It’s not easy to categorise a post as both “Interior” and “Landscape” but I’m claiming it for this one. Farewell to Gibraltar, it’s been a decent few days and if things work out I will be returning at some point.
Gibraltar is my home for the next few days. I have been here once before, in 1991 — my “Inter-Rail Summer”, aged 21. Then, one could only enter the territory by walking across the airport runway, and this is still the case, as seen here. Presumably one gets a decent amount of notice before they close it, but let’s hope that one’s electric vehicle doesn’t run out of juice halfway across. The huge lump of limestone that is The Rock has always been a landmark, and a fortress, and the peninsula on which it and the city stands is now one of Britain’s last remaining outposts of Empire: an Overseas Territory that is sort of still part of Europe, only not. A gatepost to the Mediterranean beyond.
A study in blue, or possibly, ultraviolet. A study, also, in how full symmetry is so rarely possible, however hard one tries to achieve it. I will be flying out of here tomorrow, but for tonight, the airport hotel.
Rarely has it been more welcome to be spending the night at an airport hotel and then undergoing an airport transfer, back in Cape Town. Which, as airports go, is quite manageably sized and decent: better than most. I suppose most of this stuff may genuinely be ‘African’, but it’s still an imagery for travellers rather than anything culturally real.
Four days late, I finally leave St Helena. There were genuine concerns in the morning that the flight would be cancelled yet again — apparently at about 9.30am visibility on the runway was practically zero — but, hallelujah, the clouds cleared and the incoming plane duly landed, about half an hour late (and of course carrying passengers who had all been waiting since Saturday themselves). An hour after this picture was taken, we boarded, took off and I type this in a hotel at Cape Town airport, waiting for my flight back to Heathrow this evening.
This is the blog’s 76th photo to be taken on St Helena: the first one being 9th November 2021 at the same place, the airport, the day before I began my 10-day period of quarantine (spent in a rather nice house not far from where I have been staying this time, Alarm Forest). Will this be the last shot from here, though? At the moment I have no definite plans to return — and, perhaps more significantly, no more research grant money to do so. Data collection for the project is done and I really should now concentrate on writing it all up. But, you know, never say never.
Since I last changed planes there in 2015, on the way to Kilimanjaro, Istanbul has built a completely new airport about 30 mies out of the city which is now the second-busiest airport in Europe after Heathrow. It did seem to me that you could catch a plane from there to just about anywhere, certainly in Europe, Africa and Asia — a landmass of which it occupies a very strategic point, and always has done.
I was there early, left early, but so did a lot other people — this moment of solitary contemplation was not characteristic of the whole. This becomes only the second shot in 4,652 days to be taken between 5 and 6am — the other also being in an airport, Manchester’s, while on my way to Moscow in January 2017.
So here I am back on St Helena, for my third visit — but not the last. Whereas, up until 2017, everyone arrived at Jamestown where the boats dock, nowadays, unless you are on a yacht, first sight of the island is always the airport, one of the more dramatic approaches in world aviation, I am sure. Behind is Great Stone Top, which I climbed in January last year.
Since I left Windhoek there have been only landscapes and fauna depicted on here — so on my last full day in Namibia let’s pay some credit to the fine people who have welcomed me in this country. My three guides have been particularly notable: Johannes in the Namib Desert; Veondjavi in Damaraland; and for the last three days, Samuel here in Ongava. The latter is seen here waiting with me for my plane to arrive: this is, in effect, the departure lounge of the Ongava airstrip.
Finally, I’m off. This evening, this vehicle constituted flight ET729 from Manchester to Addis Ababa, via (for some reason) Geneva: the service that saved the day back in January last year when everything went tits up due to a few snowflakes, but that is in the past. I like the Ethiopian Airlines logo, which gives it a suitably avian feel. This will be my last photo taken in the UK until 20th May.
My last day of the promised 11-in-a-row in Toronto. It’s been a worthwhile trip for sure, although that doesn’t mean it’s been all that eventful (Saturday night’s accident aside). But the necessary work has been done, and possibly I will be back in June. For now, the pre-flight ritual beer in the departure lounge, then home.
Being 42 