🇨🇻 Tales from a month-long island hopping trip to Cabo Verde, with three young kiddos✌🏻. You can read Part 1 here.
Olá Restless Ones,
Another postcard arriving via magic carpet (or the medium of the internet?) from Cabo Verde. Crikey do we have some memories made! Both beautiful and chaotic.
Hit the play above to listen to it, or check out the transcript of the voice memo below.
📸 Paid peeps: Scroll to the very bottom for this week’s family photo album snaps 🥰
Righty-ho. I’m off enjoy the last few days here then prep for the hop to the next island. Thanks for being here, as always and…
Tchau-tchau for now,
Anna xx
Postcards from Cabo Verde: Part III
A transcript of the voice note for you beautiful peeps who love words:
Journey to Praia
Last time I gave you an update, we were on São Vicente, and we were leaving the dodgy balcony and rust and everything else, but also leaving a beautiful beach…
We got on an hour's flight to Praia, which is on the island of Santiago. The flight was super hot, and the twins are still one at this point, therefore they have to be on our lap. And it was just a hot, sweaty mess.
As we got to the airport, and there was this massive queue and I thought, Why have I done this? We're doing all these little flight hops, and am I mad to keep moving us around as a family? But they are amazing out here, as soon as they see you've got kids, they will bend over backwards and stick you right in the front of the queue.
Hotel Arrival Dramas
So it all went great until we got to baggage reclaim the other end. I don't know what happened. It was the tiniest flight with about 40 people on it, but the bags took an hour and a half to get from the little runway to the baggage shed. That was very bizarre. And by this point, the kids have gone full feral, and so when we arrived at the hotel…
I mean, I'm not going to lie to you, we were that family. Jamie was doing the check-in bit. And the kids, straight away, they went to look at the pool. And there was no way of keeping them from going outside to go and see the pool, because I can't physically restrain them, because there are three of them, and they have very strong wills of their own.
Love them for that. And of course, Jamie is trying to check in. And then I have these three very tired little children who want to run around. And it was just carnage.
And you know, you're so embarrassed because you're trying not to worry about what everyone else is thinking of you, which I'm doing a cracking job of this, on of that, on this trip, mostly of just letting go of that, because you have to, when you're traveling family.
But I just want to give you the scene… Storm has waded into the pool, and she's in a fully clothed, Jupiter has decided to take her clothes off. She's very good at getting her clothes off. And she's wading in in her nappy, and I don't know what's in that nappy, and Rocky is is also threatening to go in.
And I'm trying to get Jamie away from reception, saying ‘we have get these kids back inside somehow!’ Oh my goodness. And then the kids were kicking off because they wanted to go in the pool. And they didn't want to be inside, but we didn't yet have a room to put them in. And there was just and it was like one those hotel foyers where everything just echoes. So much noise!
Life in Praia
The only way was up from there.
And after a night of sleep, we finally got settled in here in Praia. And I have to say, I was super nervous about what I was doing, bringing the family to essentially, what is the capital city of Cape Verde.
There's 200,000 people live here, and it's so different from the last island.
And as we left the airport are, I remembered reading in the guidebook that it said, out of all the islands in Cape Verde, this is the most African of the islands, and it really felt like that.
We started getting settled in, and straight away, I mean, the hotel is just lush. It is. I have these waves of thinking... that it’s too posh and it’s not even that posh. It's because it's medium level posh.
But anything that's slightly posh, and I start to feel ‘Oh, it's too posh. I don't want to touch anything.’
It's got a salt water pool, which is so refreshing and so cool, and it's just, I mean, it must do wonders for your health. I'm loving going in every day, twice a day, most days. I was worried that Storm was going to moan, that it was going to sting all of her cuts. So we had lots of chats about how great the salt water is for your body and and the kids are loving it.
I'm going to put it up there with one of my top hotel pools I've ever been to. Woah.
Attempting to explore with kids
The way we’re exploring is a bit different to how I thought it would be. I thought we were going to come here, and I was going to be taking Storm out, exploring in the afternoon, as we're really close to a couple of, nice beaches, beaches that locals go to.
But I had massively underestimated how far it was going to be on this island, it's 30C degrees here, whereas on the next island going to it's only 24C at the moment. I’d massively underestimated that.
And I thought, ‘I'll take Storm out for the afternoon, and just to give her a bit more exploration, because she's a bit older, she's four years old, let's start taking her out, seeing places.
This was going to be a trip to the supermarket. It's a mile. So I thought ‘we'll walk there. I'll have to piggyback her some of the way. But we'll walk there.’
Five minutes of leaving the hotel, Storm starts saying ‘Oh, Muuum, I'm tired. It's hot. My legs are and I just thought, oh God. I piggybacked her for the mile.
We had a really nice time. We had a little girl's date. We had hibiscus juice. Is a really big thing out here, hibiscus juice and and we had a Pastel De Nata, which is a custard tart. We had that, and they were really friendly in the little coffee shop we were in. And then we went to the supermarket, and we got a taxi home, and it was so exciting. She absolutely loved it.
Getting my cultural fix (and runs)
But I've had to adjust my expectations a bit. And actually I was talking about this with Jay, and I've realised the kids are happy here. They are happy in the pool at the hotel, or they're happy at the beac, half a minute down the road, that's where they're happiest.
It's me that needs to go outside, and I want to see what is this place really like. So we've flipped my mindset, and actually what I'm doing now is at lunch time when the kids, when the twins go to sleep.
They go to sleep for about an hour and a half, and then we a big parenting decision, to put Storm on on a screen for 45 minutes to an hour each day, which that's massive for us, because we don't have a TV at home.
But being out here, there is no parenting break from half past five in the morning when they start waking up till seven o'clock at night, there's absolutely no break. So I'm so glad we have that break.
We have an hour and a half in the middle of the day where we can both try and get some work in, or in my case, try and go off for a little run and do some exploring - run to a little art gallery, or I'll go on a mission to go and get some nappies or a bag of apples.
Local Life
I flipped my mindset in that I'm getting my exploring out in that way, running out into the city at lunchtime. And with the kids, we've been doing tiny little trips - we might go out for the a couple of hours in the afternoon to go down the road to have some dinner at some different restaurant somewhere, or we took them on this little tour around the city and an open sided car the other day, just so they could see what was going on as well in the world beyond the hotel.
I have really felt that in those lunchtimes, I'm actually getting to see what it is like to live in Cape Verde. Obviously, I'm not even scratching the surface, but I I'm so glad I'm doing it.
I've ran down the main city street, I'm calling it a high street, and there's a couple of guys carrying a mattress down the street. There's women walking with fruits and vegetables on their head. There's a woman sat on the corner just chopping up a tuna. That’s presumably just come out the sea and it's going to be sold.
There's raw sugar cane being so sold everywhere. There's smells, there's noise, there's beeping, there's busses and it's just colourful chaos, absolute colorful, hot chaos. And everyone is hustling and life is going on.
The Twins' Birthday
The twins have turned two! And I did write this on social media, so some of you might have already seen it but…
I woke up one morning and it was their birthday, and I so I said to everyone at six o'clock in the morning, ‘guess what? I said, ‘I have a special announcement to make. I said, it's your birthday, Rocky, and Jupiter!’ and everyone went, Yeah!!
And me and Storm had been on these missions to go and buy them little presents. Jupiter had this tiny little baby that I think had cost me, seven quid. And Rocky had these little toy trucks that we'd gone and bought and we'd gotten them candles.
Storm had really been involved in these little missions out to these shops to go and get this stuff for the twins. She was so excited. We had cake for breakfast, and we put got everyone that was in the breakfast place to sing happy birthday (which was only about four people, because most people aren't up at that point.)
We decided for the afternoon, after their nap, we were going to go out. And we were going to find that go to this place with cake, this little posh place with cake and sprinkles and icing on the cake and everything. And got some little candles we were going to put in the top.
And it was only actually as about lunchtime that I looked at my phone to Jamie, I saw that it said it's the 13th of January. And I thought that's really weird, because the twins birthday isn't actually till the 14th of January.
I got the day wrong!
I completely just got the day wrong. I thought was the 14th. It was the 13th. I told everyone it was their birthday. We were in the middle of celebrating it just, we just howled with laughter. But we just carried on anyway. I just said, doesn't matter. It will celebrate again tomorrow.
And then we got to this restaurant that we go to in the afternoon, and we got there and it was shut for a private party. And I looked to my right, and there're all these fast food shacks. And I said, well, right then, let's just buy a couple of burgers and we'll just stick the candles and the burgers. Everyone have burgers and chips, and we'll sing happy birthday again around burgers and chips. That's what we did. Roll with it.
Riding the ups and downs
All in all, we've been away for two weeks now and we've had days where you know, when the kids are just a bit off, and then you end up a bit off.
We've had days like that, but in this second week of being out here, it's different, because it's like a relationship. Whereas at the start of the relationship, when something's something's off, you start thinking, is this the end? Are we going to break up? But when you've been in a relationship for a while, when you have a barney or a bad day, you just think, oh, goodness me, this is really annoying, but we'll work it out it's fine.
I feel like that's the phase we're in now where, when we have a really fantastic day . Today, has been amazing, just super chilled, really relaxed, minimal dramas.
Yesterday was the opposite end of chaos, and just no one was happy. The kids were just off, and we couldn't seem to do anything, right. And it just felt like, ‘please just get into bedtime.’
What I can see right now
But I'm sitting here right now, and I can hear the ocean just lapping at my feet. There's a lighthouse off to my right. I can see the stars and then a beautiful starlit sky above me. And I'm just loving being here, even though I'm in a city, I'm still really connected to nature.
And every morning, as the kids wake up, the sun comes up about seven in the morning, and they're up for a good hour or so first, and we get watch together, all five of us, just those first rays of dawn, just creep across the balcony and watch the sky turn amazing colours, and it's just the most beautiful sunrise every morning.
That, in itself is worth it. I'm loving seeing the horizon every single day.
Okay, that’s it for this week.
In two days time, we're moving to the next island, our final Island, which is the island of Sal, which is one of the most one of the more touristy islands in the in the country. So we'll see how that goes. It's definitely going to be a different experience, and that's what I'm loving. It's different.
Thank you so much for tuning in each week. I've really enjoyed sharing with you all. Okay, take care. Bye!
Family Photo Album
A pick of the pics from my iPhone camera roll this week…
