Travel Tips

It might sound a bit tender, but I love watching the Sun set over the horizon. I am amazed by it... I get the same feeling when flying. It will never cease to amaze me that a plane with so much weight (especially with me onboard) can get off the ground and stay in the air (especially with me in it). So, in the same vein, I am amazed by sunsets. To think of the distance between the Sun and Earth and the incredible amount of combustion occurring on that ball of fire is simply astonishing.

Sunsets are one of nature’s wonders and it’s free for anyone to see anywhere in the world on any given night (unless you’re in prison). All in all, it reminds me how small and insignificant this world is (me included)...from the “green flash” of the Netherland Antilles up to the Northwest Territories, a land where the Sun never sets in summer, and down to the deep blue cold autumn skies of New England and over to the summer skies of Scotland on down to some of the most impressive sunsets I’ve ever witnessed in deep, dark Africa: Luanda, Angola.

Here in Luanda I am fortunate in that I have a veranda overlooking the bay of Luanda. And, throughout the seasons, I watch as the sun makes its daily track across the Southern Hemisphere. In the heat of the summer months it sets over the Ilha; but, as winter approaches, it crawls further south and disappears directly behind the Fortaleza de São Miguel.

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I can always tell when there’s going to be a good sunset. It’s some sort of primal instinct I feel in my bones…but not in my knees, that’s’ the cold fall rain. Anyway, I’ll be at work and something will start to stir deep inside me and it’s not Prego não pão I had for lunch…something tells me to leave work early, get home as fast as possible and make a stiff gin-n-tonic then get out on my veranda before 6pm to catch the last few minutes of that incredibly bright white-yellow globe falling into the Atlantic Ocean on it’s way over to Brasil…