Porto da Palmeira & Vila do Espargos (Part1)

The Porto da Palmeira anchorage   

Wow, we are definitely in Africa!  The immediate contrast from the Canary Islands is stark. Having arrived after dark on 14^th we left going ashore to do the arrival paperwork and immigration until the morning. Our pilot book was a little vague as to where the office of the Polícia de Ordem Publica is but it turns out that Porto da Palmeira is quite a small town and so fairly quickly we narrowed down where we needed to be. However, were told that we should come back later because the officials were either sleeping or at lunch; our Portuguese is not great and there was an element of sign language involved!

Porto da Palmeira quay where we left our dinghy in the care of a boat boy. 
The daily fish market also takes place on this quay    

Instead we wandered around and absorbed the scruffy but brightly coloured surroundings which are typically African. We both had that slightly unsettling feeling of not being able to communicate well but were surrounded by lots of seemingly friendly locals. Palmeira is one of only 3 ports in the archipelago where yacht crews can formally arrive and complete the immigration paperwork for the Republic of Cape Verde. We expected to be here until Monday because we had to leave our ship’s papers with the authorities until our day of departure and our pilot book suggested that the offices were closed at the weekend.

Porto da Palmeira   

There are several brighty painted bars, a fontenario where you can fill water jerry cans, and a few small shops. However, there are no banks or ATMs here and we needed to get some local currency which you can only get in the islands.

Vila do Espargos   

So, despite not having officially arrived, we took an aluguer minibus to the largest town on the island, Vila do Espargos, about 2 miles inland. The aluguers are either pick-up trucks you jump on the back of, or a minibus and they provide the island’s ‘bus’ service. The drivers circle around until they have enough punters on board to make the trip profitable and then they set off. Our poor understanding of the language meant we paid double what we should have; 1€ each instead of 50 cents for the journey. It took a while to get enough passengers on board but eventually we arrived in Vila do Espargos and wandered around a little to get our bearings. It’s overlooked by a small hill bristling with radio antenna and the radar for the nearby airport; a useful reference point to avoid getting lost.

There are several little squares and a mixture of old and new concrete buildings with the latter predominating. We found it hard to get a feel for what was available commercially because there are few shop windows. Mostly it’s open doors and you have to go inside a shop to see what they are selling. The banks, however, were obvious and so we picked up a queuing ticket and waited our turn. The ATM had provided the cash but we needed to exchange the large denomination notes for something of a more useful size. After half an hour we had a mixture of local notes with fewer noughts on them (100 CVE = 1€) and moved onto our next task of getting a data SIM card for our MiFi. Fortunately, the ladies in the mobile phone shop spoke enough English to make that relatively painless and the card has subsequently worked perfectly for us [Ed: good value too: 100CVE for the card and 850CVE for 3 Gb!).

Street-side fruit and vegetable stalls   

So we moved onto buying some fruit for breakfast. Now it turns out that wheelbarrows are the thing to look out for if you want to buy fruit and veg, or indeed, pretty much anything else! Everyone, it seems, uses wheelbarrows to move produce around and there are ladies with wheelbarrows all along the streets. We picked up some bananas and comparatively expensive papayas from one of these stalls but passed on the opportunity of ‘fly encrusted tuna covered by old carpet’; an interesting marinade!

Conscious that we still needed to complete the arrival formalities we took an aluguer back to Porto da Palmeira meeting Jonty from Trompette on the way.

Porto da Palmeira, Ilha do Sal, Cape Verde Islands