Postcards from Santo (pt. III)
To my friends,
Hello again! One of the highlights of my time in Santo was a few days on Araki, a little island off the coast. You can see the three ‘steps’ in the photo above. The 130-odd locals all live on the bottom step, with their gardens (little plots of land the families cultivate) and copra plantations on the second and third step. A bunch of the local boys took great pleasure in trying to scare the white man by taking him to all the hardest spots to climb to the next step, and the places with the most bizarre bits of folklore. So we climbed a cliff-face to get to a tiny little cave that the crew of a ship hid in from the cannibals in the 1800s on their way back from India (complete with a legend of stolen Indian gold hidden somewhere in the depths of a cave-in); then a lookout where a missionary pushed his wife over the edge. I guess with an island this small you have to milk such stories for all they’re worth.
Being in the villages necessitated a swift adaptation to island food. For the most part, it’s 101-Ways to Prepare Root Veges, usually with some sort of coconut and whatever fruit happens to be about (mangoes!!). Quite out of character for me, I did enjoy my part of a haul of the biggest prawns I’ve ever seen, some lovely coral trout, and even some sea snails at Asafaera!
Posted: Oct 1, 07:29 PM Category: Reflections
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