<
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220119-moyenne-island-the-worlds-smallest-national-park>
'Most people who buy their very own tropical island do so in the pursuit of
luxury. Brendon Grimshaw was different. So, too, was Moyenne, the island in the
Seychelles that Grimshaw bought.
Grimshaw first came to the Seychelles – an archipelago of 115 islands in the
Indian Ocean, only eight of which are permanently inhabited – on holiday in
1962. At the time, he was an editor working for some of the biggest newspapers
in East Africa. It was an exciting time in Africa and, as part of his job, he
rubbed shoulders with Tanzania's charismatic new leader and future president,
Julius Nyerere.
But Grimshaw was looking for something more than a holiday.
Tanzania had declared independence the year before; Kenya would follow a year
later; and Grimshaw, an Englishman, understood that jobs such as his would soon
pass to locals. Knowing that he would soon be unemployed, Grimshaw searched for
a new direction in life, one that took him closer to nature. He dreamed about
owning land in the Seychelles – ideally, he'd buy his own island.
On his first few weeks in the Seychelles, Grimshaw began to wonder whether he
needed a change of plan: there weren't many islands on the market, and those
that were had eye-watering price tags. On the second-to-last day of his
holiday, a young man approached him in the Seychelles' capital, Victoria, and
asked Grimshaw if he wanted to buy an island. Just like that. They travelled
together to Moyenne, a 0.099sq km dot 4.5km off the north coast of the
Seychelles' largest island, Mahé. Grimshaw fell in love immediately with its
silence and its wild tangle of vegetation. It was, he would later say, close
enough to be accessible from the Seychelles' main island, and yet a world away.
"It was totally different. It was a special feeling," he told a documentary
film crew in 2009. "This is the place I'd been looking for."
At four minutes to midnight on the last day of his Seychelles holiday, Grimshaw
signed an agreement to pay £8,000 for Moyenne. The island was his. But buying
Moyenne would prove an easier task than taking care of it.'
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-indigenous-rights-ecuador-deforestation-amazon-hiv-south-africa/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
