29th March, Mindelo, Sao Vincente, Cape Verde Islands
Due to go to Sao Tiago rather than Sao Vicente our destination was changed for unspecified reasons, but it probably made little difference. Advised that Cape Verde was the 'up and coming' holiday destination, we have serious doubts about this; at least for the next ten years. The upside is the island has a feel of Brazil about it. This is mainly manifest in the Portuguese culture and the local citizenry which is essentially black African, but folk more from the Sahel than west Africa who are tall and thin and very good looking. The women are similar to David Bowie's Somali model wife. We hardly saw a fatty and folk seemed friendly enough.
Mindelo had far more infrastructure than we expected, but is not up to the standards of Madeira, let alone metropolitan Portugal. There were no tourist facilities and residential holiday developments are only just getting off the ground. Most everything needs to be imported and essentially, these islands are yet more volcanic rocks, mainly lunar in appearance. The limiting factor for development will be water availability. Yet, we quite liked the town. It was comfortable with itself and hardly tuned to tourism at all. There were some Senegalese street salesman and one or two shops selling African artefacts, but none of the timeshare salesmen we were told to beware.
In truth, there was little to do except post the blog and wander around, which we did. We found a pleasant development with an internal courtyard where we sat down and took a drink. We were only in Cape Verde for a few hours, but there was no reason to stay much longer.
