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The Camp, Coco Beach and the Village
You can see the village on the left, with the vol huts on the point further right, and Coco Beach on the far right. April 3 - April 8: Week One
The Facilities Well, I woke up with the sunrise the first day, and man, what a gorgeous place! Just steps from our hut there is small cliff, with steps leading down to a fine, yellow sand beach - Half-Moon Bay. It's pretty much a private beach, just for the vols, and the swimming there at high tide is fantastic. The water is warm, but not too warm - 27 degrees, which would drop to 24 degrees by the end of the expedition (which, by the way, is number 37!!).
The way the BV site is set out it kind of neat too. At the north end, along the water, is the vols hut, the diving shack ("the Bat Cave") and the classroom ("Nosy Cao"). "Nosy" means "island" in Malagasy, and "Cao" is a bit of a joke - Nosy Hao (pronounced "how") is the large island across from the village of Andava, and "Cao" (pronunced "Cow") has the Laughing Cow (from laughing cow cheese fame) painted on the side. In any event, this end of the camp is closest to the village.
The other end (a
slow five minute walk away) is the staff end. It has the Coco Beach Hotel, which is where we get all our meals in the restuarant. It's still a hotel, and they have specific huts for guests, but most of the other huts are used by visiting field scientists, BV staff from London, and the staff here at Anadava. With the exception of Becks, who's hut is with the volunteers, all of the staff are at this end. The Coco Beach end also has a very long beach (about 1/2 km; Half Moon Beach is only 100 m or so), named, Coco Beach.
The village itself is just to the north. It's a two minute walk from the vols' end, and you walk over a low, limestone ridge, and then either along the beach (low tide) or above it, crossing a few rock outcroppings, at high tide. More about the village later.
Each volunteer hut has it's own shower, and there are four toilets for the vols. There are also toilets (western style) at the Coca Beach end. Some more about amenities - the showers are cold water only, and water, both for it and the toilets, doesn't
Ocean Views Anyone?
The view out the door of our hut. run all day. It was somewhat random, but it usually ran in the morning for a bit and in the late afternoon and evening. The water itself isn't all that great - it's usually a little brackish, and sometimes a bit smelly. But it is good for washing the salt water off after a dive or a swim.
In all, there are five volunteer huts (four sleep five, one sleeps two). One was completely empty, as it was being fixed. Of the other, the two person hut was filled by Kat and Debs, hut one by Sam, Eamonn, Kyle and Taylor, the Malagasy scholarship student, hut two by Muriel, Tori and Anita, and hut three by Mikhail, Ralf and me. Jon, Vic, Howard and Tristan were housed at the staff end.
Drinking water was at Coco Beach. There were two large filters (gravity fed, with ceramic filters) where water from the kitchen could be poured in by buckets to be filtered. If the water in the kitchen ran out (which you couldn't drink without treatment) you could always buy bottled water at the restuarant. You could also get soft drinks, beer and juice at the restuarant too. The
Half-Moon Beach
Our own "private" beach ... filters often ran dry, but you could always fill them up (although it seemed that I was always filling them up!!)
Electricity was supplied by a generator. Again, it didn't run all day. Usually it would run for an hour or two in the mid-morning, and then in the afternoon, generally from 4 or 5 until 10.00 pm. Each hut had an overhead light, and at least one outlet. We had two - luxury - so you could keep batteries recharged and run laptops if needed.
All in all, it was far more luxurious than I was expecting. However, it really was a lot like summer camp, although for adults. The cabins were about the same size as those at Mazinaw, and the bunk beds were strangely familiar. My only complaint - the mattresses in all the cabins were terrible. My back and neck would suffer badly in the coming six weeks - I guess I'm a little less flexible than I need to be. Had there been more room in the cabin, I would have moved my mattress to the floor, but I didn't really have that option (Ralf or Mikhail would have been climbing all over
The Village
The village and Andava (also known as "Poo") Beach. me to get to the toilet during the night.
The last item to mention was communications. There really wasn't any. There were satellite phones for the staff use, but while they were available, they were very expensive. Emails were sent out once a week, and they were received once a week too. Again, these cost a fair amount to send (although, quite properly, not for staff). There was a cell phone point a 45 minute walk away through and past the village, but even there cell phone coverage was spotty. But, some people were able to use their phones. All in all, I did not miss being out of communication, except for Stanley Cup news (stupid Ottawa Senators!).
Orientation and Acclimitization The first morning everyone was still a little dozy from the trip the previous day. As well, my stomach was giving me some problems. It had started the day before (I had some concerns about the 4X4 trip) and it seemed most people were having the traveller trots in some form or another.
Breakfast was bananas, rice, bread with honey, tea or coffee. This would be breakfast for the next 42 days, except
Women's Association
The Women's Association putting on their welcoming dance. when it was varied with scrambled eggs (in which case no fruit), or the bananas would be exchanged for pineapple. For me, breakfast would turn out to be the bane of the meals. By the end, I was usually down to eating just some bread and honey. There were spreads available in the village, but they were expsensive (relatively speaking) and didn't really help. The bread itself was not made at Coco Beach. The primary method of cooking was over a wood stove and fire, so baking bread would not have been easy. There were deliveries roughly once a week from Morombe (a small town to the north) or Tulear, but sometimes there would not be bread (and often it was rock-hard). When there wasn't bread, ricecakes were the order of the day. The ricecakes aren't what we would consider to be ricecakes here. They were round and soft, looking like bra implants really, or powder puffs, and were basically tasteless (at least to me).
Can you tell I wasn't too impressed by breakfast?
Since I'm on meals, let me tell you about lunches and dinner. Bean, rice and fish were the order of the day. There would
be a small salad (what the Brits call salad - usually it would be grated carrots, or sliced cucumber, or green beans) to be shared amongst all at lunch, sometime cooked vegetables. Dinner was the same, but missing the salad. Instead of fish there might occasionally be calamari, crab, turkey or goat (twice on this expedition!). Dinners and lunches were actually quite good, but they did get bland after a while. I needed to bring more sauces!
On the plus side, you could get cold drinks at Coco Beach during meals. Beer, pop and juice. Of course, they weren't that cold since the refrigerator only ran when there was power ...
So, the first two days were introductions, settling in, and learning about all the procedures. The second night, we had our only big rainstorm. And I'm happy we only had the one - the huts, which are thatched, are not leakproof. Luckily, no leaks over a bunk in our place (just a stream running through the middle of the floor from the leak at one end). Poor Deb had one right over her bed.
The nights there were gorgeous. Since the village only had limited power
(a couple places ran lights off of car batteries, as did the epi-bar stereo), and the nearest town was over 40 km away, and didn't have a lot of power either, there was almost no light pollution. I have never seen the stars so clearly. And, while the air was damp with salt, it smelt great when the wind didn't come from the direction of the village.
We also had a village tour, and you can see the poverty. But, most people are happy and smiling, and I think the Vezu, the tribe that are the fishermen there, are relatively lucky. They get lots of protein from fish, and while the diet is probably missing some nutrients, it's not too bad. Plus they get a chance to earn a little from the fishing. But this is all relative - for westerners, it is bone-crushing poverty. And the village smells like it. The wood they use for cooking (every place has its cooking hearth outside, and many inside tiny huts) burns with an acrid smoke, and that smell, combined with feces, urine and rotting vegetables provides an odour which can't be missed. Most of the vols got used to it,
I think, but I never really did. Maybe it was the village itself, but I don't think I will ever forget the smell ...
So, on the third day work began. I got to get up at 5.30 am to be boat marshall. With every dive, there was a shore marshall manning the radio and satellite phone in Nosy Cao, and a boat marshall who went on the boat and who's was to keep the surface marker buoys ("SMBs") in sight at all time. The divers in the water towed the SMBs so we could see where they were. Kind of boring, but OK to get a tan. Of course, getting up at 5.30 wasn't much fun, but you did get to see the sunrise.
Back for 8.30 breakfast, than my first dive at 10.00. The visibility wasn't all that great, and for the most part wouldn't be the whole time I was there. The average was usually around 12 or 15 feet, although we did have a few days of 50 or 60 feet viz.
The goal for us was to learn our invertebrates (animals without backbones - e.g. sea urchins, sea cucumbers, tritons, crown of
thorns starfish, cowrie shells, octopus) who lived on the bottom as well as identifying benthic life forms (corals, sea anemones, zooanthids, corallimorphs, gorgonians, hydroids, tunicates, and the ever present algae) so that we could be reef surveys. After that, the goal was to learn to identify 150 species of fish, to do fish belts (IDing and counting the fish in a 5m X 5m X 20m belt) to get an idea of the productivity of each survey site. So, it wasn't recreational diving, but man, was it a blast. Get up in the morning, head out on the boat for 20 minutes or so, go for a dive in blazing sunshine, head back in, maybe go for a second dive. What a rough life!
The afternoons in this week were spent doing workshops, to learn the benthic species. I would learn my benthic and invertebrates pretty quickly (a couple of days) but the fish took me longer.
The vols who weren't yet certified advanced divers were meanwhile learning to dive during this week. Again, the only dives are in the morning, because if there is a problem and we need to evacuate someone, a helicopter can't land at
night in Madagascar, so there has to be enough daylight to get a helicopter or plane from either Tana or South Africa. Hence, no dives after 1.00 pm.
We also met the Women's Association in the village. They make clothes and other souvenirs - I got a nice shirt and Ralf and I also bought a hammock. Although I'd end up hogging Mikhail's - his was way more comfortable!
The six day was the day off - no work, no dives, nothing to do but relax. So, party night was the fifth night (no more than one beer - the infamous THB "Three Horses Beer" - the day before a dive). This party night started with meeting the nahudas (the elders of the village) at the epi-bar. It's called an epi-bar because it's a bar, but also sells a few goods, like an epicerie (French for store in Madagascar). Hence, an epi-bar. But, although it has a floor, a roof and walls, it's really just a big shack.
Finished the night with a bonfire on the beach and stargazed. Lovely.
As the next day was the day off, and we sailed to Nosy Hoa, a largish
island offshore, via pirouges. Pirouges are the dugout canoes that the Vezu use for transport, as well as to fish. They can get quite large, and 6 of us went in two (each with two Vezu to sail them). They are pretty ramshackle, but, so long as the seas aren't too rough, they work. But they are only good for close, inshore work. At sea, they'd never make it!
But the day was fantastic. I had cut my foot earlier in the week, and Becks the medic explained that the water, and swimming, is what led to infections. They were slightly infected, so I decided to keep them dry on the day off (since I didn't want to stop diving) in the hopes they'd heal faster. And they'd eventually heal, but it took about five or six times longer than normal.
The only other complaint I had was intestinal. Although I was feeling good by the end of the week, the first five days were a constant battle between making it to the john in time and not. Unfortunately, these problems would plague me for the whole expedition.
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Bedard
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But what about the wind? Aren't you going to tell us about the wind???