Öckerö gymnasium

Santo Antao Hiking

We woke up at 05.00 am to eat breakfast. We gathered an hour later at the gate and walked to the ferry that would take us to Sao Vicente’s neighbor island named Santo Antao.

When we arrived at the port called Puerto Novo we called for a sort of taxi called aluguer. An aluguer is a kind of pick-up with seats outside. We asked him to take the road through the mountains. Along the road we saw cows, goats, chickens and donkeys. The trip took about an hour, and to be honest i found the aluguer trips more fun than the hike itself.

After the trip through the long and winding mountain road we arrived in a town on the other side of the island called Ribiera Grande, where we were going to spend the night in one of the town’s hotels - we had received a sum of money from the school to be able to pay for this, aluguer trips and all the meals during this trip. My group found a hotel called Residential Biby which was really nice. We only had to pay around 400 swedish kr for 7 people, and we even got our own terrace and breakfast.

When we had received the keys for our hotel rooms we caught an aluguer up into the mountains, beginning our long hike. Me and my group started from a beautiful crater, it used to be a volcano but was now used as farming ground. Then we started the long way slithering down, it took about hours. I never would never have thought that i would rather walk upwards than downwards, it never stopped. We met some really nice people. The simple rural life seemed quite peaceful. When we felt that the time was running out we stopped and took a aluguer back to Ribeira Grande. We felt that to end the day we should celebrate with some pizza. After waiting for a whole hour we ended up with a microwaved thin pizza without crust. Our tummies, however, were too hungry to care.

This day was amazing. I've gotten to know so much more about the rural life in Cape Verde. The people of Santo Antao were very sweet and helped us so much. There is so much to take away from this journey. What will stick the most in me must be the incredible, once in a life time, views that don't exist anywhere else.

Hannes

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Öckerö seglande gymnasieskola
Björnhuvudsvägen 45
475 31 Öckerö

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