The whole time in Cape Verde, my mum and I had been thinking about trying flyboarding (this watersport where they basically attach jet-packs to your fleet so you fly out of the sea). There’s a flyboarding stand by the beach near the pier with lots of photos and things making it look really fun, but we hadn’t had the chance to watch anyone do it, but on our second-to-last day, we decided it was an opportunity we couldn’t miss out on.
At the stall they told us we could do it straight away and didn’t have to book in advance, so my mum paid for the 2 person deal (120 euros for 20 minutes each) and we had to sign our lives away on a little contract thing. We were given wetsuits and some instructions which were basically just that you have to have your feet completely flat at a 90 degree angle to your legs before they can make you fly, and you have to keep them flat once you’re flying.
I sat on the back of the jet ski while my mum got in the water to try first. She’s a really determined person especially when it comes to sports, so I thought she’d be better than me, but she actually struggled to fly. You have heavy boots attached to you and they float in weird directions and she said they made it hard for her to flatten her feet. She did fly a few times, and I had my waterproof camera with me and managed to get this cool picture of her:
The 20 minutes seemed like longer than 20 minutes and I don’t think the man was really watching the clock carefully. On another note, this is how busy the pier was at the time… probably because everyone goes there to buy fresh fish in the mornings:
And this is me having fun with my new waterproof camera attempting to take selfies in the sea:
So anyway, I was really not confident when I got into the water with the giant boots on, but I managed to fly within a few minutes. I didn’t find it too hard to get my feet flat in the water, but it’s hard to keep them flat once you’re flying. It’s not as scary as it looks, but the problem is, once you’re up there, you know that you have to get down. If you’re experienced or a bit more skilled than me, you can do a ‘dolphin dive’ meaning you dive under the water from up in your flying position. I wasn’t going to even attempt that, so it meant that once I lost the balance of my feet, I basically had to flop onto the water, hitting something (my legs or head etc) every time. For some reason it kept being my legs, so by the end they were really hurting and red. Apart from that, it was a really cool experience and you do feel like you’re flying. I’d definitely recommend it. This is a picture the company took of me from the shore:
We chilled for the rest of that day and decided to search for some nightlife later on. At about 10pm we came across some live music in a bar called Tubarao Azul (translating to Blue Shark). It was a local bar with traditional music and dancing, but there were tourists there enjoying it too, which I thought was nice. This is a photo we took as it was closing at about 1am:
It was pretty busy but a good looking Cape Verdian guy decided to get up from his table and give me his seat and find one for my mum. I didn’t complain and we sat at the table, which was also occupied by 4 Cape Verdians. They were all smiley but I don’t think they spoke any English, but the drunkest one seemed to think he could, so I just nodded my head and laughed at everything he said because I had no idea what he was on about.
The dancing was done in partners and a couple of old men invited me to dance with them but I politely declined. Apparently my mum is more of a party animal than me because she got up and started dancing with a random dreadlock guy! Finally a cute guy (who I happened to have been secretly watching all night) came over and spoke to me and asked me to dance:
We ended up chatting for a while but there was a quite significant language barrier. He was including my mum in the conversation as well which was sweet. He said we should go with him to the club after, so we said yes just to see what it was like for about half an hour. Unfortunately I don’t remember the name of it, but it was packed in there and again was a complete mix of tourists and local people. Girls got in free and boys had to pay, as far as I could see, and the music was a mix of things like kizomba, reggaeton, dancehall and hiphop.
After about 15 minutes of dancing with my Cape Verde guy, I realised my mum wasn’t exactly having the time of her life so I suggested we should go home. The guy (Jaime) told me to call him tomorrow, and got into our taxi to ask the taxi driver for a piece of paper to write his number on. I finally managed to get it across to him that I wasn’t going to call a Cape Verde number from my UK phone and told him I’d be near the pier at 11am the next day if he wanted to meet up.
To my surprise, on Sunday, the next day, I was sitting on the sand by the pier with my ipod when Jaime appeared next to me. He wanted to hang out so I agreed to meet my mum later and we went to play table football. They have a few old wooden tables on the street and you pay the owner about 10p to play a game, so we did that for a while and then went to a Cyber Cafe to play video games for about 50p for half an hour.
I had dinner with my mum but spent most of my last day with Jaime. I met some of his friends and even went to his auntie’s house and everyone was really friendly towards me. The language barrier kind of made everything cuter because sometimes we had to just communicate via tickling each other etc.
All in all, I would recommend Sal to anyone looking for a quiet holiday with a nice beach, watersports, cheap drinks and food and no need to really worry about crime or unfriendly locals.
Travel With Zoe 