SUNDAY 2 Dec.  We will leave tomorrow midday after checking out, fuelling up, and a last minute e-mail and bread run.   Today we drove around the island which wasn’t very difficult as it’s not very large.  There are signs of rebuilding everywhere but nothing is finished. The airport clearly expects hoards of tourists to arrive... Maybe in a few years they will.

 There are extremely good cobbled and paved roads running over much of the island which have been there for several hundred years.  It is volcanic and very dry.  We drove to the top of Mt Greene which is about 900 meters high.  Great views of course. The city has some Portuguese Colonial architecture which once upon a time must have been pretty grand.  Everything is built of stone or cement blocks very dusty and grey.  So it’s no surprise some of the buildings in some of the areas are very brightly painted with purples, yellows, greens, and reds you name it. Begging is rife and quite aggressive, so much so that you become hardened to it and begin to stop feeling sorry for the locals which is of course unreasonable as they are very poor.

I’m attaching some pictures and as the captions disappear in this system I hope the order remains the same. Actually I'm doing it  from a wi fi connection and the order is whatever.

1. A gentle understated sunset to add  to the collection
2. Dorado No 1 and a premature celebration.  This one got away.
3. Dorado No 2 and a proper celebration.  This one went nowhere.
4. Dorado No 2 Tethered.
5. Finnish boy discovers Sandy Beach. Nik is fascinated by sand.  Guess there’s not too much of it in Finland
6. Sotiris Rock Climbing and of course smoking.
7. A restrained painted house
8. Cobbled Square. These cobbles have been here for hundreds of years and they are now digging them up to be replaced with nice new paving.  I guess this is progress.
9. A bit of surf.  Excellent surfboarding possibilities here.
10. This boat makes me feel better about my sat dish which is a modest 60cm.  This boat is half the size of SPINDRIFT and sports a dish which looks to be twice the size of ours.
11. Not a very flattering shot of Steve in a street market.
12. Very pretty little girl in the street market.