After being foster parents to eight children for two years, Chris and Lindsay Harvey were looking for a change in lifestyle.
21.07.2023 - 07:59 / roughguides.com
Sitting almost 2000km off the southwest coast of Africa, St Helena is a tiny island paradise – for the moment. A new airport opened in March 2016, but the island still offers a true sense of isolation and relaxation.
“This is the Officer of the Watch speaking…” The voice is calm but commanding. Mentally, I stand to attention, but the royal-blue sunlounger on the deck of the RMS St Helena is far too comfortable for further effort.
Below me, says the voice, is 2703m of water, and we’re several hundred miles from the nearest land. For a moment, the ship feels decidedly small in the wide Southern Atlantic.
They don’t do things the easy way on St Helena. Yet.
RMS St Helena in James Bay — by Tricia Hayne
By the time we reach St Helena, we’ve had five whole days since Cape Town to get used to this 158-berth vessel. Five days to adapt to a slower pace of life, the gentle courtesy of the St Helenians who look after our every need, their unexpectedly competitive streak at quoits, or deck cricket.
We’ve had five days in which to come to terms with the increasing isolation. So when Jamestown looms into view on day six, it’s with a sense of relaxed anticipation that we make our way down the wobbly gangplank onto the even wobblier pontoon and thence on to the tender that takes us ashore. They don’t do things the easy way on St Helena. Yet.
For the RMS is on the way out. By August next year, its 27-year tenure will be no more than a memory, confined to the ‘that was then’ world before the airport opened. Since St Helena was discovered in 1502, every single visitor has approached by sea.
Jamestown — by Tricia Hayne
For most – bar the occasional invading army – first footfall on the island has been at Jamestown, a tiny, well-preserved Georgian town at the foot of towering cliffs that is the island’s capital. Like us, they’ve walked along the harbourfront, crossed the moat and passed through the town gates onto the Grand Parade – where centuries of British soldiers have mustered for duty.
An extraordinary rock, where every corner turned is another scene revealed.
The sense of history may be palpable, but it’s all very low key. Far more obvious is the welcome. Passing strangers smile and say hello. Women in the St Helena Coffee Shop sit and chat. Car drivers wave as we pass on the scarily steep and narrow roads heading out of Jamestown – for the only way is up.
Up into the aftermath of a turbulent volcanic past that gave birth to this extraordinary rock, where every corner turned is another scene revealed. And so we explore – from the bare, forbidding cliffs that, fortress like, ring the island to the high peaks clothed in green plants found nowhere else on Earth.
We head into the verdant Sane Valley where Napoleon was entombed
After being foster parents to eight children for two years, Chris and Lindsay Harvey were looking for a change in lifestyle.
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