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A Visit To Bungalow

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At the post office I asked whether my hosts on my first visit, Ricky and Amanda Swain - descendants of one of the original Tristan families - were still around. I was directed to bungalow #20 (no street name). We were soon catching up on the island grapevine with Ricky, who offered me a box of legendary Jasus tristani crayfish (Tristan rock lobster) to take back home to Cape Town. He brought us up to speed on all the changes catapulting the island into the twenty-first century. Tristan now has free satellite phones, television, the Internet and a postal code, 150 vehicles (on ten kilometres of road) and a new hospital. Tristan is connected to the outside world.

The quaint museum on Tristan has genealogy charts showing the lineage of the …show more content…

That’s why they call me the rockhopper copper!” The 56-year-old was one year old when Tristan was evacuated. Awarded the MBE in 2011, he wears many caps as ex-chief islander, mediator, conservationist, top cop and author. Adverse weather conditions prevented us from landing at any of the other four uninhabited islands in the Tristan archipelago. We circumnavigated Inaccessible Island - forty kilometres south-west of Tristan - a foreboding island of 18 square kilometres ringed by steep cliffs that live up to its name. A UNESCO world heritage site, it is the only nesting site in the world of the spectacled petrel and Inaccessible Island rail, the smallest flightless bird in the world (at 15 cm). The birdwatchers were all out on deck, trying to catch a glimpse of these rare birds.

A thirty kilometre knot wind prevented us from landing on Nightingale Island (260 hectares) - home to a rare colony of northern rockhopper penguins, yellow-nosed albatross and sub-Antarctic fur seals. The islanders do a lot of conservation work here - and maintain a few cabins. The last fatting day - another unusual Tristan public holiday - was on Nightingale Island in 2001. The islanders used to come over in traditional canvas and wood longboats to collect guano, penguin eggs and “mutton birds” (shearwaters) for rendering down to fat. Those days are gone for good.

The Tristanians stopped harvesting penguin

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