The Big Goodbye!

8th June - 20th June:
Oh dear! the quick trip to the Pirates Arms for a couple of drinks turned into to an all dayer with all of us downing jugs of the local Seychellois beer. It was a pretty lively evening and in the end most of our group were there. We also met up with our park ranger Phillipe and his two lovely daughters while we were there. After a day of continual eating and drinking we finally dragged ourselves home at about midnight with the hangover from hell. In fact even as I write this now my head is still throbbing and I smell of wine due to my repeating the same mistake yesterday.

Today was our last day on camp and after hastily packing up all my stuff (Literally tons of it I've got five bags now!) we got a lift over to Beau Vallon where I'll be staying for the next couple of days before flying back. I probably should have done all my packing yesterday except what was meant to be a quick trip over to Victoria to get some money out and do some internet stuff in the morning turned into an all day drinking fest when Marcus and Ryan turned up in town and we all headed to - yep you guessed it - the Pirates Arms. Unfortunately missed the presentation and the last meal that we had on camp and arrived back totally sloshed to the pub quiz that was going on but all in all it wasn't a bad way to spend the last day here in good company.

Met a pretty interesting fellow while I was in town, I had just popped into Jivan Imports to buy some tourist toot (sorry presents!) and the old guy in charge just asked me if I was here on holiday, making polite conversation. I mentioned what I was doing here with GVI and it turned out that he is all but the father of conservation in the country. His name is Kanti and he was showing me all the work that he has done here spanning his whole considerable life (86 years). He had photos of everyone who had visited him ranging from Queen Elizabeth to Ian Fleming to David Bellamy and even Mother Theresa, he had a roll of honour given him by the UN environmental commitee, and more awards and decorations than you could wave a large stick at. At first I thought I was being given a tall story but then he was pulling out all these articles where he was on the front page or photos of him with the said people and when I later did a search on his name on yahoo there were like a million articles on him - he even has his own Wikipedia entry. He showed me around the shop and to the library round the back which was overflowing with books on marine life and conservation and various papers he had written, all of this in a small unassuming shop in Victoria, I would recommend chatting to him to anyone with a keen interest in conservation, a very remarkable man.

We were dropped off at the Sun resort this morning which I'm sharing with Jordan (no not that one!) and I decided I needed a really good breakfast, all you can eat, and a little bit of luxury so we both dragged ourselves over to the Meridian hotel with delicious but massively over priced breakfasts. We must have looked a bit of a sight, admittedly I was dressed okay as I bought some new shorts and shirt yesterday (all my other stuff is dirty, torn, or disintegrated) although you could probably smell the wine from about ten metres away and I was in the early stages of a horrendous hangover and Jordan had some torn jeans, several days of beard growth and we descended on all these posh couples and holiday makers staying there at 700 Euros a night. They must have thought the great unwashed were descending on them! It was very amusing though and totally luxurious, I even had the first real cheese that wasn't plastic processed crap in ten weeks - ohh the luxuries of back home that I've missed :0)

Other stuff that has happened in the last few weeks, we had a cool barbeque (well actually it was hot) on Tuesday night which the park ranger Phillipe very kindly prepared for us, it was an all you can eat fest with fish and meat all done creolle style and was really delicious. I think he actually prepared it for a hundred people by accident though instead of thirty the sheer quantity of it we had. Even the considerable appetites of me, Marcus, and Ryan (the official food hoovers of the trip) didn't make much of a dent in it. It sure made doing kitchen duty easy for the next couple of days though!

The previous weekend I had discovered some of Hamid's movies on one of the computers. After watching a truly dire film called 100 Million BC I found the entire series of Knight Rider Season 2 - it was so cheesy it was unreal but I loved watching it, until I had to be physically removed from the computer for my own good.

We had a number of fun dives this week now that all the surveying is over and done with, did all the usual stuff - arm wrestling with Whalesharks, waking up turtles, and interupting shagging octopi (is it octopi, octopus, or octopuses?). Don't know what to do with myself diving now when I haven't got a dive slate and I'm not counting fish or crusties!

Well thats the end of the trip and this blog for the time being! I should be returning here in August to start working on the Whaleshark internship which should be fantastic, I'll head home and start training up at the swimming pool and maybe even a bit of gym work to build up my strength and speed for when I return, chasing after whalesharks while snorkelling at 15 metres while trying to get a photo of its left dorsal fin while trying to lead a group of volunteers sounds like bloody hard work so want to prepare as best as possible! Hope you've enjoyed reading about the trip as much as I've enjoyed writing about it - Goodbye!

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