Two Weeks on Chole

Phew...leave for two weeks and your email inbox is a disaster! 240 messages (serves me right for being so popular...:P) anyway, I am back in Stone Town for the next 5 days to recoup, get things in order for ISP, catch up on communication, and prepare myself for three weeks of camping on an Indian Ocean island doing research. Phew!

So, in case you started reading this and really do not have time to read it all (longest email yet, sorry!) I have a table of contents for you if you need the short version. So, here are my two weeks on Chole!
-Fly in a chartered TINY plane to Mafia, take a boat to Chole Island
-Stay at Chole Mjini (look it up...amazing eco resort!)
-Interview local people with a translator
-Get malaria
-Have an amazing and totally unique halloween/21st birthday
-move into homestays (no English, mud huts, mice in my bed, pit toilets!)
-go snorkeling and take coral reef ecology course
-see dolphins
-swim with WHALE SHARKS!!!! aggg...sooooo cool!
-fly home to Stone Town today!

Intrigued yet? Ok here is the full blown story of Chole.

We left from the Zanzibar airport on the 23rd, and had to divide up into two planes to get our whole group there. I opted for the small 5 seater and got to co-pilot! It was so cool to fly low over all the tiny islands around Zanzibar. There are so many reefs that go forever. The sea is dotted all over with the wooden dhow boats and outrigger canoes that fishermen here use. It was spectacular. Our landing on the Mafia dirt runway was a bit exciting, but not nearly as exciting as the next two hours...yep, that is right, we sat in land rovers in the middle of town without a clue what was going on. Honestly, about 97% of the time on Chole, were confused. That happens a lot in Africa! So we finally figured out that we were loading our drinking water for the trip onto one of the cars...700 bottles worth. Chole has no drinkable water, so we had to bring it. That took a while. So then we drove down the main road in these three speeding without speedometers land rovers, chickens, people, bikes, etc all having to move to get out of the way. I swear these 3 are about 50% of the cars on the island. When we finally got to the other side of Mafia, we got to unload all the water bucket brigade style from the cars to the waters edge, then make another chain to get it all out to the boat. We did the same thing with the luggage. By the time 17 people's worth of water and gear were in the boat, we were all totally soaked with saltwater. So when the 10 minute crossing was over, it was no shock that we had to wade waist deep with all our stuff to shore. Ahhh Africa.

With the transportation description you would probably not guess that the lodge where were staying at was what it turned out to be. It is a resort that is known to be one of the most culturally sensitive and eco-friendly in the world...and is absolutely beautiful. It is run and was designed by Anne and Jean de Villers, a couple from Kenya and S. Africa respectively. It is so cool. The rooms are all separate bungalows, some built into baobab trees, others down hovering just above the mangroves. It was so cool! There was cistern water, and no electricity. We used light from kerosene lanterns at night. Even the kitchen does not have power. The hotel only employs local people, and the cooks are amazing. Without refrigerators and cooking over fire, they created the most amazing food. Quiche, cakes, curries, all sorts of amazing stuff. I even liked their versions of squid and octopus! Anne and Jean were our teachers for the two weeks. Anne worked with us going into the village to talk to local people about tourism and the future of tourism on Chole. Maybe I need to back up. Chole is a TINY island. It takes 20 minutes to walk one end to the other. It is one big village with about 800 people living on it in mud huts. No electricity, bad water, a hospital but no access to drugs, and a primary school. Both the hospital and school have come in the past 20 years thanks to funding from the hotel. So, as for the interviews. We split into groups of 4 students, and each day we had a new topic to interview about. We used diagrams in the dirt, made maps, charts, and talked through translators. It was a really interesting experience. I found it so fascinating how positively everyone viewed tourism, but it really does not surprise me after seeing the tourism they are exposed to. I learned so much by talking to these people.

Interviews were going well, we were having lots of fun living in these sweet tree houses, but for some reason I had NO energy. I finally decided to go get a malaria test. Two girls had already gone a few days before, and both came back positive. I went with three other girls, and guess what?! All positive. We all started taking the treatment (good thing we brought 6 doses along) but that was all we had. Remember how I said there were no drugs on Chole? Well, none on Mafia either. We needed some more drugs because who knew how many more cases we would have. We lucked out. Supplies were being flown in from Dar to the hotel the next day, and we got 8 more treatment doses put on board. It was a good thing, because the next day, everyone got tested, and we had two more positive results. 8 people with malaria! Fun! I did not have very bad symptoms at all. I had a cycling fever that would hit everyday around 11, 2 and 9pm. Not fun to try to sleep with a fever and no fan on the equator. I also was super tired and felt dizzy a lot. In case you do not know, malaria is a parasite that you get from a certain type of mosquito. It basically eats your red blood cells. That is the reason I felt so dizzy. But, all good now. I took my meds and feel fine. It only lasted about 3 days where I felt really sluggish. I am going to get tested again right before I go on ISP, and take two doses of meds along. Two of the girls who had malaria in Chole were on their second round it it already.

Ok, so now I can officially say that I had malaria on my 21st birthday! Actually, my birthday was amazing. Not what I had pictured for my 21st, but it was really cool and totally memorable! Another girl had her 21st on the 24th, so one night (when we were both feeling feverish with malaria) the girls made a gift scavenger hunt for us. They had clues that led us to little things all around the lodge. It was a lot of fun. The next night was out last night in the hotel before moving into the village, the 30th. We decided to celebrate my birthday/Halloween then. That morning, we had our first break from the interviewing class. Up to this point we had been in class 9-5 everyday. We utilized the morning off in probably the BEST way possible: going to a sandbar! Woohoo! Three hours on white sand and blue water beachcombing. I have found a great beachcombing partner, Nora, and we have found some cool stuff. When we got back to the hotel, we had lunch, one class, and then needed to start on our costumes for that evening. Because of the limited packing space, nobody brought costumes. To inspire creativity, we each drew another person's name out of a hat and had to dress that person up as whatever we could think of. I dressed my person up as a rainbow. She wore black and I tied kangas around her in horizontal bands in the colors of the rainbow! Cool! Avra made me into a mermaid. She braided my hair into this really cool do, filled with shells from the sandbar excursion. I felt like a princess. Always a good thing on your birthday! We had tons of creative costumes: a peacock with a banana leaf tail, a stoplight, Steve Irwin complete with a stingray tail, a bone-eating-snotflower (aka: a type of polycheat worm at the bottom of the ocean), a palm fairy, and tons more. It was so much fun! We had a photo shoot (and no, my camera is not working due to a jammed grain of rice in the memory card slot, I will have pictures though) and then went trick-or-treating at the tree houses. Someone's mom had sent a bag of peanut m&ms (thank you!), and our AD had snickers bars. Chocolate is always coveted by this all-female group! After trick or treating and our chocolate sugar high, we headed back for a birthday beer. Beers are not easy to come by here, so it was a treat for sure. As we sat sipping beers and eating banana chips, we watched thousands of fruit bats fly silhouetted against the sky from Chole over to Mafia where they feed at night. There are so many on Chole. It really felt like Halloween!

But that is not all! We have not come to dinner yet! Dinner was extra special because the staff had set our tables up in the old Arab ruins on the property (the island is covered in them...really really cool!) Our 22 person table was covered in batiks, and accented by the glow of the kerosene lamps and glow from the moon. We all sat there in our costumes, and were entertained during our appetizer (fried potato catlace with coconut chutney!) by a local guy playing some cool snake charmer like instrument accompanied by drums. It was a neat atmosphere. Dinner was amazing as all meals at the hotel were, and then to top it off the ladies in the kitchen had made me a chocolate cake decorated with bougainvillea flowers. Chocolate cake over a wood fire takes skill, and they did so well. Maridadi gave me a framed photo of me with one of the baby turtles we released, and Anne and Jean gave me some Chole made coconut soap and a bar of really nice Swiss chocolate that Jean had brought back from a conference the week before. I could not stop smiling. I could not have wished for a better African 21st birthday.

The next day morning we moved into our homestays. I lived with a mom and her husband (never actually saw him though), her 22 year old daughter, and 5 year old twin boys. We lived in a three room mud hut near the center of the island. It had a back dirt courtyard fenced in by woven palm fronds, and that is where our kitchen and hole-in-the-ground toilet was. I had never been in a real mud hut before and was really surprised how clean it felt inside. The floors were covered with woven mats, and i felt totally comfortable sitting and lying down on them to work on homework. I helped cook. I learned to make ugali and helped grate coconut. That takes some serious skill. My mom also taught me to weave. I never got the hang of it but loved to watch here weave. I had my own room and the rest of the family piled into the other two. Eating was a challenging subject in this house. First of all, the food we ate was never super scarce, but the calorie and nutrient content were next to nothing. I usually ate rice for dinner and took just a tiny but of the cassava leaves and or fish. I knew that I was served all of it, and if I did not eat it the little boys would get to. They needed it so much more than I did. They typically ate bananas and rice. That was pretty much it. They were adorable though, and would greet me every morning with "shikamoo" ( the formal greeting of respect) and I finally learned how to properly answer "marahaba" rather than the incorrect pronunciation i had arrived with. I gave them bubbles and they thought those were the coolest things in the world. I had a lot of trouble sleeping in my homestay though. I had mice in my room that would constantly run over my head and foot board and al over my mosquito net. The first and last nights they managed to get into my mosquito net and crawl ON me. That will keep you from sleeping. There were also huge spiders that would appear all over the place. Ug. Actually, one night I was tucking in the net and touched a mouse and yelped, and my mom came running. No one in the house speaks English (big challenge!) so I tried, in the dark, sitting on my bed with my headlamp on, trying to explain to them that there were mice in my room. I did not know the word for mouse, so i made ears on myself and started squeaking. They got the idea and looked around. I knew that there was nothing that they could do, but they asked if I wanted someone to sleep with me in my room so that I would not be scared. I said not to worry and they left, but I was not looking forward to sleeping with mice. I was not well rested the last 6 days in Chole.

I should have been able to sleep through anything though because I was exhausted by 8 every night. We would have class at 9, and then go for a two hour snorkel trip each day for Jean's coral reef ecology course. I loved this class! He was the most fun guy, and we basically had the first academically informative class so far this trip. We learned a lot about fish and fish morphology, whale sharks, environmental problems, and had a huge discussion about why we should remain cheerful in today's environmental fiasco. It was a great course. Our final for that class was an essay: Coral reefs: My vested interest and responsibilities (aka: why I should give a rats %$@*). It was an interesting topic. Too bad I will never see that essay again. We had to hand it in on the last day. It was a more complex question that it first reads too. It was a good brain challenge.

Snorkeling was wonderful. We would go out on this huge dhow called Lulu Nyngesi (the Black Pearl). She had an upper sunning deck that was great fun to ride on. One day we saw a pod of about 15 dolphins! They did a few good jumps, and were beautiful to watch. We attempted to swim with them at our snorkel site, but no success. We would motor out to a snorkel site, and all go off in our buddy pairs. Sarah was by buddy for the week, and we had a blast! We found all sorts of cool stuff: a stonefish, a lobster, and tons and tons of cool fish. Our favorite place was this hidden reef edge. Both of us are strong skin divers and we decided to see what was through the dark water below us. It was just water from our view. We headed down, and made it down to the reef slope...and it was COVERED with huge aggregate schools of all kinds of amazing fish, all hanging in the current. It was so cold down there, and it was way deeper than either of us realized. We decided, based on some of the other measured deep stuff we had done that we had gone down to about 35 feet, maybe a little more. It was sweet! The life on this reef was amazing. We each went down three times, and that was all our lungs could handle, so we went to find some shallower coral. I followed a peacock grouper to a shallower section of reef (they are my favorite fish! they are so pretty and seem to dance as they swim). The current was about to change, and so all the herbaceous fish were all hanging there, in a huge aggregate school, just waiting for the plankton to come with the new tide. It was amazing. Thousands of fish and you could just chill with them in the water. Unbelievable.

Our skin diving challenge was the Jaws of Death: a 30 foot deep underwater tunnel that Jean found. We each went down and took a look, and I finally decided to attempt it. It was so cool!!! Swimming though stuff underwater is always a thrill. A lot of us were successful. Yay us!

The final day in Chole we decided to go search for whale sharks instead of go out for a snorkel. They had been hanging out on the far side of Mafia, so we headed down to Fohodani, the local boat landing to take Mama Chole to Mafia. While waiting, Nora and I scoured the beach some more and found: SHARK TEETH!!! Sweet! It was so cool. I have about 6 from here now, and they are mostly tiger shark teeth. Nora found the big daddy though, a huge tiger shark tooth. We took Mama Chole to Mafia, got in the Land Rovers, drove to Kilondoni, and then again, waited to see what would happen. Like I said, lots of not knowing what is going on. We finally were told what boat we were on, and we all piled in. We were squished in like little sardines into this dhow that the driver bailed about ever 8 minutes. Gotta love travel by boat here. We headed out to sea to search for whale sharks. I was not expecting much after being disappointed in the Seychelles, so I was just enjoying the boat ride. However, I remembered from past experience that you have to be ready to throw your gear on in a second if you see one, so I was all set up to throw on my fins and mask. It paid off. We spotted a dorsal fin, stopped the engine and I flipped back over the edge. I managed to swim with the shark (it was about 13 feet long) for almost a minute before it descended into the deep dark blue water. It was gone before most of the other girls made it in the water. I was thrilled!!! It was so hard to contain my excitement, but I knew that being excited would just rub it in everyone's face. I was the only one that had seen it. Luckily, we found the same shark again about 20 minutes later, and this time everyone got a good long swim with it in the water. It was so fun to see all of us, exclaiming and swimming around on the surface in our bright swimsuits and fins, and this huge docile shark right below us just calmly hanging out. It was covered in remoras and beautiful. They are so amazing. This time back on the boat we were all thrilled beyond description! WHALE SHARKS! WE SWAM WITH A WHALE SHARK!!! It was such a worthwhile morning! We headed back to Chole, and then had a few hours to kill before our 4:00 lecture on whale sharks. Nora, Kate and I headed down to find more sharks teeth...a successful venture! The lecture was really fascinating, especially since we had just seen one, but it was frustrating too. It is hard to choke down horrible facts about species that you find incredible and other people see as money. Whale sharks are not classified as endangered or protected, although they are on a CITES list. No one knows how many there are, how often they reproduce, how they migrate etc. There are guesses, but there is very little that we know about them. What we do know for sure is that they are hunted. And for $100,000 per animal, they are a good catch. They are killed cruelly though, and a large vessel can take 6-10 a day easily, as they like to just hang around on the surface. They will swim up to it and hook huge buoys into it, and it will slowly swim itself to death. They cut off the fins and chop it up in the water and take it aboard their huge refrigerator boats. One year, 10,000 were reported traded in China, and who knows how many more were un reported. And we have no idea how many there are. Oh, they eat plankton, and can grow up to a documented 50 feet in length, but undocumented reports have them exceeding 75. That is a BIG fish!

This morning we left our families in Chole, a thing that most of us were ready to do. I loved Chole, but I was really ready to get back to Stone Town and back to the Mauwani. A real shower, toilet and bed without mice! What more do you need really? But I learned that I could live without all these things. I would not choose to, but I could do it. Being on Chole was an amazing experience. I would love to go back and see Anne and Jean again someday, dive, and visit that beautiful tiny rural island.

---

---