Here We Go Again - More to Sea

April 26-27, 2024 "Null and Null" - Null Island and Takoradi, Ghana As we were making our way to Takoradi in Ghana, we took a scheduled deter to Null Island.  Now, I had never really heard of Null Island and for good reason.  There isn’t such a place.  There sometimes is a buoy but no island.  Let me explain..  Everyone knows that the earth is sectioned up by longitude and latitude lines that help tell us where we are located.  The lines going from pole to pole are longitude while the latitude lines go around the earth.  The prime meridian represents zero degrees east and west and this line goes thru London and is sometimes referred to as Greenwich Mean Time, while the equator represents zero degrees north and south.  Where these two lines meet would be zero degrees north, south, east and west.  This location is out in the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa.    Here is where the captain brought our ship to a stop so ...

  April 22, 2024 Walvis Bay, Namibia   In our second stop in Namibia, we come to Walvis Bay ... a coastal town along the Namib desert which surprisingly is called a cold desert because the waters from Antarctica make their way up the coast and these cold waters mix with the warm air off the desert and so miles and miles of fog drift into the desert every night.  This sparse amount of water seems to be enough to keep some life sustainable ... especially the very strange plant called a Welwitschia.  This species of plant have male and female plants and they have been around since prehistoric times.   The specimens we saw were thought to be several hundred years old and to look at them you think they are dead.  If you had one in your yard you would cut it away.  Not much to look at but their story is interesting.  I am pretty sure it wasn’t worth the 30 kilometer or so trip it took to get there. The first thing we saw getting off the ...