Under the Sea

I managed to last until midnight before going to sleep, which was good work. Having to get up at 7:30am was a bit of a struggle thanks to not going to bed until “late”, but at least breakfast was nice!

At 8:45 Gemma, Mel, Tracy, and I had booked to go snorkelling and when we arrived at reception we saw a few familiar faces: most of our tour group! I’m not quite sure exactly what I was expecting, but having to wade out to the boat, a semi antique dhow (a kind of local sailing boat) wasn’t it! At least it had an engine as well as the sail to speed things up.

We had a “half hour” boat ride to the island around which we would be snorkelling: Mnemba island, which is a private island so we couldn’t actually go ashore. Turns out that half hour was African time, meaning more like an hour and a half, but it was a nice enough trip, with some “adventurous” waves. The side of the boat I was sitting on was frequently soaked like some sort of Alton Towers ride, and Gemma had her phone out for the first, and probably biggest soaking, which as it turns out gave her phone a bit of a charging issue. The run of bad luck for our group had begun!

I’m on a boat! Got photobombed by that other boat though

Mnemba island in all its $1,500 a night per person glory

The snorkelling equipment was of mixed quality to say the least: my snorkel had no valve and someone had bitten off the little lumps in the mouthpiece, plus my mask had a twist in the strap and leaked a little if it wasn’t aggressively tight (it wasn’t too bad though thankfully). Some other people’s looked much more professional. Oh well.

The snorkelling was decent, but nothing spectacular. If I hadn’t been in other places I may well have been more impressed, after all I saw a million zebra fish, some angelfish, parrotfish, a Dory (god knows what it’s actually called), some starfish, a pipefish, a gazillion sea urchins, and a few other sundry fish. The pipefish was probably my favourite, and as we were discussing which fish we’d like to see I had mentioned it, so that was nice. A shame the coral was all bleached, but oh well.

On the plus side I escaped from snorkelling without (much) sunburn! A tiny patch on my neck, and a slight pinkening of my upper arms is all, a very successful day. I did cheat to achieve this by wearing my tshirt when swimming (hence why I picked a sports one that is quick drying), but I still count it as a win. Others weren’t so lucky. Gemma randomly decided that legs don’t burn so didn’t put cream on hers (they do burn it turns out), Andy had applied sun cream when wearing his tshirt and forgot to do his torso afterwards (you still need to do it) and Suzanne just had a mare and burnt a lot despite creaming up (maybe didn’t reapply after swimming?). That’s the second bit of bad luck.

After 90 minutes of snorkelling etc (including a man from our crew selling beers, first to the passengers from our boat, then leaping into the sea with his cool box and going to another boat to ply his wares, only reappearing an hour later at the beach), we went to a nearby beach where someone had been cooking our lunch (included in the price). It was pretty basic, tuna, rice, and some sauce, but the fish was good and they certainly had enough! I got 9 huge bones in 2 small bits of fish though.

Me and a wild photogenic boat!

Afterwards there was a little time to wander the beach. There wasn’t so much to see, though I DID see the animal that lives in a Hermit Crab shell before the crab takes over: whatever it is it just sticks out a tentacle and laboriously drags itself along the beach. 

After it was time to get back in the boat, and here the water was mid chest height. Many people were holding bags on their heads like the locals (but cheating by using their arms to stabilise it), and we ended up queueing in the sea to get back on the boat, leading to my favourite quote of the holiday, by Mel: “it’s not very often we line up in the water huh?”. No, it is indeed not very often. I have no idea why, but this was hilarious at the time, maybe because of how obvious the statement is? At any rate everyone laughed.

Not for long though: whilst we were unusually queueing in the water we were being buffeted by waves. One knocked Gwen off balance, and she stumbled into a rock. On the side of the rock was a sea urchin, and she got a good 20 spines on her ankle. The crew were very fast to get the spines our as best they could, but as mentioned before they break off inside, and so we needed papayas to get them out, but the closest ones were back near the hotel! 

Off we went, though there was really no way to hurry. For good measure and to cap off the bad luck, Andrea was sick off the boat. To be fair I don’t think she travels particularly well, as she had been carsick previously in the trip (or trucksick I guess), but still not exactly ideal for her. We got back and left Gwen to the crew as we didn’t want to get all up in her face watching the papaya milk work. Later I found out that the papaya was used to counteract the venom, not remove the spines; they used Kerosene for that instead, rather unsuccessfully, and had to dig some of the spines out by hand. Ouch!

For tea Gemma, Mel, Tracy and I went for a little wander, and found a reasonably priced place that did a mix of seafood and burgers/pizzas. I nearly went for seafood curry, but they had pepperoni pizza... I am not a strong man against pizza. I was very tired, I thought because of snorkelling in the sun etc, so had to go to sleep at 9:30... but it turns out the bad luck for the group was not over. That’s technically tomorrow though so wait and see what happens!