Matt Hackett
Roving engineer
Matt Hackett
A bike ride along the northern shore of Lake Kivu, one of the world’s extremely rare exploding lakes. Though there wasn’t any visible volcanic activity beyond a hot spring, I was treated to a tea plantation (first photo) and cries of “Umuzungu!” (“White person!”) from a few hundred children in the villages we passed.
The island of São Tomé, the larger of the two main islands of the tiny equatorial African country, was in the nineteenth century essentially a network of large cocoa, coffee, and palm plantations. This system of “roçcas,” thirty years on from independence from Portugal and a hundred years on from the peak of the industry, left the island absolutely littered with massive colonial architecture in various states of repair. Driving the main road around the island, I saw town after town had sprouted up around and even in the middle of the burned or simply crumbling architecture of these estates. I also stayed at the two of the estates that have been turned into low-frills hotels. There’s a whole post-colonial studies dissertation to be written on these roçcas, but I did my best to just enjoy watching the rain forest slowly creep up on these once imposing buildings.
