January 18th: Pointe Noire to Sao Tome
We bear away from the continent and cross one hundred and fifty nautical miles of water from the mainland out to the island of Sao Tome, the engines droning above the Atlantic, no land in sight until the island coalesces conical and volcanic from the mists surrounding it as we descend. When we get lower and set up a visual approach along the shoreline I feel as if we’ve flown back in time, that if the clouds were to clear pterodactyls would be circling the heights of black rock carpeted in jungle and the long necks of vanished monsters would be seen rising from the trees.
On downwind to the runway there is an ancient wreck in the shallows below us. It is broken upon the reefs, its steel hull abloom with rust, half its carcass still above the waterline as it is consumed by the sea.
The ex-Portuguese colony on the island is much the same, as if the small town were itself shipwrecked here and abandoned, its old colonial buildings in decay, the esplanade disintegrating, the edges of the town being taken back by the creeping jungle and slowly devoured. Boats list at the dock. Plastered walls crack and peel. Banisters, posts and sections of the sidewalk along the seawall are gone. Igneous boulders are littered along the beach like cosmic rubble, fine sand feathered between. The tourists in the ramshackle resort in which we stay seem like refugees. Entropy has been let loose upon this paradise. But nobody cares.
The locals play like lions upon the beach. Children frolic naked in the waves as the sun sets.
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