Random ramblings from GVI Seychelles

I arrived on the 8th Apr and the first few days were very relaxing and had a great time chilling on the beach and doing a little swimming. We moved onto base on Fri 11th Apr and thats when the work started. There ae about 28 of us on camp and we've been doing a dive a day this week while also also studying the 150 different fish species that we have to learning in order to do the surveys. We've been doing a lot of cramming for the tests so far and I have been living breathing and even dreaming of fish for the last week as we've tried to take everything on board and doing a dive each day. We are also responsible for all THE DUTIES on camp while we are here and a typical day starts at 6am and finishes at 6pm so has been quite exhausting but great fun. I've learnt a bit about boat duties and setting up scuba gear as well as cooking for 30 people and just general cleaning and stuff. Last night we had a fancy dress party on base as it was one of the girls birthdays so went as Harry Potter and we had a great time and I setup a strobe light and some music so we had a little disco going on in our kitchen (which doubles as our social room and our local pub )and played drunken twister - great laugh! We are in a pretty remote area and takes about half an hou o walk to the local shop so food supplies are a bit basic and we have all but been turned into vegetarians as there isn't much meat available - lots of fish though.

Unfortunately the accomodaion is hardly five star and we share our rooms with mozzies and the occasional rat but suprisingly the girls (there are about 20 of them to 8 guys) have taken it remarkably in stride so if they can I'll have to deal with it as well and just hope hey don't climb into bed with me. Generally we are al having a great time though and the group has bonded really well.

30th April 08: Been here in the Seychelles for about three weeks now, I've finished all the fish exams and will be tested on worms and crustateans tomorrow - yummy! Over the weekend I popped into the local tourist resort of Beau Vallon and completed my PADI Rescue Diving course which is the last step to complete before divemaster. We also went on a night dive around the Aquarium as it is called which is two coral reefs which you can go round in a figure of eight. The daily fish spots continue to go well and I can recognise about 120 different species and sub-species of fish now.

On Monday I had some free time and took a wander over to Port Launey our nearby beach where some of our group were teaching the local school kids about the marine life, I arrived at the end of the lessons when they were messing about in the sand and there I was minding my own business and then see 20 kids rushing up to bundle me :0) A funny morning all in all! Today is Wednesday and I'm in Victoria on the shopping run for the group before heading back to do my dive this afternoon.

9th May: Hello managed to get back on a computer again today and a pretty eventful week it has been too. Firstly as previously mentioned there is a bit of a rat problem in our dorms and in light of this our health and safety director on base has setup "Rat Extermination Team Alpha" to try and combat the problem. This team of brave men and women were charged with dealing with the conquest of our bedrooms by the evil four legged rodents. Early results were promising and we managed to capture two rats, drown one rat and drew first blood on a forth. There were casalties on both sides though, one of the girls in our dorm had one scuttle over the window sill and one of our team Ryan "Rhino" Stapleton actually woke up at 3am in the morning to a rat wiping its arse on his face! - all very demoralising. I myself was called to deal with a rat we had captured in the kitchen but it was so small and ute looking - (more of a field mouse really) that I ended up just setting it free away from base. Anyway after many weeks of asking we finally engaged in chemical warfare and gassed the entire building which involved all of us being evacuated out the building for three hours and spending the day down the beach. Don't know if it was successful or not but on our return I found a cockroach in my stuff so it remains to be seen - not much kills those things - other than the well placed heel of my foot which seemed to do the trick.

When they found out the nature of the marine work that I was going to do here my work colleagues as a leaving present very kindly bought me a book titled "How it feels to be attacked by a Shark" feeling that this would be a suitable gift. It is actually quite a good book and is a collection of short stories of "How it feels like to..." and has many stories of various adventures and accidents people have had such as "How it feels to be shot in the head" or "How it feels to be stuck in an ice crevesse". In light of the events of last Sunday I would like to add my own chapter to this book, I will call it "How it feels like to fall down a waterfall".

"How it feels to fall down a waterfall"
It was a Sunday morning on our base camp at Cap Turney here in the Seychelles and a group of six of us decided to visit the local Sauzier waterfall at Port Glaud which is about an hours walk from our camp. It started off a lovely sunny day but as we got about halfway there a heavy downpour started, it wasn't too cold though so we carried on our way to the waterfall and arrived at the base of the pool. Despite the pouring rain we reached the base of the waterfall and had a swim and lark around in the pool at the bottom and took some pictures. ANyway after a while of being rained on I told the group that I was going to try and find the trail to the top of the waterfall as I expected I copuld get some great pictures up there. I followed the path beyond the pool up the side of the hill down which the waterfall was cascading and was only expecting to take about five minutes. Unfortunately there wasdn't a trail as such and I soon found myself clambering through overgrown jungle and trees and rocks - I also bore to the left away from the waterfall and did this for about twenty minutes until I reached a very steep rock face which I was unable to scale in the rain - deciding to give the idea a miss I followed this rock face back toward the sound of the waterfall realising I had actually over shot the top of it so had to descend a little way before reaching a small pool with a dam from which I could see my mates Jess and Heidi down below and gave them a wave. I took a few photos and then decided to head back down - this time keeping as close to the waterfall with it on my right as I could.

About halfway down though there were lots of boulders covered in leaves and when I put my feet down on them they went striaght through so I judged it to dangerous to carry on going that way and the rock to my right was to high to climb up by now so I had only left to turn and I came out about halfway down the waterfall about 60 feet up from the bottom pool where we had started. I was carefully trying to make my way down off to the side when unfortunately my foot slipped on the rain slicked rock, I fell on my arse, luckily the rucksack with my camera was on my back and protected it but the next thing I know my feet are in with the water flow from the fall and I'm sliding down it fast. My first thought was oh shit! and then I thought got to keep my feet in front of me and protect my head. So I'm sliding down this rocky fall in nothing but my board shorts, I can see Alex, Marcus and Jesse down below, very small figures staring up at me and I'm like no this is too high up. Luckily the water had worn a fairly smooth channel down the waterfall so I'm riding down the route of the water, I didn't scream or shout or anything but I do remeber everything sort of slowing down and while I had no control over my descent I was able to react and point myself down the right channels without problem. Down below me my mate Alex just said I had this look of intense concentration and terror on my face but didn't utter a word. After what seemed like ages but was probably about 20 seconds though the water flow was going down and there was this big jagged piece of rock going striaght across my path so I tried hard to steer to the left of it but only partially succeeded and I suspect thats where I got a nasty bruise on my hip from. From down below they said at this point it looked like i had tumbled head over heels and thought I'd broken something but I managed to recover quickly and was back on my back side after it managing to have hopped over it somehow. At this point there was only a few more metres to go before I reached the bottom and luckily even after all this I remembered to grab my bag off my back and hoist it in the air before I landed in the pool as it had my rather nice camera in it which amazingly survived its ride down a waterfall with even less damage than I had.

I swam across the pool to looks of amazement from my mates on shore and when they asked me if I was okay I managed to reply with "yep, absolutely cool - just wanted to get down the quick way". I had passed two others who were standing part of the way up on the waterfall when I fell but i was apparently so quiet that I shot by them without either of them noticing until Heidi turned around when I got to the bottom and asked "How did you get down so quick?"

In epilogue I managed to get away from this particular incident with nothing more than some nasty bruises and a couple of cuts and abrasions to show for it, and a new found respect for not climbing in the wet.


The following day was Monday and I wasn't feeling so great, I ached all over and the beginnings of ugly bruises covered my whole back side, my back didn't move properly and it hurt (still does) to sit down - there goes two months of physiotherapy down the drain. Anyway aching all over naturally my first duty of the day was to do the community service I had mentioned last week and get jumped on by loads of kids - perfect!

We had prepared lesson plans during the week during which we were going to tell the children about four prehistoric sea creatures, I was working with Alex and we had Megalodon (massive 16m sharks), Sea Scorpions, Odobenimewhatsits, and Coelacanth to discuss. We headed down to Port launey and had a snack before the kids and their teacher arrived. We split them off into groups and asked them what they knew about plate techtonics and evolution, we obviously had a group of little geniuses because they already knew all about what we were telling them and they were only nine. When I asked them about any pehistoric sea creatures that they knew of one of the smarter ones said striaght off without prompting about Megalodons and another one parroted up about a Coelacanth that had been caught by a fisherman in 1938 and seemed suprised that we the "teachers" knew about it as well - glad we did the research beforehand. Anyway we spent about an hour doing exercises and telling them about their particular creatures as they were to do a presentation to the rest of their class at the end of the lesson. It was good that there were two of us doing the lesson as when i ran ran out of things to say Alex would chip in and when she needed a break I could step in. After a while their atttention started to wander so we discussed the relative merits of the Jaws films and I also told them the story of the waterfall yesterday which kept them amused.

Next we did the presentations and got all the kids to present what they knew to their classmates and they were all realy great and we got them lying end to end to demonstrate what 16 metres was for the size of a Megalodon. After this we had the dreaded games including sharks and fishes which is a bit like British Bulldog - you all have to run to the opposite side of the beach and not get caught and "stuck in the mud" which was a sort of evolution game. There was one particular kid called Dillan who remebered me from the previous week when all twenty of the kids had jumped on me and he was a right little character - cheeky little bugger as well but very amusing and he entertained us with whistling through his nose and was just one of the stand out personalities in the group, he helped "rescue" me in the games several times as well. All in all I took it fairly easy in the games and I didn't have to "give the kids a chance" in the games of chase as they were quite agile enough to avoid us when we chased them (I suspect this would have been the case even if I wasn't aching all over). Eventually the class ended though and I along with the six other GVI volunteers and staff who had come along collapsed in exhaustion while the kids were all right as rain.

We got back to base absolutely exhausted, it had also started pouring with rain just after we had left the beach and after a quick lunch we had to kit up. Being cold, tired, aching and raining I wasn't in a hugely enthusiastic mood for this particular dive and felt I had perhaps reasonable cause to beg off of it, but I gave it a shot anyway, I'm very glad I did though. Hamid was our dive master on this one and he told me just before the dive that this would likely be a fantastic dive because he was leaving his camera behind and that he always saw the good stuff when he didn't have his camera - he wasn't wrong. During the dive we were looking at a particular large sweetlips when he beckoned mine and Alex's attention and just above us a pod of dolphins was gliding by - I couldn't believe it and didn't think they had dolphins out here but there they were! Also on the dive which was around the very current drven lighthouse dive site we saw a whitetip reef shark go by and we also managed to disturb a disgruntled looking Hawksbill turtle who indignantly took off after we saw it and managed to wake it with our breathing.

The rest of the week passed without to much incident, I caught up with various tasks around camp. Managed to prepare a very decent chicken stock and noodles with vegetable soup for everyone and on the Friday night we all took an excursion down to the LoveNut in Victoria which is the local nightclub - a fun evening all in all. Today I did a bit of shopping in Victoria with a hangover from drinking til 3am last night, bought a few t-shirts so I won't have to do any washing for a few more days and also got rid of my rucksack which I have had since my schooldays but which was finally destroyed and teared beyond reasonable repair by its trip down the waterfall.

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