Fatalist Philatelist - Fernanado de Noronha Revisited (Part 2)
I am old enough to remember a time when traveling carried with it the obligation of sending postcards to friends and family back home. For those that don’t know, a postcard is a piece of cardstock, usually 4x6” or perhaps 5x7” in size, almost always with an image on one side, and on the other, a place to write a blurb, a mailing address, and spot to stick a postage stamp (do I have to explain what a postage stamp is?). It was the pre-21st century equivalent of “pics or it didn’t happen.”
Assembling the necessary materials to send a postcard from Fernando de Noronha was deliciously, hilariously difficult. Almost no one sold postcards. The only ones I found were in the national park’s gift shops. And of course, the national park gift shops didn’t sell stamps, so that was yet another quest. As in South Africa, the only place to buy stamps was at the post office (never take for granted that grocery stores and other locations in the U.S. sell stamps).
There was only one very poorly marked post office on the island. It was on a very steep cobbled street, and the nice lady who greeted me at the counter knew exactly what this gangly white guy was there for. She assumed I was European, so I had to explain that I wanted to mail postcards to the U.S. (sorry European reader(s)!). They had no stamps denominated in the correct amount for sending postcards to the U.S., so I had to buy stamps in two different denominations, twice as many of one as the other, for a total of three stamps per postcard to cover the postage (I’m still not 100% sure I understood her correctly).
It had taken me two days to gather the cards and stamps, and I had only one more chance to get anything in the mail before we departed the island. Back on the boat, I hastily composed some blurbs, scrawled some addresses, and affixed stamps in triplicate, then stuffed them in a plastic bag so that the spray from taking the dinghy ashore wouldn’t make the ink bleed.
When I walked into the post office on February 8, 2024, I had to wait a bit to find someone to give the postcards to. A gentleman finally helped me, and after a split second of confusion, he inspected my postcards and confirmed that they were ready to be sent.
As of five weeks and counting, I still have no comfirmation that the postcards ever made it out of that mailroom. Sure, I could have used a half a dozen different digital services to accomplish the same thing, but where would the fun be in that?