Day 1 of the Vincent/Nicole Adventure

---

We had arranged for a taxi to take us up to Nungwi bright and early. I packed up my stuff and jumped in bed with Marcella and Thalita and said a very sad good-bye to my roommates of the past 5 weeks. I know they will be lifelong friends. And Marcella is going to be my sister-in-law since I'm marrying her brother (in a castle) after all. Gill and Jon came down to see us off and we got in the taxi and left. Halfway there I realized I had forgotten my Gore-tex gear in the medical kit. We called Harrison to have him have someone leave them at the front desk of the hotel and the taxi driver offered to pick them up on his way to get us in the morning. Crisis averted. We got to Amaan Bungalows, check in and had a very quick breakfast. We walked via the beach to Zanzibar Watersports and got squared away for diving. WE had to wait around for a while which was a little frustrating since we had rushed and left early to get here by 9. The boat finally arrived and we boarded an dold wooden Dhow. Quite interesting, slightly less than safe. The ride out was amazingly beautiful {as I type this I am really wishing I had a larger vocabulary and more synonyms for amazing}. It took us about an hour and a half to get to the Mnemba Atoll. I couldn't wait to get in! I brought my dive computer. I'm glad I did because its nice to not to have to rely on someone else for your safety. I also brought my dive camera, but it froze when we hit the water which was weird because it worked fin on the boat 😞
The first dive was amazing. Dive time was 46 minutes with a max depth of 24 meters. We saw an outrageous diversity of life. Large fish, schools of fish, eels, sea cucumbers as big as my leg, flounder, and so many giant sea stars. I also really think I saw all the fish from Finding Nemo- lots and lots of Nemos, Doris, Flos, and Gills. Oh, I forgot to mention that we saw a pretty big pod of dolphins and a sea turtle on the way out 😊 So many colors! So many fish!
I hate that my camera was broken because my words just aren't good enough. I'm a biologist, not a poet. We did a second dive in the same location and it was fairly similar and mostly still amazing.
We had a long way back and there were some mishaps along the way. It took them forever to get the sail up. Then we got near to our starting point at high tide. The water was MUCH higher than when we left and the beach no longer existed- with no docks or piers. It was chaos. The employees were swimming back and forth with supplies and people's stuff. And the people had to jump in and swim to shore. Very sketchy. Then they brought us to our stop and it was more of the same chaos. I was not happy to jump back in the water and try to get to the wooden stair case against the waves. Plus it was really cold and the sun had set.
We showered and went to dinner overlooking the water at Sunset Restaurant. It was cloudy so no sunset 😞 We had a very nice, relaxing diner. Vincent and I had a really good conversation. It was nice to have relaxing time away from Evet. We talked about politics and religion and relationships. We seemed to generally agree, so it was safe. We hit the sack early after a really long day...

---