Persepolis: Blending Past and Present

By Heidi Noroozy

Heidi will be back from Iran next week, bursting with new stories to tell. In the meantime, here is a repeat of her Persepolis story from November 2010.

On a clear day, you can see the thirteen stone columns of the Apadana Audience Hall from across the vast plain, just an hour’s drive from the Southern Iranian city of Shiraz. They rise into the blue sky above the ruins of Persepolis, reminding me of lonely tree trunks after a forest fire. Solemn, bleak, and dead.

Built in the fifth century B.C. by Darius I and his son Xerxes, Persepolis was the residential palace of Persia’s Achaemenian kings, where Darius and his descendants staged ceremonies and received visiting heads of state. The actual business of the empire was conducted far away in Susa (modern-day Shush, Iran). The palace’s history is still visible today on its gray stone walls, which depict scenes of Persian New Year ceremonies, camels and carts laden with provisions, and delegates from empire’s far-flung territories bearing tribute to the king of kings.

Persepolis’s glory lasted for only two centuries and came to an end when Alexander the Great conquered and looted the palace complex, then burned it to the ground. Today, the ruins are a source of national pride for Iranians, a symbol of their long-ago Persian empire. So it’s no surprise that they shun the name the Greek conquerors gave the site (Persepolis – City of the Persians) and prefer to call it Takht-e Jamshid or Throne of Jamshid (a legendary Persian king, who probably never actually lived in the palace named after him).

Persepolis may have been abandoned many centuries ago, but it felt anything but dead on the sunny February day when I visited the site. Our expedition began early in the morning when Hassan, the guide my husband had hired for the day, picked us up for the drive from Shiraz to the ruins. A young man with bright eyes and a shiny new wedding ring on his finger, Hassan showed us a picture of his young wife of six months and chatted happily of the baby on the way. When we passed through green fields at the foot of Persepolis’s high plateau, he pointed out the meadows that had belonged to his family. According to local custom, he said, farms are divided up equally between sons, so by the time he came along, his share of the fertile land was too small to support a family. He headed for the city and better job prospects.

By the time we climbed the wide staircase leading to the Xerxes Gate, my mind was filled with images from Hassan’s stories, and all I could think of was how much life had continued here for millennia. How farmers had cultivated the green fields all around the site—and likely also over it during the centuries that the palace ruins lay buried in the ground.

With a blue sky and a light breeze blowing down from the hills, mingling the scents of ancient dust and freshly turned earth, I could practically see the spirits of ancient warriors, kings, and servants climbing the steps to the Apadana Hall, just like their images carved into the side of the staircase wall. We wandered along the boardwalk covering Procession Way, where stone griffins, now chipped and cracked, once looked down on delegations as they made their way to the Hundred Column Hall. Gazing down at round stone bases that used to support long-decayed wooden columns, it was harder to picture life as it had once existed here.

But farther along, after we passed through the Tripylon Gate to the private quarters beyond, I spotted a ginger cat sunning herself in a window of Darius’s Tachara Palace. It’s an image that comes back every time I think of Persepolis. A symbol of how death and life coexist and how history is never lost forever but blends with the present.

When we piled back into Hassan’s car for the drive back to Shiraz, I couldn’t help wondering whether some branch of his family had worked the land back in the days when Persepolis was a living city, and whether a long-ago ancestor had climbed the hill to the palace plateau with food for the royal kitchens. Maybe that ancestor’s spirit also still mounts the steps to the Apadana Hall.

Off The Beaten Track: Can You Own A Culture?

Anthropologist Mary McCutcheon received her doctorate from the University of Arizona, where she researched the land and marine resource tenure of the Pacific island of Palau. After a fruitful career at the Smithsonian and George Mason University, Dr. McCutcheon now spends her time as a docent at, appropriately enough, the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Origins—a place where she just might find the answers to some of society’s most perplexing questions. 

I certainly didn’t expect to upset my friend Demei when I told him what I had done. It was 1991, and Demei was the biologist working for the government of the Republic of Palau, an island group in the Western Pacific. I was an anthropologist who thought I was an expert on ownership of property, such as land, agricultural products, and marine resources. I clearly didn't know everything on this subject.

Palau on the globe

When I first arrived in Palau back in 1977, I lived with one of the paramount chiefs in a village called Melekeok. Because I was walking all over the island looking at farms and plots of land, I also collected plants and pressed and dried them in my homemade kerosene-fueled plant drier. I would always ask Dirruleong Kebang, the paramount chief's wife, what these plants could be used for. One day, I'd collected a sprig of something that made her eyes brighten. This, she declared, was ukelel a chedib, an herb that cured stomach ailments. She described how to brew it into a tea and all about its remarkable curative properties. I jotted all this down in my notes as I pressed the sample between pages of the Pacific Daily News.

Dirruleong Kebang with her husband,
Secharuleong Kitalong

Some weeks later, Kebang looked sick. I asked what was wrong, and she replied that she had a terrible stomachache. She then asked if I had any medicine for this (hoping I'd come up with a bottle of the universally respected Pepto Bismol). I smiled and hastened off to the spot where I knew the ukelel a chedib grew. I gathered a fistful and brewed a strong tea. When I presented it to Kebang, she laughed and happily drank it. She declared that she felt much better, but I suspect it was the delight and laughter that cured her more than the potion I had concocted.  

Melekeok as seen from the sea

A decade passed. My plant collections and field notes found eternal homes in the herbarium at the Smithsonian, where I also found a dull job as a bureaucrat. One day in March 1988, I was asked to host a day at the Smithsonian for a group of Micronesian historic preservation officers. The person from Palau was my old friend, Moses Sam, so I invited him to stay at my house during his time in town.  

I prepared a talk on the importance of stretching the job of historic preservation to things other than buildings and historic sites. I stressed the significance of plants, crafts, folklore, songs, and other kinds of traditional knowledge. As an example, I told the story of Kebang and the ukelel a chedib tea. That night, Moses came home for dinner and told me how especially meaningful my anecdote had been to him. He had had a bad case of Hepatitis B and thought he was close to death. His liver had been failing, and he’d had no appetite or any energy at all. His grandmother suggested that he drink a strong cup of ukelel a chedib every day. He took her advice, got well, and went back to playing softball. He’d gained weight and felt terrific. The credit went to his wise grandmother and her ancient herbal cures. When Moses told me his story, I just laughed and would have completely forgotten it, had it not been for a tiny story in the Washington Post the following week. 

  

Click article once to enlarge.

I was reading this article, absent-mindedly, while having my English muffin and a cup of coffee when suddenly I realized, "Damn! That Phyllanthus is the same genus as ukelel a chedib.”

That day, I tracked down Baruch Blumberg, the American physician mentioned in the article. He'd discovered Hepatitis B and, as a Nobel laureate, he was not hard to find. Our correspondence eventually included his assistant, Dr. David Unander. A couple weeks later, Unander came to visit the Smithsonian herbarium that housed my samples of Phyllanthus palauensis. He also had a chance to meet the foremost expert on the genus, Dr. Grady Webster, who had also spent a lot of time at the herbarium. Unander thought it was possible that the Palauan species had even more powerful properties than the South Asian variety he had been studying. I couldn't help feeling proud of myself.

Phyllanthus marianensis, a close relative of Phyllanthus palauensis
(known in Palau as ukelel a chedib)

It was during my next visit to Palau in 1991 that I went to visit Demei and told him my ukelel a chedib story, expecting that he would appreciate the contribution that a Palauan tradition might have in the world of medicine. But instead, his eyes squinted a bit, and he glared at me with disgust. Who did I think I was taking his culture’s traditional knowledge and spreading it around all over the place? I stammered an apology as my face burned with a blend of anger and shame.

In fact, I doubt that my information ever made any difference in this research. A quick look on the Internet shows that research on potential cures for the virus continues and show promise, but there is no mention of the Palauan species. I don’t think anyone is making buckets of money from the active ingredient of Phyllanthus yet, but still, this episode marked the beginning of my sensitivity to what could be called “cultural intellectual property.” Individual or corporate intellectual property is what we protect with copyrights and patents. But what is a CULTURE? It’s not exactly a group of people, but rather the values and social rules that bind a group of individuals together. How can a thing such as culture have rights?

The author with JohnWayne Kentaro,
Kebang's great grandson, in Palau 30 years ago

There are lots of other areas where cultural intellectual property is treated as a public good. Consider folk music, traditional dance, legends,
curing rituals, motifs in art, needlework, jewelry design,
and costume. More and more, these kinds of “plagiarisms” are
making their way into courts where finding justice is not easy.

The problem of using knowledge from medicinal plants is more nuanced because of the
potential life-saving power of this knowledge. We'd like to think that all people would generously part with secrets and folk knowledge if it could save lives, but the truth is pharmaceutical companies are seeking profits and exclusive patent rights. Their shareholders might be oblivious of the real “research and development” that goes into a product as they cash their dividend checks.

Moses Sam

In this day of world migration and intermarriage, the boundaries around any cultural group are blurred. The best way to handle such challenges is to make sure that large percentages of profits go towards something that benefits the place and whoever might live there. But even deciding how these proceeds should be spent becomes problematic when different individuals claiming to have authority over cultural knowledge disagree.

When Kebang died 12 years ago at the age of about 106, she was the oldest person in Palau. Moses Sam died in 2009. I heard he had died of liver cancer—a consequence of hepatitis B.

An Overflow of Corpses

By Patricia Winton

A couple of months ago, the mayor of Falciano del Massico in southern Italy issued a proclamation forbidding the residents to die. His wry action focused on a local problem, but it highlights one existing throughout the Italian peninsula—a land where people have lived and died for several millennia: What do you do with the corpses?

Previously shared cemetery

Falciano del Massico’s problem began fifty years ago when boundaries between two towns were redrawn leaving the previously shared cemetery in the town of Carinola. Citizens from both towns continued to bury their dead there until it filled up. The two towns have been feuding since about where to put Falciano del Massico’s dead while the town sought to build its own cemetery. Fed up with delays, the mayor signed his proclamation in hopes of speeding up the process of obtaining the necessary permits, funding, etc. And while the town still awaits resolution, a few citizens have disobeyed the mayor’s edict.

Where to put the dead is a problem facing many Italian cities and towns. A common solution limits the amount of time a body can actually remain underground. The time varies by local decree, but it can be as short as eight years, such as in Venice, or as long as twenty-five, such as in Voghera, a small city near Milan. After that, the remains are dug up and removed to another site. (Read about Carlin Romano’s discovery that his father had been exhumed and moved without his knowledge here.) The wealthy can pay extra for longer repose.

Magdalen Nabb's delicious mystery, Death of a Dutchman, uses the inevitable disinterment of someone after ten years in a Florentine cemetery to provide the clue that Marshall Guarnaccia must puzzle over to find the murderer.

Loculi in Venice

The disposition of the remains after they have been disinterred also varies by locale. Until about fifty years ago, for example, bones exhumed at Venice’s San Michele cemetery island were unceremoniously dumped on the nearby Sant’ Ariano island. Other places had similar mass repositories.

Today, the bones are usually removed from the grave and transferred to a small metal box and placed in chambers called loculi, niches. Because Italians don’t embalm the dead, insects will have done their work after eight or ten years, so only skeletal remains, which require less space, are left. The loculi rise in stacks  and the cemeteries provide movable ladders for climbing to those in upper rows. Like headstones, the loculi usually display a photo of the departed. The exterior may be embellished with crucifixes or images of the Madonna. Some families add perpetual lights and vases for flowers. Others light candles in red cylindrical holders and bring potted plants.

Even these small loculi do not always fill the need. In the town of Putignano, for example, there is a twelve-year wait with almost eight hundred requests for loculi space outstanding.

And lest this focus on the practicality of dealing with the remains suggests a lack of respect for the dead, let me disavow you of that thought. People spare no expense for funerals, which are open to the community. People celebrate the life of the departed. They light candles; they mass flowers—chrysanthemums are the flowers of the dead; they fill the coffin with the deceased’s favorite possessions—even jewelry.

Remembrance of the Dead

And the whole country honors the dead on November 2, Commemerizaione dei Defunti, Remembrance of the Dead. People travel to cemeteries bringing chrysanthemums and candles; they travel to distant villages to honor ancestors; they participate in secular-religious ceremonies; they eat celebratory meals. It can be like a big family reunion.


I blog on alternate Thursdays at Italian Intrigues.

From Dynasty To Dust

By Beth Green

During the time I’ve lived in China, I’ve been honored to take part in baby-naming ceremonies, birthday parties, festivals, graduations and a wedding. It seems that the only way-point marker on the trail of life that I haven’t seen first-hand here—thank goodness!—is a funeral. When Westerners think of funerals in China, they might imagine the scenes in Amy Tan’s books or movie adaptations. These and other books set in Chinese culture evoke professional mourners, wakes and plenty of rituals.

Incense burning in a temple atop Mt. Emei, Sichuan Province, China.

My students in China, though most of them have a superstitious dislike of talking about death, have shared a little information with me too—I remember one embarrassing (for me) incident well.

 A pre-teenage boy, who had just transferred into my class and who had been giving me plenty of attitude, came to our English lesson one day with a green cloth armband pinned to his sleeve. Trying to get on his good side, I asked him if it was a new fashion trend.

Nope, the armband marked a period of mourning for his great-grandfather—kind of like the Victorian English used to do with their black clothing that subtly, over time, mellowed in hue to grays, violets and finally other colors.

People attending funerals in China wear somber colors, black, blue, or, sometimes white. I have seen gatherings outside restaurants or homes where all of the participants were wearing white robes and white head coverings. At first—being Western—I thought it might be a wedding. My students, when I asked, though told me it was more likely a funeral.

An ancestor hall, where families can pay respects to departed loved ones, in Hong Kong.

In Guizhou Province, which is predominantly rural and which seems to have more people following tradition than in the city where I now live, I’d often see huge wheels of flowers set on the sidewalks. My co-workers explained that wreaths are an important tribute to the deceased and his or her family.

These modern anecdotes aside, I’m probably more knowledgeable about some ancient Chinese funeral customs, seeing that on my travels around China I'm about 200 times more likely to choose to visit a tomb complex or museum than a shopping mall.

One of China’s most famous tourist attractions, is, after all, a big monument to funeral traditions. The Terracotta Warriors, the emperor Qin Shi Huang’s army of life-size pottery soldiers, were buried so they could accompany him to the afterlife. However, it wasn’t only emperors who used have pottery replicas of things buried with them when they died. In museums throughout China visitors today can see pottery wares that were made specifically to represent after-life wealth. My favorite of these is in the Shaanxi Provincial Museum in Xian, near the Terracotta Warriors. It’s a small addendum to a terracotta mansion that some wealthy homeowner wanted take with him. Indeed, it’s a miniature outhouse, economically placed above a pigpen so that nothing is wasted.

An economical outhouse for the afterlife. Shaanxi Provincial Museum, Xi'an, China.

Many visitors to China feel that stepping into the airplane hangar-esque Pit One at the Terracotta Warriors is the epoch of their trip. This and the Ming Dynasty tombs near Beijing are some of the first things tourists usually learn about when they are planning a trip to China. But a tomb complex that not many visitors make it to is the “Chinese Pyramids.”

The foundations of the Western Xia Royal Tombs, near Yinchuan, Ningxia Province, China.

This site is found in Ningxia Province. Years ago, this area was was the cradle of the Western Xia Dynasty (1038-1227 AD). The Xia rulers, who were often involved in battles with the Mongols, created opulent mausoleums for their final resting places. They consisted of palatial gardens; replete with underground chambers, colorful ceramics and woodworking and mighty watchtowers to protect them. The Mongols did eventually besiege and sack the Western Xia capital, and destroyed the mausoleums as well. Now visitors can only see the packed-earth foundations, which rise above the surrounding dry earth in pyramidal mounds. Like many other extinct cultures, the Western Xia are now understood primarily by what they left behind, by what they buried at their funerals.

Death and the Afterlife

By Alli Sinclair

Call me morbid, but I’ve always held a fascination for the way different cultures deal with death. It’s not uncommon for me to take a Sunday stroll with hubby through a cemetery and us spend time imagining what kind of lives the people now buried there used to lead. When I was in Bali, I was fascinated and honored to be included in a burial celebration for a distant relation of a tour guide I met and Varanasi in India had me entranced with the funeral pyres. And every year, while I lived in South America, I liked celebrating Dia de los Santos Difuntos--Day of the Deceased Saints, with my friends and their families.

When I first started writing VESTIGE, I researched Incan weddings and funerals for the historical component of my story. I was lucky enough to meet an anthropologist with a passion for all things Inca and we spent many afternoons discussing the various practices used throughout the Incan empire. His incredible knowledge could easily fill five hefty books, but alas I’m limited to one blog post, so here goes:

According to the Incas, when a person passed from this world, their thirsty spirit travelled the land in search of chicha (Incan fermented maize), and in need of food. The loved one’s dressed in black and grieved, and for five days mourners would be accompanied by musicians and sing songs of sorrow, drink alcohol and eat. The women closest to the deceased would cut off their long tresses or tear out their eyelashes as a sign of grief.

People would gather at the deceased’s most favorite place or where his or her greatest success had been achieved, and while there, the loved ones could recount significant events and fond memories.

When the commoner’s were buried, they would be accompanied by their tools of trade and perhaps some food or chicha, while the Lords would be dressed in their finery and buried with their wealth. Occasionally their wives and servants accompanied them.

The funeral for a kuraka, a regional ruler entailed the mummified body placed in a pucullo, a burial chamber, along with various goods to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. The community would band together and offer llama sacrifices, textiles, cuy (guinea pig), and ceramics at the burial site.

The death of a royal was celebrated in much the same way as a commoner, but on a grander scale. Once the ruler died, his passing would be kept secret until a successor was named. The ruler would be embalmed and placed in Qorikancha Temple Qorikancha Temple. Of course everything was on a grander scale, including the sacrifices. Unfortunately, the Incas not only sacrificed llamas when their ruler died, but 1,000 children were sacrificed in pairs at mountain shrines throughout the region.

The mourning period for a ruler spread across ten days and a further couple of weeks were spent traveling to the ruler’s significant sites—battle victories, agricultural fields, and monuments—where people would speak of the emperor’s greatest acts and victories.

Royal mummies were dressed in a fine tunic and jewelry then wrapped in six layers of precious textiles woven with vicuña fur and feathers, shells, and threads of gold. A piece of silver or coca leaf was placed in his mouth and the emperor’s grave contained several changes of clothing, food, and weapons for the afterlife.

A group of relatives, known as panaqa, were charged with the care of the deceased emperor and they ensured the mummy was kept in food and water. Often, the mummy would be consulted in difficult matters and the people carried on as if the mummies were still living. They even went so far as to gather mummies together for celebrations.

Traveling through the regions that were once part of the Incan Empire, it’s easy to spot pucullos of both the commoners and royalty. Which type of pucullos people were buried in depended greatly on where the deceased person lived.

In the eastern quarter of the empire, in Antisuyu, the people in this rain forest buried their dead in hollowed out trees. The northern quarter, Chinchaysuysu, people held open-air burials where the mummified remains were left out in the elements for five days before being placed in the pucullo.

In the southern quarter of the empire, in Collasuyu, the people were placed in pucullos away from the towns of the living. The cluster of pucullos were commonly known as the “village of the dead.” And in Cuntisuyu, the south western corner of the Incan Empire, the people utilized the dry, mountain environment and placed their dead in natural nooks and crannies.

Some pucullos were made from the traditional method of fitting stones together without mortar (Cuzco is famous for this work), while other regions used adobe bricks. Along the coast, pucullos had numerous chambers and in the mountains, some pucullos towered over 30 feet in height.

I could go on, but I’ll stop here for now. Death, like life, has many facets and through exploring the different belief systems of cultures from around the world, we can learn so much.

How about you? Have you ever experienced or read about a burial from a culture you find fascinating?

Iran's Misty Mountains

Heidi is still traveling in Iran, and her plans this week include a trip to Gilan Province, where the green mountains above the Caspian Sea are draped in mist:

Off The Beaten Track: Kwei Quartey’s Murder in Paradise

Kwei Quartey was born in Ghana and raised by an African-American mother and a Ghanaian father, both of whom were university lecturers. Even though his professional writing career began after he became a physician, his desire to be a writer began at the early age of eight. Kwei Quartey’s debut novel, WIFE OF THE GODS, was released by Random House Publishers in July 2009. CHILDREN OF THE STREET is his second work (2011), and his third, MURDER AT CAPE THREE POINTS, which features Ghana’s new oil industry as a backdrop, comes out mid-2013. Kwei Quartey now lives in Pasadena, California. He writes early in the morning before setting out to work at HealthCare Partners, where he runs a wound care clinic. 

Forty miles off the coast of Ghana in the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf of Guinea is a drilling rig belonging to Malgam Oil, a multinational petroleum company that has been operating in Ghana’s territorial waters for 18 months. Large offshore reserves were discovered there in 2007, and production began 40 months later in 2010.

A semi-submersible rig used by Malgam Oil

Malgam’s oil rig is protected by the Ghana Navy Service (GNS), which often finds itself in conflict with Ghanaian fishermen who venture far out to sea to catch fish with large nets that can get snagged on oil drilling installations. Fishing canoes are not allowed to approach the rig within a 500-meter radius.

Four months ago, a fisherman’s 12-foot-long canoe breached that boundary, and the rig’s oil installation manager alerted the GNS. A man and woman occupied the vessel, but they weren’t paddling it. There was good reason for that: they were dead. Two corpses crumpled together in the floor of the canoe, both shot in the head at close range.

A shocking turn of events. Fictional, as it turns out. Although there really is an oil rig 40 miles off Ghana’s coast, it belongs to Tullow, not the imaginary “Malgam,” and the tale of the corpse-containing canoe is from the opening scene of my upcoming novel, Murder at Cape Three Points.

However, there’s nothing fictional about the geographic location of Cape Three Points in the Western Region of Ghana. In 2011 when I chose to include its name in the title of my novel, I hadn’t yet visited the spot. When I finally made it there in March 2012, I discovered I had unknowingly selected an extraordinarily lovely site to set a murder. Sometimes called the “land nearest nowhere,” because it is the closest land to a central point on the globe that is zero latitude, longitude and altitude, its name derives from three peninsulas that jut parallel to each other into the Atlantic.

The small fishing village of Cape Three Points lies on the center peninsula. 

Shoreline at the Cape Three Points Village, where fishing is the main livelihood

I went up into the working lighthouse that affords magnificent views over the bay.

Cape Three Points lighthouse, one of Ghana's five lighthouses

View of the bay from the lighthouse, with the third peninsula in the background

Walking some distance from the lighthouse, I came to stand at the edge of a cliff, at the bottom of which is a majestic spectacle of sight and sound. The waves crashing against the rocks send up a gossamer spray that stays suspended in the air for a few seconds before dissipating.

I wouldn't go any closer to the edge if I were you.

It's a spectacular show of sight and sound.

My murder plot mind always at work, I couldn’t help thinking about how perfectly awful it would be for someone to slip, fall and be dashed against those cruel rocks. Accidentally, of course.

Both a beautiful and treacherous landscape

Indeed, on seeing the young man pictured above fishing off the craggy cliffs, I did think about such a scenario for my plot, but I decided not to fiddle with what I already had – a corpse-carrying canoe adrift in the Atlantic Ocean.

How could this canoe with its dead bodies have gotten so far out to sea? It was probably towed by another canoe under paddle, wind or motor power. Many are surprised that fishermen go out as far as forty to fifty miles from the shore to catch fish, but they do. Ghana now faces a crisis of rapidly dwindling fish populations. Fishermen claim that the oil industry is making the situation even worse, which the petroleum folks deny. Hence the animosity between the two groups.

There are lots of places along the lovely coast of Ghana’s Western Region where you could quietly launch a canoe at night with a couple of dead bodies, like Ezile Bay, an almost achingly lovely location a few kilometers from Cape Three Points village.

This is a scene right out my novel, Murder At Cape Three Points

I recommend you select a less moonlit night for your nefarious deed, however.

Ezile Bay Village is a small and delightful resort owned by French couple Olivier and Danielle Funfschilling.

Dawn at Ezile Bay

Mid-morning low tide at Ezile Bay

Hilltop view of Ezile Bay with the village of Akwidaa in the background

Akwidaa fishermen coming home

There are many sinister countryside settings in the mystery-writing tradition – think of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Adventure of the Speckled Band, which is said to have been inspired by a story recounted in 1891 by a captain who had been dispatched to West Africa. But there’s also something chilling about murder in beautiful places, where one doesn’t expect to come across heinous crimes.

In Murder at Cape Three Points, there is another uncomfortable juxtaposition: wild beauty against the threat of an oil spill that could mar the incomparable setting like the slash of a knife across the face of a beautiful woman. Such a catastrophe could jeopardize the wildlife that exists at Cape Three Points and points offshore, including dolphins and whales. In an environment as stunning as this, that would be like murder in paradise.

Cape Three Points Village