) all the Churches Maryanne could find and then back to the boat to hoist the courtesy flag fo St Helena
The next day we visited the museum, and Maryanne found one more church to explore. After that we to do an easier hike to some of the ruined military lookouts on the eastern side of James Bay. We got nice views and the ruins were interesting. Once there, though, we had that thing where we decided to keep going to see what’s around the next corner and so on. We ended up on the hill overlooking Rupert’s Bay.
More exploring in town, we found the attractive prison wasn't a tourist attraction and we'd actually need to break the law before they would grant us entry.
One of the many trails leading to coastal fortifications and great views (and exercise)
The tropic birds were easy to spot flying around the cliffs below the trail, and eventually we made it to the Wharf at Rupert's Bay
Rupert’s is the new industrial center of St. Helena. The supply ship was berthed there across the bay from a giant fuel gantry that looks like a jetway on steroids. Behind that, large diameter pipelines ran through the town to big tanks in the valley above. Heavy machinery was busy making all sorts of loud diesel noises leveling ground and installing big pieces of concrete. It was astonishingly unlovely. Interspersed among all of this were a few of what I imagine must be the worst houses on the island, set in the bottom of a sea of noise and dust.
I’m sure it was once the other way around. Rupert’s was a serene getaway at the bottom of a quiet valley. Then, a few years ago, the British government signed off on what must be one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in the world when measured on a per-use basis.
For the longest time, the only way for people to get to and from St. Helena, apart from having their own boat, was to book passage on the dedicated freighter that supplies the island from Cape Town once every six weeks. A few years ago, it was decided St. Helena needed a proper international airport to make travel and commerce faster.
There were a couple of problems with this. First was that the mountainous island didn’t have a big enough parcel of flat land on which to build an airport of the size needed by aircraft with the range to get there. The solution to this was to remove the top of the hill adjacent to the island’s biggest flat spot and then use the material as fill to build a berm on the other side. This would give them a runway with a sheer cliff off both ends, To do this, they would need heavy earth moving equipment, of which the island had none. That was the second problem
Solving that issue wasn’t as easy as you might expect. Jamestown and the whole of the island behind it is protected from a naval attack at James Bay, which is the only suitable harbor at the island, by substantial fortifications (more on why later). Most noticeable of these is the wall between the settlement and the pier, which is further fronted by a moat (or is it a ditch if it doesn’t go all the way around?) To get from one side of the wall to the other, it is necessary to go through an aperture known as St. James’ Gate and over a bridge. Everything on the island that isn’t planning on spending its entire life on the pier, like the big crane that swings the shipping containers ashore, has to be light enough to cross the bridge and small enough to fit through the gate. This means the maximum size is about enough for a minibus. Dump trucks and bulldozers are out. That’s just as well because the streets of Jamestown are so narrow and winding that they wouldn’t get much past the gate anyway. This is why, for example, the island’s wind farm looks quaint with its small two-bladed turbines. The big ones we are used to seeing everywhere else wouldn’t fit.
Which brings us back to Rupert’s. In order to build an airport, they would need a harbor big enough to tie up a ship and a big, wide reinforced road between the two, which goes clear across the island for all of the lorries with oversized loads. Oh, also, they had better put in a fuel terminal because they are going to be using a LOT of diesel for all of this.
After a lot of work, the airport was finally complete. (It’s basic – just one runway, a parking area and a hut for a terminal. There are no taxiways, no intersecting runways, no nuttin’) A South African airline was contracted to begin air service. On the first proving flight, the company’s Chief Pilot flew the leg in one of the company’s Next Generation Boeing 737s. On their first approach, they got a windshear warning and aborted the landing. The horizontal wind over the runway plunged off the end toward the sea, making for some alarming downdrafts right when you don’t want ‘em. They made a second landing attempt with the same result. Low on fuel, they returned to South Africa without landing. Once they arrived, the Chief Pilot declared the St. Helena airport unsafe and announced the company was cancelling the contract. This caused the newspapers to go crazy, with headlines like “World’s Worst Airport”
After a couple of years, a different South African airline (Airlink) agreed to give service a try in their new Embraer 190s. Embraers need less runway to land than 737s, which meant they could come in higher, land further down the runway after passing the downdraft at the cliff face and still have sufficient room to stop. It’s still a challenging approach that requires special airport specific simulator training for each pilot that flies it, but it was doable. Soon, it was announced that the airline would be inaugurating once-weekly service from Cape Town. Every third week, the flight would continue to Ascension Island, stay the night and then return on the way back to Cape Town the next day.
That’s right. The whole airport project was for one flight per week. Most St Helenians say the flights are too expensive (the average per capita income on the island is quite low at around £8,500 per year) so the seats are mostly taken up by government officials and a smattering of tourists with enough time to stay until the next flight. I’ve never met such a high proportion of adults that say they have never been on an airplane.
The supply ship was in. From our viewpoint above Rupert’s, we could watch it unloading cargo onto motorized barges called lighters, which would then take it around the corner to the pier at Jamestown. This is again because trucks that could transport the cargo can’t navigate the road between so almost everything is still brought onto the island by lighter like it always has been.
Actually the cargo ship arrived after and was in town for serveral days - we didn't actually spot it in Rupert's bay until we walked over that way on our last day in St Helena, but we won't let a muddled memory get in the way of a good story...
This sort of thing might explain why three or four sentences into every conversation, St. Helenians almost always start complaining about the government. It’s not the mean-spirited stuff you hear elsewhere. Mostly it just seems like a way of passing the time and almost always comes with the caveat that, “They mean well, they just don’t have many resources to work with”. The government once proposed a plan for eliminating unemployment by paying people to complain about them, but the public rejected it after heated debate for not being generous enough. St. Helena has a high-speed fiberoptic cable, but it hasn’t been connected to anything yet so the internet is right out of the 1990s. The main problem is that the company with the contract to provide the local phone services doesn't want the competition of a faster internet provider and their contract has yet to expire. Smart phones don’t do anything useful except take pictures you can’t upload, so most people entertain themselves by sitting on benches and conversing with one another and chatting with passersby like us. It’s really quite wonderful.
Back through St. James’ Gate on the way to the pier, it was time to stop at the yacht club for Taco Wednesday. Uh, what? Wednesday! Maybe it rolls of the tongue better in Ukrainian. Our host, Elyena is from there and now lives on the boat on the mooring next to Begonia. She said she learned from ‘The YouTube’ how to be the only Mexican restaurant on the island. It seems to have worked. The place was overflowing with both yachties and islanders.
We shared a table with the four guys from the big ketch on the mooring on the other side of us from Elyena. All we knew about them so far was that their silhouettes were always the first and last things we could see on deck in the dim twilight and they were always fishing. They are a group of friends from Hong Kong who all decided to take a couple of years off and sail around the world together. They had an infectious enthusiasm and were all really funny as they joked around with us and each other. After returning to our boats with bellies full of tacos, they pulled out the lines and caught two more fish. They say they looove sushi and their cook is a high-level chef back at home.
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