The Wandering Scot

Last week I was on Palau, where I visited a Yapese quarry site. Today I’m 280 miles away on Yap itself, inspecting the resulting money hoards.

There are hundred of surviving “coins”, ranging from 2′ to 8′ across. Some are held communally and displayed in village Money Banks. Some are held by families and displayed in front of houses.

Among the surviving stones, a very few seem to be shiny marble-like rock and maybe that’s how the whole craze started. But many seem to be rather dull gray, even under the weathered surface.

The true history of the stone money is hard to figure out. They seem to have originated about 500 years ago as rare prestige items, obtained with great effort and great risk from across an ocean voyage. As with many status items, there seems to have been a subsequent social one-upmanship pressure to obtain more, bigger, and better ones.

Presumably the prestige came from the great effort of having quarried and fetched them all the way from Palau. So when David O’Keefe started mass production and importing in the late 19th c, the prestige evaporated and the bottom dropped out of the market.  I suspect many of the larger surviving coins are from the O’Keefe phase, but it’s hard to tell.

P.S.  Since I had been a good and diligent tourist, my hotel rewarded me with a Stone Money Cookie with my lunchtime coffee.  🙂

I’m on a short trip to Cap-Haitien, Haiti.

Cap-Haitien is in the North of Haiti, well away from the troubles in Port-au-Prince. It is tolerably safe and also has some of the most interesting historical sights in Haiti, from the time of the Haitian Revolution, when the slaves overthrew the French and established a free black state.

The #1 target on my list was Citadelle Laferrière, which was built by King Henri I (née General Henri Christophe) around 1820 to deter a French return. It’s seriously impressive, perched on top of a mountain, with giant walls, and with more that enough cannon to deter any sane general.

Nearby are the grand ruins of Henri’s palace complex of San Souci. “The greatest palace in the Caribbean.” Designed to impress haughty Europeans.

I also visited a key revolutionary site at Bois Caiman, where supposedly the first revolutionaries bound themselves in a voodoo ceremony in 1791.  They swore to kill all the French, naturally. There’s nothing left of the original site, but the government have constructed two modern ersatz voodoo sites. Not actually for tourists, but rather to highlight to locals what is seen as a key national-origin story.  (I stumbled and grazed my hand on the way up to the sacred voodoo cave, but I mostly managed not to drip any blood inside. I’m sure nothing bad will happen.)

Yes, it’s true, after years of delays the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza is finally open!

They do indeed have many Wonderful Things.  They have almost all the items from Tutankhamun’s Tomb.  All well displayed, in a spacious gallery.  And they have lots and lots of other Good Stuff spread across 12 galleries.

They also have lots of eager visitors, both locals and tourists.  I was the third person into the galleries yesterday and went straight to the Tutankhamun Gallery, and I still found myself in a scrum of photographers at Tutankhamun’s Mask.  It was actually much quieter 10 minutes later, when the over-eager early bird fervor had died down!

P.S. Yes Tutankhamun’s inner coffin really is 240 lbs of solid gold.  Wow.