Mikindani

Mikindani… not a kiswahili phrase for the blog post heading this time, but simply the name of the village where we are staying right now. I like the African sound of it!

We’re back in civilization now. Read as: we’ve got a room with a private bathroom and toilet next to it, complete with running fresh water and electricity (the lighting even consists of halogen lamps!). However, every upside comes with a drawback here: for a start, the electricity falls out every 30 minutes – not only in our hotel but also in the whole village. The manager’s explanation: “no wonder, the current comes all the way from Mtwara! [editor’s note: 50km down the road]”. You gotta give it to him, Mtwara’s power plant is brand new and still test running, as far as I understood. Another disadvantage: the hotel is located along a road. About every half an hour or so, a light (but heavily shaking) lorry drives by, and of course the hotel doesn’t have any windows (I mean, there are windows, but there’s no glass in there – and why should there be anyway. An insect screen and a shelter in front will do as far as temperature and rain are concerned). Coming from a completely deserted part of the area, that’s a hell of a lot of noise. Oh, and there’s a freaking rooster nearby…

Diving at 30m in coral canyons; Mikindani, Tanzania.

The diving, too, has its ups and downs. Let me start with the good part: the first dive we’ve done here was without a doubt the single most beautiful, spectacular dive ever to me! Vertical coral reef walls, forming intertwining canyons. Lapis lazuli water. Walhalla for tiny, hidden but beautiful, precious and special algae between the corals, a Giant pufferfish, ditto mantis shrimp and lion fish. In short, everything we needed except for Whale sharks. But the big downside of it all: our PADI dive leader. She turned out to be downright incompetent, inexperienced and rude. We’d hoped to be diving with the dive centre’s owner, a marine biologist, but he was on a leave. Especially her briefing was worthless – hardly mentioning any details and yelling at us afterwards about misunderstandings…

Anyway, as I’m writing this, I’m trying to hide my feelings about her. It looks like it’ll be only her and me for the next couple of days. Heroen is down by a combination of fever, vomiting, and all the other symptoms well known by tourists in the tropics. I just hope it doesn’t get as bad as last time in Oman, when I had to rush my colleague to the local “hospital”…

Scorpion hidden between the sheets of the dried algae; Mikindani, Tanzania.

Yesterday evening, I tried to focus on something different by refreshing all the press-dried algae we’d collected so far; in fact a boring job where little or no brain activity is required. It turned out not to be as relaxing as I thought: while turning one of the pages, I found… a scorpion waiting with his stinger raised. A small scorpion, but rumour has it that the smallest are the greatest [editor’s note: greatest killers] in the tropics. I immediately ran away… to fetch my camera and take a couple of nice close-ups. I can’t help it; small scorpions don’t have the particular evil looks of their bigger sisters, from which I probably would have run away fearing for my life. Lesson learnt: even refreshing dried algae is a dangerous job. Or: I should demand higher wages.

In the meantime, the sun has reappeared after days of overcast skies and rain… Looks promising for our next dives!

Pauly’s finches

Pauly's finches

There are downsides to this place… One of them being the fact that the intense heat causes isolated thunderstorms nearly every day, which isn’t a big deal as long as these occur at night. But lately, we’ve had to wait for a little less rain and wind during the day to go out diving. We now have some time to edit our field notes, or just hang around and stare in the distance. For instance, it occurred to me that there are two small finch-like bird species here; let’s call them the local Robin and Bluethroat. The Robin is even smaller than the Bluethroat, but otherwise their morphology appears to be the same. Since they always come out in pairs, I suspect the Bluethoat is sexually isomorphic, while probably the female Robin is brown. Both species seem to forage on the same resources; moreover, they do so little more than a couple of meters away from each other. Two species in the same niche: did sympatrical speciation occur?? If I would have visited this place roughly 160 years ago, I would have taken my notebook and scribbled, “I think… ”, followed by an evolutionary tree. I would have beaten Darwin and my PhD would be in the pocket by now

Another downside: the more western visitors come here to show off their wealth (or just come here, the rest is self-evident), the more theft becomes a daily phenomenon, and “security” becomes an issue. The solution of the firm searching for natural gas wells for the nearby power plant consists of hiring multinational security subcontractors. Their employees are all former marines who served at least once in Afghanistan and once in Iraq. They came around in our lodge for a couple of drinks last night… let me just describe them by saying they are “weird”.

The owners of our lodge took a different approach to protection: they hired two Masai warriors. They are much taller than all the local people, and they look very strong and athletic. With their impeccable brightly coloured clothes and their ever-focused eyes, they appear incredibly charismatic.

Our hosts think they are not prone to corruption because they have no affairs with local people (and are allegedly the most reliable people on earth anyway), while at the same time they make a far les threatening, colonial impression compared to the white mercenaries. Unfortunately, we can’t talk to the Masai, as they do not speak a single word of French or English, and we don’t speak Swahili.

Once an evolutionary biologist, always an evolutionary biologist, so we started wondering why Masai are so tall. An evolutionary advantage to look out above the savannah grass, combined with reproductive isolation, was our guess. The hostess, however, saw it differently: “It’s because of their nutrition! We eat only a lot of fruit and batatas, which is hard to digest, so we stay little. They, and Tutsi people, eat mostly meat and continue to drink milk up to the age of 15, just like Dutch people, you see!”.

My colleague Heroen wading up the mangrove channel. Where's the crocodile??

Contrary to what these rainy-day-philosophic-chats might suggest, we do work out here . Yesterday evening, we went out diving during dusk; right in front of our lodge, steeply down to 30m. Floating weightlessly around in half darkness, suddenly encountering gigantic fan corals, looking for special algae, staying focused on compass, clock and air gauges for an hour, closely watching the currents, nothing compares to it. Before that, we went out snorkelling and wandering through the nearby mangrove forest, which was like sauna: steaming hot, a very high humidity, the smell of coal fires in nearby villages, and the herbal scent of the trees. We waded up against the current in the main mangrove channel while searching head under water for algae, and floated all the way back through the rapids. When we arrived back at the lodge, the hostess had prepared coconuts to take a rest from the field work. This gotta be The Coolest Job on earth!  The day before that, we wandered 12km² of tidal reef flat for 3,5 hours looking for algal species hidden in tidal pools. So far, we collected 250 specimens, each preserved in three different ways. We’ve been collecting so many algae, we are risking to run short of supplies already.

Tomorrow, we head off to a lodge equipped with electricity, so maybe my next post will be from a computer instead of mobile phone.

See you!

“arrivals”

Baggage claim

Today, we officially left “civilization” behind us. My colleague Heroen remarked that nothing has changed in the landscape in 6 years, except for the mobile network antennas (as a shortcut to modern times – there never was a fixed telephone line). But let me start from the beginning. The flight towards Mtwara was on time according to Tanzanian norms (i.e., delayed by 45 minutes). The towering thunder clouds somewhat worried me, but the coastline was cloud-free and the view on the thunderstorm few kilometres inland was spectacular. The view on the deep-blue sea and brightly coloured coral islands also provided sufficient entertainment. I thought the landing was exceptionally rough, but while taxiing the runway back to the “terminal”, it became clear why: the tarmac looked decades old, and fixed with concrete a thousand times over. And about this “terminal”: it was nothing more than a wooden structure measuring 20m by 5m with a corrugated iron roof. The 40 passengers entered a tiny 5 by 5 room with an “arrivals” label above the doorway. Someone was sitting at a kitchen table, slowly scribbling names and addresses from everyone’s passport on a notepad. Right next to the “arrivals” doorway, there was an open window with a similar kitchen table in front, and a “baggage claim” label above. Shortly after, a noisy tractor came pulling the baggage train right in front of the window, and someone handed all the bags through the window onto the table, and that was it. We negotiated for a cab to take us to Mtwara city (featuring many huts, as opposed to a village), to buy old newspapers to dry the collected seaweeds. Ethanol, formalin, aftersun lotion and three more items we desperately needed were nowhere available. The driver then filled his tank, bought some engine oil and a second-hand spare tire to head off on the long dirt road to Msimbati.

The dirt road from Mtwara airport to Ruvula

You couldn’t think of a more African road. Winding through densely vegetated areas with acacias, mango trees, palm trees, baobabs, banana trees and mangrove forests, with little villages dispersed between the trees, and brightly clothed women and children along the road, carrying water buckets on their heads. Scenes that are very familiar from TV, but strange to see in real life. Twice, we had to demand the driver to drive more carefully along the narrow dirt roads through the densely populated villages, the second time threatening we wouldn’t pay if he didn’t slow down from 100 to 50 in the villages (we’d actually read the speed from our GPS, his excuse being the broken speed indicator). He once had to stop to tie his door to he rear one and the broken windscreen using a couple of ropes, as his door kept falling open and threatened to break off. I kid you not!

Our “lodge” at the beach, not unlike the surrounding villages in the wider area, consists of huts made from loam with straw roofs, without electricity or running water. We can shower and have a toilet in a separate, public hut, using seawater. But our sleeping hut does feature beds equipped with insect nets (not only against mosquitoes – there are a lot of other bugs you don’t want crawling around in your bed), and it looks idyllic in the light of the kerosene lamps at night. So does the whole setting under palm trees right at the beach. For those of you who like Google Earth, our hut is at S10.3054, E40.39515. We were welcomed very friendly by our hostess, the Congolese wife of the Belgian owner (who currently is back in Belgium to avoid the hottest season) and their daughter, and were immediately served one of their infamously delicious fish dishes (which we were told would be the only food for the next 5 days, albeit in different forms) on the beach. I won’t be able to post every day, because I only have my mobile phone to type messages (fortunately we do have coverage!), and besides the fact that it’s a little awkward, I need to save some battery because we cannot load our batteries here. But hakuna matata as you all know and see you later!

Day 3

By far the toughest day so far! This morning we got up at 6.30, dragged our complete field lab equipment to the dive centre, loaded all of it on a boat and we were dropped off on Mbudya, a nearby island located in a marine protected area, one of the few in this country. We wandered for two hours on the rocky tidal reef flat around low water, and collected a hell of a lot of seaweeds under the burning sun (although this time we did it in a fully closed wetsuit – one learns quickly). We sorted it all out for preservation under an idyllic beach shelter for 1,5h, noting all our observations. The dive centre boat came to pick us back up at noon. By then we’d lost a few litres by sweating, we had no time for lunch, but when you’re on a speedboat gliding over smooth azure water, halt somewhere in the blue, put on your diving equipment, plunge into the water and make a free fall to 30m, you couldn’t think of a cooler job anywhere in the world. We “landed” on a huge reef, table corals as far as you could look, and it appeared unreal. We swam past the reef, and entered a beautiful “garden” of seaweeds of all kinds, in every shape and colour. It hadn’t been the first time for the dive instructor to take biologists out in the reserve on request, and he knew exactly what we were looking for…

Afterwards, we sorted everything out in open air under shelter at the dive centre. We’d finished by 5pm, but we felt tired to death. Mostly the pain from our sunburns from yesterday was unbearable, especially when we had to take or diving gear on or off and had to carry it all – it seemed like being tortured jointly by the CIA and KGB. I have honestly never in my life been so badly burned on my back, arms and legs… and all that because of twenty minutes exposure to a cloud-shrouded sun on our first diving day. I had little or no sleep last night, being waked up by the pain every time I’d fallen asleep and tried to turn over, with no relief from the litres and litres of aftersun lotion I’d applied. Being a marine biologist on field trip is by far the coolest job on earth, but also the single most painful (it reminded me of the time I’d got bitten by a Moray eel in Oman, only now I had the same pain all over my body instead of my hand).

Tomorrow we pack everything here and leave for Mtwara, first to Ruvula “Sea Safari Lodge”. I don’t know if there will be mobile coverage, so don’t panic if I’m not able to post on the blog!

Take care!

Day 2

I’ll start by presenting our current lodge and our dive centre today:

http://www.jangwani.org/hotel/home.asp

and http://www.hotelwhitesands.com/Entertainment.html

And now let me continue from where I stopped yesterday. We crashed in bed around 9.30pm, terribly tired by the travelling. The room was hot and little air blows through the insect nets, but I was way too tired to notice. We got up at 7.30 this morning, so don’t think we’re playing tourist around here! We had some issues finding diving tanks and an apt boat. We’d hoped to take tanks from the dive centre and go off alone on a fisherman’s boat, but in the end it turned out to be cheaper to just join in with the dive centre, and a lot less trouble. They understand what we want and allowed us to sample seaweeds on the reef. They even agreed to drop us separately on an island tomorrow and to come and pick us up for a dive in the afternoon.

So today we had our first dive! Though the bottom was visible from the surface, we dropped 30m along the reef, then coming back up slowly to the reef flat at 15m. The water was a comfortable 27°C, and the dive was very rewarding considering I already found an algal species which may be new to science. Beautiful coral too! I gotta say we encountered far less fish than you’d expect on a reef like that, and there was a lot of soft coral too instead of reef-building coral. We suspect it was due to the combination of sewage discharge from the nearby capital and blast fishing which, although illegal, is still practiced in the wider area… we definitely heard blasts under water!

The dive went without any issues, something we can’t say from the boat ride to and from the dive. The skies were overcast this morning when we embarked, but gradually the sun came out during our boat ride, and the high clouds could not prevent us from getting sun-burnt like lobsters. Lesson to learn: white guys ALWAYS need sunscreen in Africa, even on an overcast day…

During the afternoon we sorted out and preserved our algal collection, readily 40 species from the one single dive. That’s promising! Tomorrow is our last day here before heading off south. Hakuna matata!

Karubi

Africa! It’s even more typical as I thought it would be. We’ve flown here in Boeings that were clearly bought second-hand from an American airline and were a bit out-of-date on the inside, but all in all we’ve had steady flights. Still, 6 take-offs and landings each separated by 1,5 to 7 hours, it’s more than I wanted. We were very relieved to find all our baggage perfectly transferred with us to Dar-Es-Salaam. Immediately upon exiting the airport, several cab drivers tried to convince us to go with them – we chose one who finally settled on our terms and conditions. Next thing we knew, we were taking part in a Need-For-Seed-style drive to the nearby coastal town of Kunduchi, on a road with more craters than the moon, with an estimated 5 lanes on each side (estimated because of the lack of marks), switching from left (the normal side) to right more efficiently than shown in an Austrian giant slalom championship, accompanied by a loud feel-good hakuna matata tune from the speakers in the Toyota which felt as if it was constantly running off its wheels, with colourful fruit sellers along the road, biking along palm trees with huge piles tied on the rear of their bikes – in short: AFRICA!

We selected the cheapest beach hotel, which provided very comfortable rooms. Apparently, we were only one of the very few non-African tourists staying in the hotel. The joy of life, that’s what I find most remarkable about Tanzanians on my first day here. During an evening stroll on the beach, we encountered any form of entertainment engaged in by local people only, from tug of war games to hip-hop contests. We also enjoyed a delicious meal of chicken with coconut sauce and rice on the beach at dusk, with still a lovely 25-30°C and a lovely breeze.

We found someone willing to take us out diving on a nearby island, but we’ll have to see tomorrow if he really lives up to his promise – that’s kind of doubtful here, but let’s hope we can already start diving tomorrow. I’ve already taken loads of pictures and movie clips, but I’m unable to upload many due to lack of broadband connection here, and I’m not eager to wait a for a long time at this computer… It’s already dark, and since the computer desk is located in open air, I am swarmed by (malaria) mosquitos :-p  Anyway, I’ll do my best to send you some!