Spicy! (Mindelo)

 Mindelo is a bit of a tired rundown town, dusty streets lined with crumbling pastel coloured former Portuguese Colonial architecture.

Stray dingo-like dogs curl in the sun at every corner - and whilst possibly rabid, they all appear quite tail waggingly friendly and surprisingly well fed. The coffee skinned locals have a lot of hanging around time on their hands too, mainly decked out in unknown football teams strips they group around in palm tree shaded spots here and there. The whole place very reminiscent of Port Morseby in Papua New Guinea from my perspective. Despite the obvious poverty - there’s no begging, and a tolerable, but only mildly annoying number of people trying to hustle and hassle you in one way or another. The open fish market was worth a look for the shear size of the fish within: it made our mahi mahi efforts look pretty insignificant. There’s a wide array of exotic fish on display, outnumbered by flies 10:1 which the stall holders gently waft away with straw fans, a few opportunistic cats hung round the entrance.

The town does have a little charm when viewed in the right light, but it’s not somewhere I’d recommend visiting, and I’m in no hurry to return.

The marina bar - floating on the jetty in the no-mans land between sea and shore, is a refreshing spot for free wifi but expensive beers and chips. The clientele an eclectic mix of nationalities and ages:

Old salty sea gypsies with long weather worn beards, hippies, locals, and tanned families with expensive laptops and grubby kids. We spend a few afternoons there.

We were able to check out without issue at the Port Police, and secured the all important passport stamps to prove it - something that had eluded us for much of our time up in Europe.

Following the success at the Police station we took a taxi to the Covid testing centre ( a PCR test is a requirement for entry into Antigua ). It’s a disorganised mess, people everywhere outside in the sun, and one flustered official at the front handing out deli counter style numbered tickets to all. We’re given number 35, the most recently ticked off numbers on his sheet show we’re up to number 17. A dodgy, albeit friendly local tries to give/sell us ticket number 14... we decline.

Within 30mins - and despite any correlation with what his sheet says, with a little bit of prompting, the offical allows us in.

Next hurdle, payment:

“No accept credit card, you pay cash: 19500 Escudos”

We haven’t got any. OK no problem, we can have the the tests and come back and pay later - all good: left my passport as surety.

Now despite all the people here being lovely, the actual Covid test was, to me and Martin at least, a bloody brutal brain prodding jab. This done in a corrugated-iron, dunnie-style torture chamber - with a shower curtain entrance. The nasal jab had us both involuntarily pushing the small ever smiling nurse/assassin’s hand away. She took this in good humour and violently jabbed away at the next orifice regardless. Chez however, was swabbed and done with no fuss - suspect the nurse goes easy on the ladies..

Quick trip to the bank, securing the required wodge of confusingly high valued colourful notes, to get my passport back.

That all done, back to the boat to get ourselves further prepped for our next departure: tidying, filling diesel, water, and gas, buying some food (from a poorly stocked supermarket) and deflating the tender and putting it away.

All seems to be good to go for the morning.

Next morning - Chez, who’d complained of headache the night before, was as ill as I’ve seen her in a long long time. Despite some feeble Captainly protests against doing so, we remained at anchor and she spent our expected departure day in bed. After some good long sleeps, perking up somewhat in the late afternoon. She performed a self test and the sadly inevitable result came back...

Oh man! She got da spicy African Covid!