Monthly Archives: April 2008

Car Crash (again)

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Those things that happen, they say… well with me they happen too far often! I returned from Sao Tome and Principe (West Africa); on the 27th of March (Thursday). By Friday (the 28th) I was involved in a car crash. A lady thought it was a good idea to reverse her car in the middle of the road when I was driving at 90km/h 30 meters from her, I had to get off road, tail-slide, got back on the road fully uncontrolled, banged on a back bumper from a van coming on the opposite direction and stopped a few centimetres from the road rails. Outcome? A broken light and some metal damage, very little. However a 4×4 that was behind me took most of the front part of her car. Fortunately no one got hurt!

Not happy with that, Saturday, I was coming from a night in Bar do Bruno, really wrecked and tired, fell asleep on the wheel and smashed my car against a house on a bend on my way home. Result? Car unrecoverable!

Now I’m on foot and riding my bike very often (good to diminish my carbon footprint!). However, by the end of the month I’ll get back on sending carbon to the atmosphere with a 22 year old Volkswagen Golf, an old-school retro model. I know, it pollutes more than the new engines and so on, but is the only thing I can afford at the moment. What I can say is that I’m cooking some projects to compensate this, and I’ll post some stuff soon enough :-)

Sao Tome and Principe (part II)

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I’ve returned from Sao Tome and Principe (STP) last Thursday, where I gave a presentation at a conference about Biodiversity and Ecotourism. The title I presented was “The non-lethal use of Cetaceans – a multidisciplinary perspective”. It basically covered the uses cetaceans can withstand nowadays (whaling is not one of them), recommendations to the STP’s government and a challenge for STP to declare their national waters a sanctuary for cetaceans.

Sao Tome and Principe Kids

Interestingly enough, the day I arrived a commission of STP’s government headed to Japan where they signed a bilateral agreement on fisheries, presumably to do with tuna. My opinion is that the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and whaling issue was on the agenda, and STP is at risk of joining the IWC and vote with Japan to uplift the moratorium of 1986.

Beside the forum I had the chance to speak with some people of the government, tourism agencies and people interested in developing sustainable ecotourism and the press. I also manage to get a letter from 10 different organizations to the president himself. One can only hope STP is not signing the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW).

Also, there will be published a book with the presentations given at the forum, so I will have the chance to make a point on why whaling is not acceptable today and how Whale-Watching can be of a great help to the local community.