To take our elderly parents as comfortably as possible from Europe to our then home in Rio my wife and I booked a cruise leading us from Mallorca to Manaus, via Madeira and Teneriffa. On board we were watching the  theatre of a strangely behaving German small town society under the magnifying glass of a cruise ship.  It was like a soap. Every night there was a themed buffet and people ate as it was the last supper before a severe hunger crisis: Mexican, American, Indian, Chinese, Italian food…it all tasted the same. Each morning severe towel battles for prime-positioned lounge chairs were fought on the pool deck  Guests complained when markets they visited had a different odor than a regular German supermarket. At night they donned their Dirndl and Lederhosen and celebrated Bavarian “Anton aus Tirol” yodel parties on board.

In the midst of stormy Atlantic, 500 kilometers off continental Africa and halfway to our next port in northern Brazil, we reached the archipelago of Cape Verde. The sun was just rising as we sailed into the port of Mindelo on São Vicente, one out of 10 Cape Verdean islands.  In the following night we cruised from the Windward to the Leeward Islands of Cape Verde and anchored on Santiago. I liked the stark contrast between the two islands, the first dry, barren, with dunes and devoid of any green and the latter humid, lush, with cragged peaks. I imagine only Santo Antão, another of the Windward ones, with its dramatic canyons and terraced fields, can rival the beauty of Santiago. Cape Verde had been the original home of Cesária Évora, barefoot diva and one of my favorite lusophone singers. In her native Cape Verdean Creole, drinking and smoking on stage, she sang about love, homesickness and nostalgia. Fitting themes, as many more Cape Verdeans live abroad in the diaspora than in the beautiful archipelago itself.