travel – The Pilots of the Caribbean

2020: The Year that Wasn’t

We left Alter in Preveza, Greece in October 2019 with the firm belief that we would return six months later. We travelled to Haiti to replenish our coffers flying on contract for the local airline, Sunrise Airways. We have both come to love Haiti but flying for Sunrise was not the ideal farewell. Cap Haïtien was our only destination. It is only 25 minutes flying time from Port-au-Prince, and our schedule of up to eight sectors a day was unrelenting. We spent most of our time off in our apartment staring at the opposite wall, trying to find the energy or inclination to do anything else. When we did find the energy, we visited old friends and explored some of the sights that we had previously missed, including one of Port-au-Prince’s iconic Gingerbread Houses: a post-colonial mansion that was built at the turn of the last century.

Then Covid-19 happened. SARS and MERS had both come and gone with little damage and, at the time, COVID didn’t appear to be much different.

We returned to the UK in February at the start of the global pandemic and a world that was inexorably changing. We had booked a short skiing holiday in Valtournenche, in the Aosta Valley. We hadn’t skied for two years and were keen to get back on the slopes. But before we left, while we were staying with Nicky’s sister in Wales, the pandemic began to swell. It flooded the province of Lombardy in Italy and seeped from there via the surrounding provinces into the rest of the country. We considered cancelling. But decided to go ahead and boarded the flight to Turin as planned. On arrival, we joined a long queue that snaked towards a cluster of medical staff who checked everyone’s temperatures and collected contact forms. The Italians were riding Europe’s first wave and were paddling furiously, trying to stay ahead of its curling tip and prevent their winter holiday season from drowning. Most skiers had chosen to stay home leaving the towns of Valtournenche and Cervinia bereft, with many restaurants closed and a curfew that brought an eerie calm to the evening streets. Residents were in shock, their hopes fading like mountain mist. Some stopped us in the streets to thank us for coming.

When the ski slopes closed we went snowshoeing.

On Sunday 8 March, the ski lifts operated at reduced capacity, with blocked-off seats and social distancing in the queues. Then, when it was clear that the wave was really a tsunami, the Italians finally did what they had been desperately trying to avoid, they closed the slopes.

EasyJet cancelled our return flight to the UK on the morning of our departure and muttered vague promises of evacuation flights from Milan, the epidemic’s epicentre. We declined and took the last flight out of Turin on Ryanair, who continued to honour their published schedule. At Stanstead we were greeted by empty hand sanitiser dispensers. Nobody seemed vaguely interested that we were coming from the heart of the pandemic. It was a strong indication that Britain had rolled up its trousers to its knees, pulled a knotted handkerchief firmly down over its head and was preparing to paddle into the wave without a lifejacket.

I left for South Africa shortly afterwards to start a two-month contract flying in the DRC and Nicky returned to Wales. In a world where plans were fast becoming meaningless, Nicky intended returning to Greece to go hiking in Corfu before we met up at the boat in May.

But Covid had a schedule that didn’t involve us. Countries began to close their borders and lock down their citizens. I reached Kalemie in the DRC the day before the Congo closed its borders and cancelled all internal flights, leaving me without much flying to do. I settled in for an indefinite stay. Nicky’s planned hike became impossible, so she moved into her sister’s Airbnb to wait out the pandemic.

My two-month contract stretched three and then four. It was eventually four and a half months before a new crew could replace me. With no flights between South Africa and the UK, or anywhere else, getting back to Nicky in the UK was a challenge. Fortunately, my boss agreed to drop me off in Lusaka and the Zambians let me remain in transit – without going through the mandatory 14 days quarantine – while I waited for an Ethiopian Airlines flight to London, via Addis Ababa.

Post-apocalyptic empty walkways at Heathrow.

During the four months, Nicky had decided that we needed a more permanent home, somewhere that we could always go to in times of crisis. The boat was supposed to be our home, but neither of us could get there. She wanted something more tangible. South Africa was too remote and neither of us wanted to return there permanently, so we decided to take advantage of the Brexit withdrawal agreement and move to Europe. But where?

Our first instinct was Spain. We flew to Granada to spend some time there and see if we liked it. We landed in Malaga and joined a crush of people choking the passageway to the arrival hall. Most were wearing masks, but I’ve seen more social distancing at a Rod Stewart concert.

The crush of people that greeted us in Malaga.

Grenada greeted us with temperatures in the forties and mandatory mask-wearing indoors and out. It was a bit like walking about in a large sauna with a shopping bag over your head, so we often escaped to the coast or drove up into the mountains, where it was a few degrees cooler.

We both loved Granada, and very nearly made an offer on an apartment in nearby Salobreña. But after a month it didn’t feel like home. More importantly, it felt like it might never be.

So, after making a list of all the places that we might want to live: France, Italy, Greece and just about anywhere in the world apart from Chad or North Korea, we decided to move to France. It was already August and under Article 34, we had to be resident and make an application to stay before the end of the year. There wasn’t a lot of time to spare.

We rented an apartment in Carcassonne, a city on the Canal du Midi that we had visited a couple of times previously. Properties closer to the coast tend to be more expensive and we didn’t want to be too far from the sea. After Nicky had examined every property for sale in a five-hundred-kilometre radius, we found a village house that, for me, was a coup de foudre. It wasn’t perfect for Nicky, with little outside space. But other than that it was exactly what we were looking for: somewhere small that we could lock up and leave whenever we wanted to without the property beginning to deteriorate the moment that we locked the door.

Perhaps the best part of the deal was that we bought it from an English couple who had renovated another property three doors down and would therefore be our neighbours.

Having Paul and Tan there to show us around and introduce us to our other neighbours made our transplant almost painless. We quickly discovered that we had a lot more in common and have become firm friends.

And then, finally, in July 2021, Covid restrictions began to ease. By then France had vaccinated us and we were able to consider returning to Greece and the boat.

Lake Kivu

When the UN contract in Haiti came to an end a little over a year ago, we headed to Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo to fly for Monusco, the UN Peacekeeping Mission that has been trying to separate Congo’s warring factions for the last twenty years.

Our job is the same; the destinations are different. Instead of Port-au-Prince, Cap Hatïen and Santo Domingo, we shuttle to Kalemi, Kisangani, and Entebbe in Uganda. Occasionally we fly to Beni, about two hundred kilometres north of here, where sporadic attacks by an Islamic militia hamper international efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak.

Coming into land with Mount Nyiragongo in the background.

Goma huddles up against Gisenyi in Rwanda, on the shore of Lake Kivu. To the north, Mount Nyiragongo, an active volcano, smokes ominously, a constant reminder of the 2002 eruption that drove a swathe of molten lava through Goma and into the lake.

The city is five-thousand feet above sea level. Daily downpours in the rainy season wash away the film of sulfurous ash and keep the air cool. When the sun dips toward the horizon, it dapples the clouds crimson and the mountains guarding the edges of the lake fade to purple.

One of the best places to watch the sunset is from the bar of Hotel Linda. Fishing boats venture out for the evening catch: three boats tied together side-by-side with long poles protruding from their flanks, like the antennae of an enormous insect. It’s a tranquil scene, but danger lurks under the still surface of the lake.

You’d think that a volcano, armed rebels and the threat of Ebola would be enough for one region. But the three of them are dwarfed by the biggest danger of all, the lake itself.
Lake Kivu is part of the Rift Valley that tries to cleave the eastern third of Africa from the rest of the continent. The lake has an average depth of eight hundred feet, and a surface area of one thousand square miles.

Brackish springs deep within the lake release water rich in carbon dioxide. Because the water is saline, it’s heavier than the fresh water above, so it stays at the bottom. Pressures of over forty atmospheres ensure that the carbon dioxide remains dissolved in the water. In some places the bacteria that live at the bottom of the lake feed on the carbon dioxide, turning it into methane.
To the south-east, near the Rwandan shore, there’s a white structure that looks a bit like an oil rig. Rwanda is extracting methane from the water for power production. But the volume of methane is increasing faster than it is being used, and the water can only hold so much methane. When the pressure of the gas equals the pressure of the water, the dissolved gas will bubble and surge to the surface, forming a toxic blanket, displacing all the oxygen.
In 1986 something similar happened to Lake Nyos in Cameroon. The lake released a large cloud of carbon dioxide from its depths, suffocating almost two thousand people, and more than three-thousand cattle. Lake Nyos is a fraction of the size of Lake Kivu.
There, a solution was found to prevent it from happening again. Vents were installed to allow the gas to bubble out of the lake at a controlled rate. But a similar project for Lake Kivu might run into tens of millions of dollars, money that the Congo and Rwanda don’t have to spare.
A major disturbance, like a volcanic eruption, might trigger an overturn, with all the gas effervescing out at once, possibly causing a tsunami.

As in 2002, the volcanic eruption would send people fleeing to the lake shore. Those that avoid the lava, and don’t drown, will be suffocated in a gigantic gas cloud. Two million people might die.
Fortunately, it only happens every thousand years, or so. But the last overturn was about a thousand years ago. It’s almost due for another one. Scientists predict that the next overturn will only happen towards the end of this century… or when the volcano erupts. And nobody’s quite sure when that’s going to happen.

Jacmel & Bassin Bleu

Distances in Haiti are measured in hours, not kilometers. A five-kilometer trip to the supermarket takes at least half an hour. Jacmel on Haiti’s south coast is only a hundred kilometers from Port-au-Prince, but a three-hour drive.
We planned to depart early for Jacmel to avoid the hour or three when the Port-au-Prince traffic goes from slow to stationary. We should have known better. Carefully planned itineraries in Haiti are naïve fantasies. So, we were unsurprised, but flustered, when a failed clutch stranded us before we had left the house. With accommodation booked and no other means of easily getting to Jacmel, we began frantically calling car hire companies. By the time we’d negotiated a replacement at a sensible price, loaded up, and set off for Jacmel, the roads were as congested as a consumptive’s lungs.

Eglise Paroissiale St. Philippe et St. Jean overlooking the old Iron Market in Jacmel

We pushed through the sprawling Carrefour slum on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where ruined roads slowed us to a crawl, and negotiated the torturous traffic, flanking water tankers that leaked from their hindquarters like incontinent elephants, and passing brightly painted buses with I Love You God and Grace Bondieu splashed across their windscreens. We fought our way free from the morning melee into the countryside and followed a pass over the Massif de la Hotte, the mountain range that divides Haiti’s Tiburon Peninsula. The narrow road passed through unkempt villages and wound around blind bends, slowing us to a plod. And when we found ourselves behind an asthmatic truck, there was no passing it until we reached the top.
Then we plunged down towards the sea, making up time on the descent, and turned off towards the renowned Bassin Bleu, a little before Jacmel. Thanks to Google Maps, we knew precisely where we were, exactly where we were going, but had no idea how to get there. Google had us fording the river, but a new bridge kept our tyres dry. We ditched the GPS and, with the help of the occasional local, found our way to Bassin Bleu the old way.
Tourism in Haiti endures somewhere between scarce and non-existent. If you ignore the Canadians bussed to the all-inclusive Decameron Hotel in packages or the sun-seekers delivered to Labadee by the shipload, you could count the foreign tourists on your fingers. Consequently, places like Bassin Bleu, which would be overcrowded on any other Caribbean island, are visited mostly by locals, or foreigners living in Haiti. So, the guides, who sometimes wait fruitlessly all day for a tourist, turn into a lynch mob when a potential client arrives. Well, that’s what it felt like. Before I had set the park brake, a crush of guides surrounded the car, knocking on the windows, clamouring for our attention. We emerged into a cacophony of unintelligible Creole.

When we hesitated, they began shouting and shoving each other and fixing for a fight.
I was ready to abandon the visit. But Nicky found David Guerrier from the Renand Foundation, who was a tranquil island amidst the tempest. We followed David along a forest path that wound upstream, until we came across a top hat resting on a pair of boots. Baron Samedi had beaten us to it. We left our trainers next to the hat and slid down a rock face to the river with the help of a knotted rope.

Bassin Bleu nestles in a narrow gorge at the base of a small waterfall. It comprises a series of pools, the most popular of which is the highest: Bassin Clair. Despite its name, its water is a milky turquoise but it is cool and inviting in the Haitian heat. We stripped to our costumes on the steep stone sides of the pool and swam, with our sandwiches, to the toad-like rock in the middle, where we joined a group who were visiting from Jacmel.
While having our picnic, we met Susan an American artist living in Jacmel. She told us about her art studio and also about The Vatican, where Reggie blends his own ice cream creations.
An hour or two later we were back at the car. We felt that David had looked after us well so, although he hadn’t asked for any money, we gave him a thousand gourdes (about $16 US, which, we believed was way above the going rate). He seemed unhappy, so we offered him more. He declined. So, we left mildly disgruntled David, paid the car guard, and tried to ignore the gathering crowd of hawkers and their trinkets. I turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. The car was dead.
With some reluctance, we rejoined the atmosphere of mild discontent. The guides, car guards and hawkers gathered around, all loudly recommending solutions. We traced the problem to a loose battery connection, tightened it, and fled for Jacmel. But the car felt spongy, so we pulled over down the road and found that one tyre was badly underinflated. We pushed on cautiously and soon after we rejoined the main road, we stopped at one of the many roadside tyre repair spots and pumped up the tyre. It didn’t go down again. We couldn’t help wondering if someone at Bassin Bleu had deflated it so that they could ‘assist’ us to inflate it again.
When we reached Jacmel, we headed straight for The Hotel Cyvadier just outside town in time to watch the sunset, both clasping large and welcome rum punches.
The following morning we headed for The Vatican and Reggie’s ice cream. Jacmel isn’t very big, and we had directions, but The Vatican was nowhere to be found. We wandered about looking confused until someone emerged from a doorway and asked what we were looking for.
‘Le Vatican.’
C’est ici. Entrez!’ he gestured for us to enter. We hesitated. There was no sign outside and the interior was dark and uninviting, with a pool table guarding a cluster of dusty chairs and half-built furniture.
‘It’s closed for renovations, but you can come in.’

The Vatican occupies a reclaimed alleyway with a roof and mezzanine added. Attached to the restaurant, beyond a small courtyard, are an ice cream parlour and café: both also closed. We followed the guy upstairs, where a long bar counter faced a few tables with bench seats.
Reggie rose from his mattress on the adjacent balcony like Lazarus and, wearing little more than a loincloth around his ample waist, clambered over the low wall into his restaurant. He shook off his afternoon sleep and greeted us like honoured guests. Reggie is a Haitian who, like many of his countrymen, has spent much of his life in the United States. Unlike most of them, he returned to set up his business in Jacmel. He was tickled that we had come specially for his ice cream and reeled off all the different flavours for us to choose from. I don’t remember all of them, but Nicky settled for Rum & Raisin and I requested a bolder Pineapple & Ginger.
When the cups of ice cream arrived, Reggie hovered over us like an expectant father. He needn’t have worried, they were both delicious. Sometimes food exceeds expectations only because the expectations weren’t very high to begin with. But Reggie’s ice cream alone was worth the journey to Jacmel. While we were savouring our treats, Susan and Stephanie, who we had met at Bassin Bleu, arrived. I think they might have entered from another balcony, but I can’t be sure because we were fixated on our ice creams. We sat chatting for a while before heading off to explore Jacmel.

Jacmel has little of the bustle of its big brother on the other side of the mountain. It is a rough gem badly in need of polishing. The Marché de Fer in Bel Air was once a lively centre of commerce, but its heart has ceased to beat. Some of its steel struts have rusted through, causing part of the roof to lean alarmingly into the street. The remains of bright silver cladding imply a scrapped renovation: a love found and lost.

One of the shops selling papier-mâché masks.

Down towards the sea, artists studios and galleries range along the cobbled streets near the Hotel Florita. And further west, towards the river, we found shops with brightly coloured papier-mâché heads for sale, a side-gig for the artists who make masks for Carnival. Graffiti is often a blight, but the Jacmel artists have talent in any medium.

The walls near the Alliance Française are covered in the kind of graffiti that might once have been frescos. At the seafront, the promenade was deserted except for a group of schoolchildren bussed down for the day. The beach would be idyllic, but for a canal that delivers a stream of garbage and plastic containers onto the sand.
The city is a living metaphor for Haiti: warm, picturesque and laid-back; but its crumbling infrastructure is almost beyond repair.

The Big Apple

We could easily have changed our minds. Our boss said that we could withdraw our resignations any time during our notice period, right op to the last day. One of our colleagues had recently done just that, returned to work with chilly toes and his tail between his legs. When the doors of the New York bound Airbus closed and it started moving, we both let out a sigh, releasing all the pent-up tensions from the last three months. The deed was done.

Before this all started, when we were still dreaming of leaving our jobs to sail around the world, Nicky had declared that as long as we motored out the harbour, turned right, raised the sails, passed Cape Recife and set course for Rio, or St. Helena, or wherever else our fancy took us, it didn’t matter if we never made it. If some freak wave sank us before we lost sight of land, it wouldn’t matter, she would die happy knowing that we’d had the courage to take the risk to venture towards the unknown.

Crossing the Atlantic in an Airbus wasn’t quite the adventure we’d imagined, but, metaphorically, we felt that we had passed Cape Recife and left the safe life behind. Because of poor connections in New York, we would have almost twenty-four hours to explore.

A day is not enough to do more than scratch at the Big Apple’s skin; many New Yorkers never get as far as the core. But we were determined to take the biggest bite that we could.

After dropping our suitcases at the hotel before breakfast – no check-in until much later that afternoon – we took the Long Island Railway to Penn Station. Nicky quickly befriended two young men from Chicago, who were sitting opposite us. They were as clueless as we were about how to get around, but the man across the aisle, who overheard our conversation, chipped in and matched the subway’s tangle to our plans.

We were on a tight schedule, and a budget, but we had a plan. Our first destination was the iconic Staten Island Ferry, which took us from Manhattan across the Upper Bay, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to Staten Island, and back again, for free.

Then the Metro took us to West 72^nd Street and Central Park’s Strawberry Fields, across the road from The Dakota, where John Lennon was shot. Strawberry Fields was, unsurprisingly, jammed with tourists wielding their look at me sticks like light sabres. For them a memorial park was not a place for quiet reflection. The man ripping it up on his guitar, belting out a cacophonous version of ‘Imagine,’ didn’t give peace a chance.

With two items on Nicky’s list ticked, it was time for mine: Greenwich Village. I don’t know why I wanted to go there, but to me it is synonymous with New York. New Yorkers have a reputation of being unfriendly, but Nicky proved the opposite. She started chatting to a flight attendant at the subway station, who was waiting to go home after a long flight home. He was so tired he hadn’t noticed what the weather was doing outside, was surprised when we told him that it looked like rain. He recommended a small Italian restaurant without a sign outside on Bedford Street. Cotenna was everything that he promised, and more. The Saturday lunchtime gathering was sparse and mostly local. We were served by the Maître D’, a Frenchman who rules his domain from under a pork pie hat with a soupçon of Parisian surliness. (He seemed to be having a bad day, with a number of his staff not having shown up for work.) But his demeanour added to the atmosphere, and beneath his indifferent exterior beat the heart of someone who really cares about food. The meatballs, washed down with an excellent glass of red, were sublime.

It was a late lunch and as the sun began to set on the city that never sleeps, we made our way up Seventh Avenue to the mayhem that is Times Square for the final act. Roadworks had turned the busy intersection into gridlock. Beneath the veneer of discordant lights, competing for attention, a NYC policeman posed with a gaggle of oriental tourists, while nearby a Congolese hawker handed out advertisements to anyone who would take them.

A sheik, by his garb, pontificated for a clutch of cameramen. Then, as night fell the other shows began: groups of women wearing little more than body paint joined the me
lee, touting tourists for tips. We left them to it, retreated to the subway and back to the hotel. We finally got to the room at nine o’clock, knackered. We set the alarm for 2 AM and collapsed into bed.

Meanwhile Hurricane Matthew had veered away from Jamaica and was headed for Haiti.