St Helena: a seductively strange holiday

Scheduled flights are now landing at St Helena's new airport, says Chris Carter. But getting to the island is still a wild ride.

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St Helena: wind-buffeted, yet welcoming

"You have written a new will, haven't you?" a fellow passenger and amateur pilot asked Julia Buckley on a flight to St Helena. "We were somewhere over the Atlantic," Buckley recounts in The Independent, "the Namibian coast nipping at our heels." The tiny British island territory sits in the middle of the South Atlantic, where it is often buffeted by gale-force winds. Until recently the only way to get there was via a five to six-day boat crossing from Cape Town in South Africa. Then in 2015 the island's new airport opened five years late and at a cost of £285m, funded by the British taxpayer. There was just one small problem: owing to severe winds, planes weren't able to land.

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Chris Carter
Wealth Editor, MoneyWeek

Chris Carter spent three glorious years reading English literature on the beautiful Welsh coast at Aberystwyth University. Graduating in 2005, he left for the University of York to specialise in Renaissance literature for his MA, before returning to his native Twickenham, in southwest London. He joined a Richmond-based recruitment company, where he worked with several clients, including the Queen’s bank, Coutts, as well as the super luxury, Dorchester-owned Coworth Park country house hotel, near Ascot in Berkshire.

Then, in 2011, Chris joined MoneyWeek. Initially working as part of the website production team, Chris soon rose to the lofty heights of wealth editor, overseeing MoneyWeek’s Spending It lifestyle section. Chris travels the globe in pursuit of his work, soaking up the local culture and sampling the very finest in cuisine, hotels and resorts for the magazine’s discerning readership. He also enjoys writing his fortnightly page on collectables, delving into the fascinating world of auctions and art, classic cars, coins, watches, wine and whisky investing.

You can follow Chris on Instagram.