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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (89535)	4/27/2012 3:40:04 AM
From: average joe	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 219648

A place to call home and retire. A haven in the Seychelles: Brendon Grimshaw bought his tropical island for £10,000 on a whim National Post Staff, National Post Thursday, Apr. 26, 2012 Brendon Grimshaw was a 49-year-old newspaper editor when he did what others do only in their dreams: he bought a deserted island in the Indian Ocean that came complete with rumours of buried pirate treasure. Fifty years later, he owns Moyenne Island still, having transformed it from a £10,000 “hunk of waterless bush,” into a haven for birds and tortoises that reportedly drew offers of $50-million or more before it was declared a national park in 2008. The story begins in 1962, as the Yorkshire native was enjoying the second-last day of a month-long visit to the Seychelles Islands, when a boy passing in the street asked whether he wanted to buy an island. Brendon Grimshaw, owner of Moyenne Island in the Seychelles. agrainofsandthefilm.com “I wanted to buy an island. I can’t tell you why,” he told Radio New Zealand in an interview. “I never had any feeling to buy … a parcel of land on the bigger islands.” His previous efforts to buy one of the archipelago’s hundreds of islands had met with no success when the random suggestion was made. After a quick visit — “as soon as I set foot on the island, I knew immediately” — and a friendly meal with the owners, a deal was struck at four minutes before midnight. “I said to myself ‘My God, what have you done?’ ” he told Radio New Zealand. It took until 1973 before he was able to move to Moyenne Island full time, becoming one of the few people to ever live on the island. He puts the number of his predecessors at three, and there is no reason to wonder why there were so few. In interviews he has described the island as impenetrable bush with few signs of fauna. To get from one side to the other required swimming around or boating. The first challenge, then, was to cut a path through the undergrowth so he could see exactly what the island had to offer and what needed to be done. Since then, and with the help of a local man he hired to help him, they planted 16,000 trees, attracted thousands of birds and fostered a thriving community of giant tortoises, none of which were around when he first bought the island. A tortoise on Moyenne Island in the Seychelles. agrainofsandthefilm.com He greets visiting tourists, the fees from whom pay for the island’s upkeep, barefoot on the beach. They are welcome, though developers who would cater to the area’s tourist boom are not. Moyenne Island and the north coast of Mah, Seychelles Wikimedia Commons “I’m sure there are people who would like to see this island taken over by one of the multi-millionaires,” Mr. Grimshaw told the Financial Times. His stance has made him a darling of conservationists and he is the subject of a documentary [external] A Grain of Sand, that pushed to have the island declared a national park of the Seychelles. That goal was achieved in 2008 and Mr. Grimshaw continues to tend to his island and his giant tortoises. “The babies are kept in my bedroom,” he told the Financial Times in 2008. “If you let them go, you’ll never see them again.” As for the rumoured buried treasure, he hasn’t found any yet. National Post [iframe height=465 src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/9166589" frameBorder=0 width=620][/iframe] Posted in: News Tags: Brendon Grimshaw, Moyenne Island nationalpost.com