Saint Helena: Exploring the Island’s Interior
Saint Helena measures 16×8 km or 10×5 mi. It’s a rugged island with no beaches, vertical cliffs and no safe harbors on the exterior, rising quickly to almost 2000ft in the interior. In the center – it’s verdant and lush and more reminiscent of Scotland or Ireland then a tropical island. All the original vegetation that existed on the island (as well as all the fauna) is gone now completely and replaced by European domestic animals and New Zealand flux that covers most of the interior (flux was widely used for making strong ropes in the past). The roads in St Helena are narrow and twisting, often requiring a double turn maneuver just to make a turn at a hairpin bend without scraping a stone wall. The eastern part of St Helena Island gets very little rainfall, shielded by the higher terrain to the west. The result is absolutely surreal desert landscape of colorful eroded badlands that is almost like American Southwest but most definitely not a tropical small island in the middle of the Atlantic!
