Pictures - Salomon Islands Atoll, Chagos
Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Mon 14 May 2012 04:49
| April 1, 2012 - April 28, 2012 More old news, but at least you'll get a little glimpse of what Chagos was like during our 28-day stay.  Our first anchorage next to Ile Fouquet, one of the tiny, flat, palm tree covered islands in the Salomon Islands Atoll.  Our first foray to shore in the kayaks.  What's left of a French pop star's large catamaran six months after dragging onto a reef during a squall and washing up on Ile Fouquet's beach (photo taken before the well equipped Danish crew began their energetic salvage operation).  A young coconut crab hiding in…you guessed it - a coconut.  A family of hermit crabs hanging out by the beach. It is against the rules to collect seashells in Chagos, but even if it wasn't, it would be very difficult to find a shell not already occupied by a member of the Chagos hermit crab clan.  Don with his first leopard coral trout catch. Yum. Better than mahi-mahi.  The beach at low tide on Ile Boddam, another tiny island fringing the Salomon Islands Atoll lagoon.  Although the Chagos archipelago was originally uninhabited, European settlers turned some of the small islands into palm plantations, bringing in laborers from India, Sri Lanka and other countries to work the fields. These copra (a coconut palm product) producing plantations existed for a few hundred years before the British started to secretly 'resettle' the islanders from Chagos to Mauritius and the Seychelles between 1965 and 1973. Eventually, the entire archipelago was emptied of people, and the British were free to lease Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos group, to the US for a military base. Since then, the people of Chagos have brought suit against the British government for forcing them to leave their homeland, and the case has gone back and forth in the courts for many years. No one has been allowed to move back to Chagos (not sure they would really want to given there is zero infrastructure), and the US still has its base on Diego Garcia. The photo above shows the remains of a cemetery on Ile Boddam, where one of the plantations once existed. There are a few wells (at least one still in operation, which some of the boaters used to do laundry), and ruins of various buildings, but the tropical jungle is extremely resilient and certainly, given a little more time, will finish reclaiming all of what used to be a small village and plantation.  Lucky Tagish, a Canadian boat, literally becomes the pot of gold.  Our fabulous sunset reward after enduring a night of squalls and a day of high wind topped off by one dragging anchor episode. Next up: Chagos to Mauritius passage summary and pictures. Anne |