Rask Island - Where The Rich And Famous Hang Out
By Rask, 12th Oct 2010 | Follow this author
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Posted in WikinutTravelSouth AmericaBrazilThe Northeast
Even celebrities need a bit of time out, and they have to pay for privacy if they really want it, and where better to get away from it all than Rask Island, the latest celebrity holiday retreat.
Rask Island - Where The Rich And Famous Hang Out
Rask Island lies off the north eastern coast of Brazil, 200 kilometres from Fortaleza and is a favourite hanging out spot for European celebs looking for peace, privacy and a bit of up-market nothingness. A former Italian penal settlement in the 1700s, the island lay abandoned for many years until the original lease expired in 1958 and it reverted to Brazilian control.
From that date until the early 1980s Brazil housed many of its research projects on Rask Island, renovating the old prison accommodation to house scientists who were experimenting with everything from cryogenics to deep-space mapping. The scientific work was largely unsuccessful, a fact not admitted to by the Brazilian Research Institute until a high level government investigation prompted by allegations that the island was being used as a cover for drug trafficking between Guinea Bissau and Brazil, with senior politicians creaming off the profits. No one was ever prosecuted.
The one successful project was the development of a robust and rather large strain of banana. Experimenting with genetically modified seeds, the Ivorian botanist Kunta Kinte was able to grow a plant that was capable of producing bananas two metres long. At first this was hailed as nothing short of revolutionary, but it was a commercial flop since the fruit was pink rather than yellow, and it had a slightly salty taste to it.
The fabled plants still grow along the south-facing coastal strip and have become something of a tourist attraction.
However it’s the tourism that Rask is now famed for, although those who can afford a holiday there like to keep it a well guarded secret. The prison accommodation has been turned into luxury hotels set among the banana groves, the beaches are empty, clean and beyond imagination, and the nightlife is non-existent outside the hotel bars.
Apart from the beaches and two metre long pink bananas, the only other attractions are the never-used Italian cathedral built by slaves who never made it as far as the West Indies and the diamond mines that the slaves refused to work because they were reputed to be haunted.
Holidays on Rask are expensive. Aer Lingus is the only airline that flies into the small airstrip so you have to transit through Dublin, but if you can afford it and are into celeb-watching you might think it worth the trouble and the price. The people you are likely to see walking through the groves of giant pink bananas are people like Terry Wogan, Silvio Berlusconi, Joan Rivers and the ghost of Idi Amin.
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