In about six weeks time, we'll be off on the world's last royal mail ship, the RMS St. Helena, traveling up the middle of the south Atlantic ocean from the Namibian port of Walvis Bay to the islands of St. Helena and Ascension. St. Helena is among the most remote places on earth, some 1800 miles east of Brazil and 1200 miles west of Angola. Ascension, a dependency of St. Helena (itself a British Overseas Territory), lies some 600 miles further north.
St. Helena is most known as the place of final exile, and death in 1821 of Napoleon. It was chosen to hold Napoleon because of its remoteness and in fact, still today has no air field. The only scheduled service to St. Helena is via the RMS St. Helena. Ascension, meanwhile, is a communications center, sending out the BBC's World Service broadcasts to Africa and South America, and is the home of various NASA and satellite tracking stations and military installations. The RAF used Ascension as a staging area during the Falklands War. (Here's the weekly Ascension newspaper The Islander.)
We'll report on our trip here on CS&W. We'll also be guest posting on the blog associated with the travel booking site CheapoAir.com.
In March of 2007 we were booked into a quick trip to Barcelona but a snowstorm prevented us from reaching our flight at JFK airport. With several days off and nowhere to go, we booked last minute tickets to Ecuador on CheapoAir.com, at a good price and everything worked great, so we can heartily endorse them. Check out Cheapoair.com's blog and use CheapoAir.com for Cheap Tickets. We're listing them from today in our travel tools under "Cheap Tickets." Try 'em.
(See photos from Ecuador in the Ecuador Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See also the South Atlantic News for coverage of St. Helena, Ascension, Tristan de Cunha, South Georgia and the Falklands.)
I found some great deals on cheapoair.com, thank you.
Posted by: heidi | 13 November 2009 at 03:39 AM