Explore offshore wondersĪs on St Helena, the seas around Ascension offer clear, unpolluted waters with some excellent diving and fishing opportunities year-round – provided you arrange things in advance. The modern set of boxes was set up in 1979, and each now contains a visitors’ book and a handstamp, so that you can authenticate your achievement. Notes were left by visitors at this spot and the next person to come along would take the letter to the post office. In 1913, the first letterbox, a green tin box, was placed at Letterbox, a peninsula at the easternmost point of the island. The idea of letterboxes derives from a 17th-century practice, when outward-bound ships would leave messages on the island for the next ship to take home. While the walks are generally better waymarked than those on St Helena, don’t depend on it it only takes a sign to be obscured by vegetation and you could easily find yourself taking a wrong turning. There are numerous walks around the island, including a series of letterbox walks, similar in concept to the postbox walks on St Helena. Discover the island on footĪscension is a great place for hiking, with a varied range of walks that take in volcanic landscapes, lush green cloudforest and challenging coastal paths. The early part of the year gives the best chance of seeing land crabs when they are spawning, usually around February and March. To watch one of these lumbering females laying her eggs in the sand is one of the world’s great wildlife experiences. More seasonal, but equally unmissable, are the nesting green sea turtles, which are usually here between December and June. Up there with the best sights, too, is the endemic Ascension frigatebird. Key to many a visit is Ascension’s birdlife (page 133), and specifically the seabird colonies of the Wideawake Fairs and Boatswain Bird Island. The best things to see and do on Ascension Island Get up close with the island’s wildlife With so few visitors, guided trips in particular can rarely be organised on the spur of the moment, so a little advance planning is well worth the effort. You will, though, need to be reasonably self-sufficient. While the tourist infrastructure is modest, and the accommodation on the island is simple, it’s also comfortable, the island uncrowded, and there’s no shortage of activities and places to explore. Nevertheless, the island’s more conventional natural beauty will become apparent upon looking away from this Mars-like expanse: the quiet little town of Georgetown Atlantic rollers crashing on to long, sandy beaches nesting turtles that lay their eggs by starlight seabirds in their thousands and the densely vegetated slopes of a mountain that represent an extraordinary triumph of human intervention over the natural world.Īscension Island may be a ‘working island’ but it is very much open to visitors. The largely barren, volcanic, landscape has a special allure all of its own, with rusty red cones, crusty black lava flows, and a slight air of impermanence, more reminiscent of a futuristic new planet settlement than a mid-Atlantic island. It is essentially a multi-national communications and military hub, but from a political point of view it forms part of the British Overseas Territory of St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha.įirst impressions of Ascension are almost literally out of this world. Nesting turtles, huge seabird colonies and superb walking: Ascension is much more than just a military base.Īscension Island does not fit into any normal geopolitical pattern.
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