Spot the danger?
Just off the coast of East Africa, a thirty minute flight north of Zanzibar, lies the tropical volcano island of Pemba. And if that sounds like the first sentence of an adventure story, it is precisely because it is.
It takes an effort to get here; from Brussels to Istanbul, from Istanbul to Zanzibar (via Kilimanjaro), and then one last tiny plane to Pemba domestic airport, an airstrip with a shed made of corrugated metal for a terminal. And even then the journey isn’t over. We’re picked up by a driver and taken on a bumpy ride to the northernmost tip of the island, where we finally arrive at one of the two resorts in existence here, the Gecko Nature Lodge.
You see, unlike its more famous neighbour to the south, Pemba is largely devoid of tourism, and all the better for it. This is also the reason why we have come here; its relative obscurity is one of the factors explaining why the surrounding waters are home to some of the best dive sites in the world. Corals are dying everywhere because of global warming and over-exposure, but here they are still perfectly healthy, and there is an abundance of them, too.
After last year’s less than impressive diving adventures in the Andaman Sea and on Gozo, my friend Lesli (of Sardinian and Appalachian fame) and I have high hopes for this place, and it doesn’t disappoint. The place is right on the coast, next to a local village, and surrounded on all sides by encroaching jungle of the kind you’d expect Tarzan to feel at ease in.
Our hosts, Russian Ekaterina and French Lucas, have only been here for two months, but make us feel at home right away. The fact that there is only one more diver here at first makes it feel almost as if we are their personal guests rather than paying customers, which is lovely.
We’re exhausted from our travels, and hide out from the midday heat in the guest huts that lie hidden in amongst the mango trees and banana palms and other vegetation. It’s a shock to the system, suddenly being subjected to heat and humidity on a tropical scale, but as the afternoon wears on, we acclimatise ourselves, and when the sun sets over the African continent we are seated on the water’s edge, sundowners at hand, ready for the spectacle to begin in every sense of the word.
Light, camera, action!
The next day we start with an early breakfast of eggs and freshly baked bread out in the open (but under a roof made of bamboo and fronds to hide us from the elements), then we gather our gear and head out in the rim boat to the dive sites.
I feel the usual excitement rise within as we follow the coast and take in the sapphire waters and emerald forests. Dara, our fellow diver from Ireland, has been here several days already, and Lesli is three times more experienced than I, but I’m always a little apprehensive when diving; it can be dangerous.
We kit up, buddy up, and prepare to go in. Lucas warns us that the visibility is so good that it can actually be a problem; divers used to less impressive conditions might mistakenly think they are in shallower waters than is actually the case, simply because they’re not used to seeing so well. That doesn’t sound so terrible, but can be a real issue, as going too deep causes the body to accumulate more nitrogen than it can take, effectively poisoning your blood in a way that can kill you.
One last security check, and we roll backwards into the water. On the divemaster’s command, we decend into the blue, and like that, we arrive in a different world.
There’s a lagoon formed by the main island and two smaller ones, Njau and Fundu, and the best diving is found right on the edge of the islands and in the two gaps that lead into the lagoon, where the tide has furrowed underwater channels that are lined with an astonishing plethora of corals.
There are fire corals, so red they look like glowing lava, cream-coloured porcelain corals, orange staghorn corals, sky-blue corals shaped like trees and pink fans and black chimneys and yellow bubble baths and sponges and a hundred other different shapes and sizes and hues, and nearly every one of them is favoured by one or more different species of fish: Tiny multicoloured nudiebranks and fiercely territorial clown fish hide in amongst anemones, parrot fish munch on their favourite calcified snacks, shoals of golden glass fish crowd swim-throughs, giant moray eels and lobsters and mantis shrimp are backed into crevices, poised to attack if you get too close, camouflaged scorpion fish lie motionless amongst the corals, deadly to touch and all but invisible. The list goes on and on. Add to this that you are floating as if suspended in the air, and it’s an experience so different as to be almost impossible to explain to someone who has not had it.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so…
Dara (who dives every week) and Lesli (with her daily yoga exercises) stay down like a couple of mermaids. Me, I’m using up air like I’m trying to corner the market. The excitement and adrenaline doesn’t help, but it’s all good. Never have I dived in such pristine waters, in such a rich flora and fauna. I surface with an enormous grin on my face.
The build-up of nitrogen from our first dive necessitates a surface interval of an hour or so, so the captain – a local fisherman who finds all the dive spots with eerie accuracy – lands us on a secluded beach where we bask in the sun, have water melon and pancakes and tea before heading out for a second dive. After that, it gets too hot, so we make for home and a well deserved lunch.
In the meantime a family trio from Argentina (a father and his adult son – Juan Carlos II and III – and daughter Jennie) have arrived, and over the next four days we will be the only guests at the lodge. Father and son joins us diving, and Jennie, who turns out to be a TV star back home in Argentina, takes lessons in the afternoons to get her certificate.
It’s a simple routine, but a very pleasant one. In the mornings we go diving, after lunch (and a siesta to hide from the worst heat) we go exploring. We rent bikes and kayaks to see more of the island. We traverse the jungle with a guide and see silk monkeys and crested hornbills (think Rowan Atkinson in The Lion King) and flying foxes (a type of giant fruit bat), we paddle along the coast and into the lagoon and its mangrove forests – the trees look like giant spiders with their hundreds of air roots holding them in place on the edge of the tides, and the volcanic rock walls are alive with hundreds of crabs, clambering along the razor-edged overhangs as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
Almost as exotic is the experience of interacting with the locals here. When I went running through the village I had a chorus of children calling me. For some strange reason they shout “bye bye” by way of greeting, and they laugh and smile and stare at me, obviously thinking it a very strange sight. If I stopped and tried to talk to them they grew very shy, and were likely to run away, but sometimes they ran after me instead. Once, when biking, we passed a group of serious-looking young girls in beautiful scarves and dresses all lined up and waving at us, and I blew them a kiss. The fact that children often marry very young and that polygamy is allowed is difficult to comprehend for a westerner, so for a moment I was wary of having committed a serious faux-pas, but much to my relief it resulted in an explosion of giggles. Even the adults seemed genuinely pleased, much like I expect they would have if a monkey had performed a particularly good trick. It’s a strange feeling to be find yourself part of a tiny minority, and quite the eye-opener.
Me and my seven new wives. Not.
And so the days go by. The place lives up to its name, as I discover when I find a gecko inside the toilet bowl one morning. At least it wasn’t a poisonous centipede, or a cloud of winged termites, or a bushbaby – all of which have found their way inside huts in the past.
A couple of the dives are scary, because the currents are unpredictable, and toss and turn us every which way, making you feel as if inside a washing machine during the spin cycle. When that happens there is little to be done apart from hiding from it as best you can, but sometimes even that isn’t possible, and you get taken for a ride.
The very last day on Pemba is a case in point. By now the Argentinians and Dara are gone, replaced by a Danish father and son. One of them has difficulty decending, and before he manages the current has taken us to another spot than the one we meant to dive. Before we realise this we are down to 28 metres instead of the fifteen we thought we would bottom out at. And the second dive that day, the very last dive of the week, is a wall dive that sees us drift so fast that the group becomes separated. It’s not unlike a rollercoaster, in fact, with the current pushing us up and down as we rush by the corals.
Eventually I get low on air and find a rock to hold on to for dear life while I do my safety stop, and when I finally come up I find that the two Danes are already back in the boat, having abandoned the dive earlier, while L&L are a hundred metres away, dragged there by the current. It’s a humbling experience, and one I will always remember as The Floomride. Even so, it was The. Best. Diving. Ever.
A Great White Swede.
We spend one last day on Zanzibar, in Stonetown, a place that will forever live in infamy as the biggest slave market in the world.
The slavery museum is a moving memorial to the untold millions of victims of this heinous crime against humanity. Raiding parties would find their way far inland, so that by the time they came here, slaves would have been marched for many months already, shackled together like animals day and night, and subjected to all manner of atrocities along the way.
Having been taken across the sound to Zanzibar the traders would cull their stock, throwing the ones that didn’t seem worth it off the ships to drown rather than having to pay duties for them. The cargo would then be incarcerated in tiny, overcrowded cellars underground for a couple of days to weed out all but the strongest, who would finally be taken to the market to be inspected, bought and sold like so much cattle (or worse, since I gather cattle rarely get used for sexual purposes by their owners), before being taken by their new masters to all the corners of the world, for – lest we forget – this was a global commercial endeavour. It beggars belief. Hitler, Stalin and King Leopold are all amateurs by comparison.
And with that sobering reentry into civilisation, plus a parting gift of torrential rain and ditto diarrhoea, Zanzibar speeds us on our long, separate ways home.
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All photos curtesy of Lesli Woodruff.
