São Tomé and PríncipeMapAugust 22...24, 2014 São Tomé and Príncipe is a poor but clean and safe little country. It’s a former Portuguese colony, which is almost always good.  A license plate.  A small post box.  A large post box.  A payphone.  Beautiful trees that are ten times a person’s height.  Doing the laundry.  A roundabout.  A motorcyclist.  A colonial street.  Traffic signs.  A taxi stand.  Use the dumpsters!  And here are the dumpsters.  A contemporary art exhibit.  The market.  Fish.  Portuguese heritage.  A square.  Former cannons.  Many of the homes are on stilts (to keep out insects).  Street food.  Drying laundry.  A bus stop in the city.  A bus stop outside the city.  The roads in the country are reasonably good.  A concrete kilometer marker.  A São Toméan digger.  A street bakery.  Former beauty.  Some more.  A stoop.  An expensive fence.  A free fence.  Women filling containers with water.  Children about to roll some tires with sticks.  A boy putting the skills he learned to good use: selling berries on the run to car passengers.  You can’t run around like that with vegetables.  Beautiful baobab trees grow here.  That’s why the AIDS poster also features a baobab. Let’s hope the islands’ residents don’t take these directions too literally.  The colonists founded a village for their slaves at one point, building them beautiful brick houses.  Curiously, the free people of today build worse housing for themselves than what the enslaved previous generations had. There was enough space left between the buildings for these new shacks to be put up.  A village built without the colonists’ involvement:  For those afraid of traveling to Africa, São Tomé and Príncipe is an excellent option.  It’s peaceful, quiet and safe here, with palm trees and the ocean and all that.  |
