CHRISTMAS IN PARADISE FOR FAMILY WHO LEFT DERBYSHIRE FOR TINY ISLAND

Derby Telegraph 26^th December 2013

This year, the Troman family swapped their life in rural Derbyshire to live on one of the world’s most remote islands. Here, Tim Troman talks about the first six months of island life and spending their first Christmas there.

Tim and Sarah Troman and daughter Lucy, all formerly of Belper, are living on Saint Helena for two years

It is December and I’m sitting in our living room in shorts and a T-shirt.

The temperature is 26°C outside and there is hardly a cloud in the sky.

On the local radio station, they are playing the song Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.

But looking at the weather outside, it is really hard for me to believe that it’s Christmas.

My wife Sarah, our young daughter, Lucy, and I have now been living on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean for six months.

But it only seems like yesterday that we left RAF Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire, to set off on our two-year adventure.

Initially, settling into island life was hard as we missed family and friends.

The lifestyle and pace of life is so different to the UK but now we have settled in it has become an absolute pleasure and a fantastic adventure.

Saint Helena is a wonderful island, with such diverse landscapes that just being here and experiencing it is a privilege.

Small things which we now take for granted are so special - to get up in the morning and choose bananas from the tree in our garden for Lucy to take to school still makes me smile.

Life on Saint Helena feels like when I grew up in the UK in the 1970s, with only the recent advent of the internet and television to significantly change things.

The island is a cash economy, so no debit or credit cards and no cash machines, so it’s down to the bank each week to draw out real money.

Shopping is great fun, too, as there are none of the major chain stores on Saint Helena, just lots of smaller independent shops (some of which are chain stores in their own right!), which sell anything from groceries to engine oil.

Sarah, in particular, finds the shopping opportunities limited.

There’s no Westfield just around the corner to pick up the latest fashions and somehow internet shopping is not quite the same.

We ordered some items from Tesco in September, which have only just arrived.

One of the best things about the island is the wonderful people who live here.

They are known as ‘Saints’ and they live up to that name as, ever since we arrived, everyone has made us feel so welcome and if you are ever in trouble and need a hand, someone will help you out.

For Lucy, it is the most wonderful opportunity to live in a safe, secure environment.

She reached the grand old age of three in August, at which point she started school and very quickly realised it was far more fun to have a bus journey to school with the other children each day rather than staying at home with boring Daddy.

From a personal point of view, my life has changed so much in six months.

Back in Derbyshire, I was a director of a company. I’ve gone from that to having no set structure to my day. It’s taken some getting used to.

I now volunteer two days a week in the Environmental Management Department for the Saint Helena Government.

I do another two days in school, helping the children with their reading skills.

The remaining working day of the week needs to be set aside for the weekly shopping challenge.

I think that, when we return to the UK in 2014 (for a holiday), I won’t be able to cope with all the choice of a huge supermarket.

Having all this extra time has allowed me to spend more time playing different sports.

My weekly diary now includes games of tennis, a round of golf and I have just played my first cricket match since I was eight years old. We won and I managed to score a run.

I don’t think Derbyshire County Cricket Club will be signing me up any time soon, but I am really enjoying the outdoor lifestyle.

The island also has some stunning scenery and there are a number of trails, called Post Box Walks.

They stretch across the island and vary in difficulty from “hard” to “I need to be a mountain goat to do that”.

Many of them involve ropes set into the rock to help you scramble up and down steep sections.

I’ve done a couple of these but there are lots more to try yet and anyone who enjoys walking should definitely put this on their list once the new airport opens in 2016.

Saint Helena is also a wonderful place for marine life.

Diving is a big pastime on the island and there are lots of boats offering dolphin and whale watching trips, which are just fantastic.

The sight of the dolphins putting on an acrobatic display at the side of the boat will live with me forever.

Last week, I saw my first whale. They are just beautiful creatures.

Probably the most unusual experience I have had is being allowed to do my own show on what is basically national radio.

I was asked by Saint FM Community Radio to make up my own play list of my favourite songs and choose a classic album to play tracks from.

The two hours flew by and I even had people ring in to tell me they were enjoying it.

That’s the beauty of this island, as there is no way I would have got that opportunity in the UK.

I’m going back for more over the Christmas holidays when the Saint FM Community Radio airwaves will be taken over by myself and my neighbour, who is a big Newcastle United fan, so I’m sure that the banter will be good.

Back to Christmas and I can confirm that Saint Helena most definitely enjoys this time of year.

It is the height of summer here, so the schools have four weeks off for Christmas, which is really nice as the weather now is gorgeous.

The Christmas decorations started going up in the shops in early November and they are definitely not understated.

It was also around that time that I heard the first Christmas record of the year on the radio.

I have learned a whole new raft of Christmas tunes, as the island is big on country music and there is a huge selection of classics that we are now aware of.

Lucy had her school advent service in St Paul’s Cathedral - that’s the name of the cathedral on Saint Helena and it makes me chuckle every time I say it.

There was also the school Christmas parade through the main shopping street of Jamestown, which is the island’s capital.

There was even an appearance from a jolly man in a red suit - and for the first time ever, he had a Derbyshire accent.

Finally, I would like to say happy Christmas to everyone back in the UK.

By the time you read this, we will have sat down for our barbecued turkey on Christmas Day.

It wasn’t quite the same as the traditional roast turkey with all the trimmings.

To continue to follow Tim and his family’s adventures on Saint Helena, visit his blog at www.timsjustlikelivinginparadise.com.

EXPORTING SAND TO ST. HELENA

Informanté Namibia 28^th November 2013 by Floris Steenkamp

In what could be an unprecedented economic case for Namibia, the Walvis Bay-based Baard Group secured a contract for the export of sand to the island of Saint Helena, where an international airport is currently under construction. The sand requirement includes both dune sand as well as sifted sand, from the Swakop River.

A spokesperson for the Baard Group, René Baard, confirmed the contract this week and said the company’s customer is Basil Reid Construction, which has the tender to construct the airport for Saint Helena.

Saint Helena is one of the United Kingdom’s last British Overseas Territories (BOTs). The UK government wants BOTs to be less economically dependent on the British taxpayer, and the construction of an international airport is one of the measures to stimulate foreign trade and tourism. Walvis Bay is the closest port to Saint Helena, hence the decision to source construction material from here. All machinery and equipment used in the construction project on the island is also shipped from Walvis Bay.

According to Baard, 1,000 tonnes of river sand was already exported to Saint Helena and the process is currently in progress to export a further 1,000 tonnes of dune sand. Baard explained Saint Helena Island consists largely of a rugged mountainous environment. There is no sand for large scale construction on the island. Existing agriculture soil is highly treasured for coffee and banana production.

“All services at the airport in terms of electricity, water and communications are installed in underground channels, blasted for that specific purpose. The sand is used to cover these burrows again,” Baard explained. Baard Group also casts concrete lintels for window and door frames for the airport construction project, and anticipates that more orders for sand and other construction materials would be placed in the foreseeable future.

Saint Helena international airport is scheduled to open in mid-2015 and will also accommodate flights from the Walvis Bay airport.

ST. HELENA BUILDS OWN AIRPORT

Eyewitness News 14^th November 2013 by Rafiq Wagiet

Jamestown, the capital of St. Helena Island. Picture: Wikipedia

The island of St. Helena could soon become the holiday destination of choice for Capetonians.

The tiny island in the South Atlantic will soon be getting an airport, with a direct five-hour flight to and from the Western Cape.

The airport, currently under construction, is set for completion in 2015.

St. Helena Governor Mark Capes says he hopes the airport will help to re-establish a century-old link between Cape Town and the island.

“We’ll be developing hotels, restaurants and other leisure facilities to accommodate growth in that sector. Our relationship with the Western Cape goes back over 350 years. There are close historical, family and commercial links.”

He says Capetonians can play a crucial role in growing the island’s economy.

“As we connect St. Helena with the world we look to our friends in the Cape to partner with us in developing our economy.”

AIRPORT OPENS UP OPPORTUNITIES ON ST. HELENA

MoneyWeb 7^th November 2013

Investment on the island of St. Helena will be a hot topic in Cape Town next week, during a visit of Mark Capes, governor of St. Helena, neighbouring Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha.

The island, situated in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and more or less on the same degree of latitude as Luanda, is mainly accessible only by a four-day boat trip from Cape Town once a month.

Its days of isolation are however numbered.

South African construction group Basil Read is currently building St. Helena’s first ever airport and air access is expected to make all the difference.

The airport is expected to be ready in early 2016 and will open the island up for business. The St. Helena government is planning £24 million of infrastructure upgrades in the next few years in anticipation of air access. This includes electricity, water, sewage, a new wharf at Rupert’s Bay and better connectivity.

The key question now, is where flights to St. Helena will embark from. No decision has yet been taken whether flights will be from Johannesburg or Cape Town. However, the St. Helena airport will be operated by the same operator as Lanseria.

Governance, opportunites

St. Helena is a British overseas territory and English is the language spoken on the island. The currency is St. Helena Pound, which is interchangeable and on par with British Pound. St. Helena law applies, based on British Law.

About 80% of the land belongs to the island government. Freehold of up to two acres is available without any licence and bigger pockets on lease of up to 150 years.

The St. Helena government is determined to manage the island’s development in a sustainable way.

It offers several incentives including early tax breaks, zero customs duty, corporate tax and capital gains tax for seven years on investments over £1million and below £5million. For bigger investments the term is extended to ten years. Investments of more than £1million will attract a 50% discount on freight rates and those bigger than £5million also qualify for a 50% discount on passenger rates. St. Helena has no exchange control, sales tax or property tax and also no visa requirements.

Opportunities are mainly focussed on tourism, fishing and services, says Julian Morris, executive manager economic development of Enterprise St. Helena, the NGO established to promote economic growth and funded by the St. Helena government and the British government’s Department for International Development (DFID).

High value, low volume tourism is envisaged and a decision has been taken to cap the number of visitors per year at 30 000. See the graph below on who is expected to visit.

Extensive research has shown opportunities in especially heritage and culture tours. The island’s link to Napoleon is a huge point of interest. Bird watching, gaming, fishing and diving, and to a lesser extent astronomy are other niche tourism markets targeted.

On the fishing side, St. Helena has a 200 mile exclusive zone where it controls marine resources and tuna stocks are largely untouched. Fresh and frozen tuna provide opportunities as well as sports fishing, says Morris. The St. Helena government will next week be in serious talks with prospective hotel investors and parties interested in establishing a fish processing plant.

The island government is looking for hotel developers and discussions with the Mantis group and St. Helena Leisure Company on two five star hotels, one with a golf course, are at an advanced stage. At least one South African hotel group is interested in building a £8 million three or four star hotel. Investments are also sought in new boutique hotels.

Supply chain

Interested parties will also be able to get more information during an event hosted in Cape Town in conjunction with the Western Cape Destination Marketing, Investment and Trade Promotion Agency (Wesgro).

The supply chain and services to the fledgling economy need to be established and opportunities abound. Advertisements will go out for a hospitality trainer shortly, to up-skill islanders, also known as Saints. It will be a one-year contract.

The current supply line from the city, the RMS St. Helena, has significant economic value, says Nils Flaatten, CEO of Wesgro. The RMS will be decommissioned in 2016. Morris earlier said the RMS St. Helena alone, is worth £20 million for Cape Town per year. That includes island supplies, mostly purchased in Cape Town. Islanders also come to the Mother City for advanced medical treatment and the total value of the St. Helena to the Cape Town economy might be much more.

Flaatten says Wesgro is pro-actively fighting to retain all or a large portion of St. Helena’s business. “We have regular engagement with the St. Helena government and are assisting them with their interaction with investors”, he says.

A request for proposals will be issued next year for airline operators to service the route, he says. That process will determine the exact route.

I visited St. Helena earlier this year as a guest of Basil Read. The island is extremely mountainous with narrow paths criss-crossing its 122 square kilometres. Jamestown is the business hub and can be compared with a small rural town in South Africa. There is one bank on the island, no ATMs, no estate agent signs, no vehicle dealerships.

Shops are few, since almost everything is imported - clothes, furniture, vehicles and even fresh fruit and vegetables. The geography is varied and includes barren parts with hardly any vegetation as well as rain forests. The 4 000-odd islanders are extremely friendly and seemed quite laid back. The tourism positioning “one of the world’s last remaining ‘undiscovered’ places” is exactly how I would describe St. Helena.

One comment filed:

For those who like the unvarnished tourist experience, now is the time to visit St. Helena Island. It’s going to change. And of course, there’s a rapidly closing window of opportunity to go on the world’s last mail ship.

ST. HELENA: UNEARTHING THE EXCEPTIONAL

News24/Travel 6^th September 2013

Want to get in on one of the world’s best-kept slow travel secrets?

www.rms-st-helena.com

Jamestown, St. Helena (Shutterstock)

Consider a relaxed voyage to St. Helena, one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world, on board one of the last working royal ships the RMS St. Helena.

Yet, this unique opportunity to appreciate the hospitality of a bygone-era comes to an end in 2016.

Saint Helena Airport is under construction and will open concurrently with a new Mantis hotel, when the RMS St. Helena is said to become non-operational. Rich in fauna and flora, the island fits with Mantis’ mission of ‘Unearthing the Exceptional’.

Famous as the place where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to, Mantis together with the RMS St. Helena are focusing on bringing hospitality, education and conservation expertise to the island.

The island has an abundance of natural beauty, friendly people and fun-filled activities.

If you do go you’ll get to walk on land once occupied by prisoners of war during the Boer Wars as well as meet Jonathan^{but see Our Comment, below}, arguably the oldest tortoise in the world, who enjoys life in the picturesque gardens of Plantation House, the governor’s official residence.

A visit to St. Helena also means exploring the scenic coastal and inland walks. A leisurely escorted tour in the island’s only Charabanc is a highlight, as is the stop at the top of Jacob’s ladder that looks across to Jamestown. The museum in Jamestown is highly recommended. Here the history of Britain’s second oldest colony is laid out in an informative and interesting way.

If you’re interested in experiencing this unique RMS St. Helena voyage there are different tours on offer. All trips depart from Cape Town with the ship also calling at other interesting places along the South Atlantic Ocean route.

Upcoming themes include the Oktoberfest, which is a beer tasting voyage. Namibian breweries will offer 11 products to be in the spotlight for three evenings of the four-night trip.

The chairperson of the Mantis collection Adrian Gardiner said as part of their growing portfolio of boutique cruises worldwide, they’re excited to be marketing this iconic royal mail ship as it one of only two left in the world.

“The last of the RMS fleet will sail its final voyage when the airport on St. Helena Island is unveiled and it is an honour to have this vessel in our collection, get on board while you can,” said Gardiner.

Tourism will undoubtedly receive a welcome boost and visitor numbers are expected to rise but will be restricted to 30,000 a year, once the airport is complete in 2015. Could there be a better time to visit this exclusive and exotic destination, with its unique ecosystem? We think not.

Our Comment

For accuracy and to avoid disappointment, don’t imagine that you will get anywhere near Jonathan, or any of the tortoises. They roam freely in a field below Plantation House but visitors are no longer allowed into the field, at the orders of The Governor, supposedly to protect the tortoises. You may be lucky and Jonathan will decide to come over to the visitors’ walkway and meet you; otherwise you will more probably just see him in the distance. Read more about Jonathan.

ST. HELENA: A FLIGHT TO THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

mail & Guardian, South Africa 2^nd August 2013

St. Helena is about to stand on its own but will its new airport bring the tourists?

A St. Helena resident climbs the 699 steps known as Jacob’s Ladder above the capital, Jamestown. The island has only been accessible by sea, but the building of an airport could bring many changes. (Reuters)

It is not easy to travel to St. Helena. First, there is only one way to get there and that is by sea. Second, as a destination it is formidable. The island is a small volcanic outcrop in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, circumscribed by cliffs which plunge into seas of more than 4,000m deep, and it is lonely: Cape Town is a five-day sail away; Angola to the east and Brazil to the west are each close to 2,000km away; Portland in Dorset is almost forgotten.

As its colonial British owners have long known, St. Helena is best suited as a fortress of incarceration for upstarts most irritating to the empire. They include Napoleon Bonaparte and Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo and about 6,000 Boer prisoners of war. St. Helena is “further from anywhere than anywhere else in the world”, is how the writer Julia Blackburn once described it.

Until 1502, when the Portuguese seafarer João da Nova was said to have discovered it, it was uninhabited. Its population peaked at 9,850 (in 1901, when the Boer prisoners were there), though it has been in steady decline to today’s 3,800, expats not included.

But all that is about to change. The island, Britain’s oldest colony after Bermuda, must begin to fend for itself after centuries of dependence. St. Helena is the most costly of Britain’s 14 overseas territories.

After decades of vacillation the United Kingdom finally made a commitment to develop the island’s tourism industry. To help the islanders do that, the British government is building them an airport - £250-million worth of access to fast transport and the instrument with which to drag this slowly decaying Dickensian society into modernity.

I am on the island as Basil Read’s guest to inspect the South African company’s progress with the airport. Basil Read won the tender from the British government to design, build, operate and transfer the airport against several competitors. They dropped out chiefly, as Basil Read’s island director Deon de Jager says, because “it could not be done”.

The airport is the biggest of its kind that the UK government has ever signed and is one of the largest construction projects awarded to Basil Read.

Forbidding grey

The RMS St. Helena - the world’s last working mail ship - rounds the island from the south-east. The coast is a forbidding grey, as the island of Dr Moreau might have been in the eye of HG Wells, and I wonder whether the island would turn out to be Moreau’s laboratory of accelerated evolution, or would the film version of the book, The Island of Lost Souls, be more apposite?

On board the RMS in the bright temperate sunlight typical of the island’s climate, the mood is light. After days of stoic endurance, the islanders among the passengers appear on deck having remained below for most of the voyage.

“We’re Saints, see? St. helenians.” My informant is fishing boat skipper and dive instructor Craig Jon. In the cargo hold is a new motor launch which Craig and his brother, Neil, plan to use for scuba diving.

The brothers don’t have customers yet, but they bought the boat in South Africa in anticipation of an influx of tourists that would begin with the completion of the airport.

Jon’s deliberate explanation must mean that he has said it before, that he will repeat it as often as necessary. He does so gently, if in a non-standard English accent alien to my South African ear, but there is no doubt about who and what he is. I ask the Jons what they paid for their new boat, but they won’t say.

“Enough in pound, see?”

I decide the heavily accented dialect is a form of Cockney, but with an alien inflection assimilated from the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers. Perhaps it was formed in the island’s heyday, during the regency era when George III’s son, the Prince of Wales, ruled Britain as regent. That time more than a 1,000 ships a year anchored off Jamestown, the capital and victualing station for sailing ships.

But now, as the RMS approaches its anchorage, no more than a dozen yachts float in James Bay.

Redundant

There is no harbour. Passengers disembark on to lighter vessels which deposit them on a quay of sorts with the rising swell crashing into the rocks at the foot of a cliff overhanging Jamestown. Ours is the only ship in the bay and, with the rare exception, that is the way it has been for many decades.

It was steam, that first engine of modernity, which began the decline of the island as a victualing station, since it made sailing redundant and a shortcut between the Cape and Europe possible. The death knell to what little export industry the island had came in the 1950s when Britain replaced flax with nylon as raw material for its postal bags.

There are no other industries of any economic significance. Intermittent rainfall and erosion on a vast scale make agriculture a poor prospect. There is nothing to mine and outside of exotic sport fishing, the depth of ocean makes commercial fishing unlikely without a breakwater and harbour.

With the imminent retirement of the RMS, which, for the moment, delivers every life-sustaining necessity to the island, even that seems a remote possibility.

Also on board the ship was a representative of resort operator Mantis. He declined to be interviewed, but it is clear that the British government’s anticipated 30,000 visitors a year to the island could justify the construction of at least one upmarket hotel.

The site on which Mantis has its eye is a 19th-century fort overlooking Jamestown. Other hotel groups, including Protea, have also expressed interest, according to Stuart Planner, the commercial property director of Enterprise St. Helena, a government agency charged with tourism development.

The hotel groups must know something most of the Saints don’t. If the island is to entertain 30,000 visitors a year the airport must receive 82 passengers a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. It is difficult to see how the airport, which is designed to handle aircraft with a maximum capacity of 200 passengers (Airbus A320, Boeing 737-800) on its 1,850m concrete runway, will deal with the arrival of such hordes.

Possession of cannabis

The Saints to whom I spoke are mostly cynical about the tourism prospects and many oppose it, even if Basil Read employs about 250 islanders while the airport construction is under way.

A plebiscite conducted before the project started gave a 60% approval, but that number included the large diaspora of Saints in the UK, for whom fast transport home will be desirable and, unlike their compatriots on the island, more likely to be affordable.

The Saints on the island are poor, though, thanks to British welfare, not destitute. Crime is virtually unknown and violence rare. Most offences, according to the weekly police report, are connected to the possession of cannabis.

You may be right to judge the Saints as extraordinarily hospitable and laid-back islanders, but they are also shy and reserved to the point of subservience.

Class distinctions are along racial lines, with British expats working for the government on top of the pile and the darker descendants of slaves and labourers imported over centuries at the lower end, and for whom education and wealth prospects are limited. Most younger Saints either leave the island, or want to leave. That, too, is a circumstance that has prevailed for a long time. When the British established a naval station on the island in the 1840s to suppress the African slave trade across the South Atlantic, about 15,000 slaves were liberated there.

The British offered to repatriate them, but for illiterates captured all over Africa and sold in Madagascar, it was difficult to say where exactly home was. Now the Saints’ choices seem as limited as they were before: Those who can, leave. The others, those who are unlikely ever to afford an air ticket off the island, or passage aboard the RMS, and who are unlikely to gain much from repatriated hospitality profits, must accept the largesse of its colonial owner - or perish. For many, St. Helena is indeed The Island of Lost Souls.

Blom visited St. Helena as a guest of Basil Read earlier this year

WISH YOU WERE THERE? FAMILY SET FOR LIFE ON REMOTE ISLAND

Derby Telegraph 27^th June 2013

Belper, Derbyshire

Sarah, Tim and daughter Lucy

St. Helena

Location map

A FAMILY have swapped life in landlocked Derbyshire to live and work on one of the most remote islands in the world.

Tim and Sarah Troman, along with their two-year-old daughter, Lucy, have left behind their Belper home and are on their way to Saint Helena - a British territory in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, 1,200 miles off the coast of Africa.

They are moving there because Sarah has secured a job as capital programme manager, overseeing projects that improve the island’s infrastructure.

At present, the island is only accessible by boat and one of the projects she will work on is the creation of an airstrip.

In the past, Sarah has been involved with regeneration projects in Derby through her work with now defunct regeneration company Derby Cityscape.

The Tromans have already started their journey to the island, where they will be joining a population of just over 4,200 people.

But because Saint Helena has no airport, they have had to travel on an RAF flight to Ascension Island - another remote British territory island in the South Atlantic.

From there, the family will take a boat trip on HMS St. Helena{15} to their final destination.

Once there, they will live on the island for two years, which means Tim and Susan have both had to quit their jobs back in Derbyshire.

Sarah worked for Derby City Council and Tim was sales director of Alfreton-based manufacturing firm Amberol.

Sarah said: “It was sad to say goodbye to everybody. I enjoyed my time working in regeneration in Derby.”

“I hope when we next come back for a visit lots of projects will be completed or well under way.”

“It feels pretty strange to leave but now that most of our stuff is on a container ship headed for Cape Town, there’s no going back!”

Before embarking on the trip, Tim, who was Amberol’s first employee when he joined the firm in 1983, said he would miss his colleagues.

He said: “While the Saint Helena project is a fantastic opportunity, I will miss the staff at Amberol who have become friends as well as colleagues. They are like extended family.”

Amberol’s marketing director, John Williamson, said: “We were sorry to see Tim go after so many years.”

“He has played a crucial role in the company’s growth. We wish him and his family all the best in this exciting new phase of his life.”

Tim will be spending his time on Saint Helena looking after daughter Lucy, while Sarah works on the 47-square-mile island.

Discovered by the Portuguese in 1502, Saint Helena is perhaps most famous for being home to Napoleon Bonaparte during his exile in the 19^th century.

Because of the island’s remoteness, the Tromans will keep in touch with friends and family via the internet.

Tim has started a blog called Tim’s Just Like Living In Paradise, where he has so far been describing life on Ascension Island and posting pictures.

In one of his most recent posts, Tim wrote: “The first thing that hits you is the heat but I guess we will get used to that.”

“The island initially doesn’t look that attractive but as you spend more time wandering around it is quite beautiful and the beaches are stunning, although the sea is not safe to swim in due to the strong currents.”

“The overriding factor here is just how friendly everyone is. Literally you spend all day waving at complete strangers.”

ATLANTIC STAR AIRLINES PLOTS CAPE TOWN - ST. HELENA - EUROPE FROM 2016

ch-aviations 12^th June 2013

Atlantic Star Airlines is a start-up founded by three ex-British Airways pilots with plans to begin flights from the British Overseas Territory of St. Helena, situated in the South Atlantic Ocean, to the United Kingdom using a B757-200 WIN. According to their business plan, flights will initially operate once weekly routed Cape Town - Saint Helena - Southern Europe - London with an additional first sector from Johannesburg O.R. Tambo to be added once demand has picked up. Thereafter, frequencies will be increased to “two or three” flights per week. Operations will only begin once the airport on St. Helena, still under construction, is completed and certified in early 2016.

More information at www.atlantic-star-airlines.com.

ST. HELENA AIRPORT TO OPEN FEBRUARY 2016; ON LINE SURVEY TO ASSESS TRAVEL POTENTIAL

Merco Press 28^th May 2013

Image of St. Helena’s planned new airport bulding

Matt Joshua of ‘The Journey Tourism’ has been commissioned by Enterprise St. Helena to assess visitor potential for the island.

“An important part of this is assessing the potential level of travel by Saints living on the island and living overseas.”

Matt hopes that St. Helenians living in the Falklands will take the time to complete a survey online atwww.surveymonkey.com/s/SaintsOverseas in order to assess that travel.

According to the Falklands 2012 census almost 420 St. Helenians are living in the Islands, two thirds of them at the Mount Pleasant complex.

As one of the leading communities in the Falklands, Saint Helenians celebrated their day last week with a reception held at Government House in Stanley.

Acting Governor Sandra Tyler-Haywood welcomed everyone to the event which celebrated the anniversary of the discovery of their island home more than 500 years ago.

Mrs Tyler-Haywood said it was fair to say that while the Falklands and St. Helena enjoyed very different climates, the islands do have much in common.

The reception was, she said, an opportunity to celebrate the common bonds that the Falklands and St. Helena have, not just as UK Overseas Territories but also as island people.

The St. Helena airport is under construction since early 2012 and is scheduled to open in February 2016, by which time the RMS Saint Helena, the only regular ship to call at St. Helena, will be retired.

A total amount of £201.5 million has been funded by the British government for design and construction of the airport which will be carried out by South African engineering group Basil Read (Pty) Ltd. Additional funds of up to £10 million in shared risk contingency, and £35.1 million for ten years of operation by South-African airport operator Lanseria Airport have also been granted by the UK Government.

The airport will be the largest single investment ever made in the island.

Saint Helena has a known history of over 500 years since its recorded discovery by the Portuguese in 1502.

Claiming to be Britain’s second oldest colony, it is one of the most isolated islands in the world and was for several centuries of vital strategic importance to ships sailing to Europe from Asia and South Africa. For several centuries, the British used the island as a place of exile, most notably for Napoleon Bonaparte.

Most historical accounts state the island was discovered on May 21, 1502 by the Galician navigator João da Nova sailing at the service of the Portuguese Crown, on his voyage home from India, and that he named it Santa Helena after Helena of Constantinople.