Lighthouses!

Phare des Baleines on L'Ile-d-Ré

Vince and I never miss an opportunity to climb a lighthouse. And we climbed one this weekend in Cape Agulhas in the Western Cape.

Cape Agulhas is the southern most point in Africa. Not the Cape of Good Hope as is commonly believed.

And it is probably the place where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. Again not the Cape of Good Hope where they would like you to believe. I say probably because really, how can you tell? It's water.

I mean of course besides the plaque that says Indian Ocean this way and Atlantic Ocean that way!






But Cape Agulhas is definitely more southern than the Cape of Good Hope. And guarding its rocky needle point is the 1874 Cape Agulhas Lighthouse.

Pharos all the way on the left, Agulhas in red.

Its shape is modeled after the Ancient Wonder of the World, the Pharos of Alexandria. They had a chart in the Museum with silhouettes of many different lighthouses of the world, past and present, showing their relative size.










Agulhas's lighthouse is a little smaller than Sandy Hook in NY Harbor

But while no one really knows what color the Pharos was, Agulhas is red and and white. They are restoring it again and the painters were working on it when we visited. They let us climb to the top to see the great view.

And the huge unlit fresnel lens.

Thank goodness they weren't testing it that day!










The shape of the Cape Agulhas Light reminded me a little of another lighthouse where Vince and I and our sons spent the night once many years ago, the red lighthouse on Monomoy Island off the coast of Cape Cod.

Organized through the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, we ... and our naturalist Thor (that was his name really; a great name for a naturalist) ... spent the night together in the decommissioned lighthouse. You could stay in the lightkeeper's house or you could bring your sleeping bags up into the lighthouse and sleep on the top of the light! Which we did.

Monomoy Island was once attached to nearby Chatham by land. A nor'easter in 1987 resulted in the Chatham Break which created the uninhabited Monomoy Island. At the time, the only way to reach the island was by boat which is how we got there. I haven't been to that part of Cape Cod in a while, but I understand the break has been slowly filling in and has formed a land bridge again back to Chatham. Too bad. It was much cooler and more romantic when it was more inaccessible.