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Getting high by going low
Posted by Squiffy on June 18th, 2008
Whilst Dave was doing his basic Open Water Diver, I decided after my previous 15-20 dives, it was about time I challenged myself and took the Advanced course. I wanted to gain the skills to feel more comfortable underwater, and besides, it was one of my goals for this trip.
To qualify, I had to do five ‘adventure’ dives which included peak performance buoyancy, fish identification, naturalist (doesn’t involve swimming naked) and navigation. The one dive that I was a bit apprehensive about was the deep dive to 30m. For those of you who no nothing about diving, after 25m, some people experience nitrogen narcosis, which can include symptoms such as euphoria, confusion, memory loss and generally going a bit crazy. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the experience.
To demonstrate the effects of deep diving, my instructor had me do a timed task at surface level, and then repeat the task on the bottom to see how much longer it took. He wrote the numbers one to twenty in words in a random pattern and I had to point to them in order. Easy enough. As we descended past 25m I did begin to feel a little confused and giggly. Once on the bottom, Ross gave me the slate with the numbers on. As I looked it I felt very confused – the words weren’t right. I tried turning the slate upside down but they still didn’t make any sense. I realised then that words were back-to-front, and thinking that the slate was perhaps made of glass (it was obviously plastic) I turned it over to see if that would help.
The truth is, Ross, egged on by his fellow instructor Peter, had actually written the words back-to-front to make me think I was going crazy. They got the result they wanted! I tried to do the task anyway, giggling all the way through it, and got to sixteen but just couldn’t see seventeen. I knew it began with an ‘s’ but couldn’t concentrate any longer and gave Ross the ‘I give up’ I sign. He laughed and asked me to check my how much air I had left. I gave him the signal for ’90 bar’ (out of 200) and we ascended slightly to finish the dive. After a few minutes and as the effects wore off, I looked at my air and realised that I now had ‘100’ left, so I must have had more than 90 on the bottom – proof that I did go somewhat crazy and confused. Although I felt very tired afterwards, the dive itself wasn’t as scary as I thought it might be and I did enjoy feeling like an extra in James Bond with my big dive computer strapped to my wrist (I’m sure it had a laser gun function).
We’ve seen loads of stuff underwater here including lion and scorpion fish (both poisonous), big angel fish, moray eels, trumpet fish, squid, trigger fish, various nudi branches and loads of corals. It’s a great place to dive, although getting a little cold now at 26c in the water (two wetsuits required!).
Now that I’ve completed all the necessary dives I qualify as an Advanced Open Water diver and feel much more comfortable in the water. One travel goal achieved – yeay!
Filed under Tanzania • 5 comments »
Kendwa Beach: The world’s most beautiful men
Posted by daveb on June 17th, 2008
It’s not often that two of the three world’s most beaufitul men are to be found in the same place as each other. Sadly the third most beautiful man, Fabio couldn’t make it as he is currently undergoing reconstructive surgery after having his nose broken whilst on a rollercoaster by a seagull flying into him (do a Google search, if you don’t believe me!). I mean, what are the chances of that happening?
Alas, it’s just Peter and I. Peter is my Swedish diving instructor and probably the most beautiful man I will ever see without looking in the mirror. Claire describes him a a blonde Johnny Depp and cannot stop gawping at him, even though she is being taught by a completely different instructor, Ross, who is also a beach-glazed hunk–obviously, it goes with the job–coincidentally from Leicester.
Rather than soak up the sun on Kendwa’s white sandy beach as bikini-clad girls swagger by, Claire and I decided instead to learn to dive with the highly-regarded (and rightly so) Scuba Do diving school on Kendwa Beach. I spent four days working towards my PADI Open Water diver certificate, which allows me to undertake basic dives, and Claire furthered her experience to achieve an Advanced Open Water certificate, which she’ll want to tell you about separately.
I’m happy to report that with Peter’s excellent–no, beautiful–instruction, I passed the tests with flying colours and had a lot of fun in so doing. Zanzibar is purportedly one of the premier dive locations in the world; the aquatic life is so varied and colourful. Immersing yourself in it is like being in a different world. Claire took some underwater photos on her film camera and we’ll upload them here once we’ve had them developed.
A big thank you to the team at Kendwa Beach’s Scuba Do dive school — Christian, Peter, Ross, Dan, Ahmed et al. You might find a cheaper alternative, but I doubt very much that you’ll find a more professional, friendly and experienced one in Africa.
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Kendwa Beach, Zanzibar: Idyllic tropical beach.
Posted by daveb on June 16th, 2008
The lack of power is the talk of the island. Rastafarian’s are slinking past me on the beach complaining that “It’s dark, mon.”
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, so maybe his sunglasses are a shade too dark.
Following a ghastly pot-holed, suspension-busting dirt track, complete with lush, tropical leaves smacking against the windscreen of our beaten-up taxi, we checked into a ‘simple’ room in Kendwa Rocks hotel — chosen over the others as they run their electricity generator later into the night (to spin the ceiling fan for essential cooling).
The beach here is beautiful and I love the handmade huts, benches, beds and hammocks that dot the coastline. Here are a few pictures to make you go green with envy!
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Stonetown: A spicy birthday on Zanzibar
Posted by Squiffy on June 13th, 2008
No lie in for me on my birthday (the last of my twenties-eek). I was awoken from my sleep in a grand and traditional Zanzibari bed to open my cards, followed by a quick breakfast on the hotel roof terrace, before we made a mad dash around the ubiquitous travel agencies to find the best and most reasonably priced spice tour. As Zanzibar is (was?) famous for its spice trade, this was something many people had recommended to us, but Dave was more keen than I as I don’t like spicy food! Anyway, as Dave hadn’t had much of a birthday with all the travelling, I agreed we should go.
We were collected by the famous Mr Mitu’s driver and driven to a plantation in the centre of the island. Our guide took us round the different plants and showed us what spices really look like in the wild. We were given the opportunity to smell and taste a variety including cloves and cinnamon (the two main exports), vanilla, ginger and tumuric, as well as trying exotic fruits such as jack fruit, lychees and star fruit. I declined to try some of the weirder looking things, but did make use of the ‘lipstick plant’, as you’ll see from the photos.
At the close of the tour we were invited in to a local’s house where a meal of rice and coconut vegetable sauce had been prepared for us, using some of the spices we had seen earlier. It was actually very good.
Later that evening it was my turn to chose what to do, so we reserved the best table at the Freddie Mercury restaurant which overlooks the sea and is a great spot to watch the sunset. Freddie was born on Zanzibar, and as I’m a fan of Queen music and sea views, it was a fitting place to go to enjoy a pizza and pina colada as the sun went down. They even played Happy Birthday for me (not a Queen version, sadly). After dinner we had to negotiate the scarily dark alleys of Stonetown to get back to our hotel – they really do need to get this electricity problem sorted! (Our hotel’s generator has kicked in as I type, meaning I now have light and a fan).
So, all in all, a day to remember for my last 20-something birthday. Thanks to everyone who sent cards and messages x
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Zanzibar has no electricity. It’s dark, mon.
Posted by daveb on June 11th, 2008
We’re on the beautiful, tropical island of Zanzibar, a couple of hours off the coast of mainland Tanzania. The island has no [permanent] electricity right now. Apparently the single oil-cooled underwater cable recently leaked and burnt-out. It’s a highly specialised cable and will take months to replace — not even the renowned African ingenuity can save the day! Consequently, no-one on the island has reliable power.
So what does this mean to us and you?
For us, it principally means that everything is more expensive than it should be. To put the lights on, the hotels and restaurants are running generators for a few hours each evening, and thus burning expensive diesel (I certainly don’t need to remind you how expensive petrol is right now). These costs are being passed-on to the consumer (that’s us) and so most things are more expensive than they should be: My two international cost benchmarks, beer and internet, cost double here when compared with the mainland. The supermarkets (supermarkets? Yeah right!) have no food at all and so we have to eat at one of the two restaurants with generators.
For you, it explains why our blog posts have taken such a long time to surface; our blog comment and e-mail response will also be poor in the near-term.
Welcome to Africa, where nothing can be taken for granted and everything changes in a moment.
PS: The hotel’s generator just conked out and all of the desktop computers around me survived for about thirty seconds on the [link]uninterruptable power supply[link], but my laptop carries on regardless — yay for laptop batteries!
PPS: Not that I can publish this post at time of writing, as the internet service is down — presumably the service provider can’t generate enough power either. “Maybe tomorrow it will work”, is the present estimated time-to-fix…
PPPS: The diners in the restaurant opposite us are now trying to locate the morsels of food on their plates in complete darkness, without music, whilst the waiters are busy trying to find some candles… This is hilarious. And very dark too. (Notwithstanding my bright laptop screen which is now drawing a lot of attention — dimming the screen in an attempt to remain inconspicuous.)
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Birthday on a boat to Zanzibar
Posted by daveb on June 9th, 2008
I awoke on my (daveb’s) birthday to a nice handful of birthday cards, which I opened in bed, under the mosquito net. Thanks to everyone who sent me cards and birthday messages in e-mail and Facebook — I’ve not had a chance to personally respond to any of them yet as Internet from where I’m currently typing is both patchy and expensive; I’ll explain why in another blog entry…
Breakfast by the beach was a treat too. My dahling Squifter had sneakily had a personalised birthday cake made for me, which was presented by the beaming hotel staff just after I had thrown a couple of oddly-green eggs down my neck. Lord knows how Claire managed to arrange this in such a short amount of time, although I reckon the fact that the outer icing was actually shaving foam, had something to do with it — we had a good giggle at this. The chocolate-flavoured sponge on the inside was delicious though.
Rather than spend the day slumming around on the beach, we decided to pack-up and head for the tropical island of Zanzibar, in search of even whiter sands and bluer water (no mean feat, when you consider this current beach just south of Dar Es Salaam). We donated the rest of the cake to the hotel staff and caught taxis and a river-ferry to get to port.
Our guidebook indicated that the touts at the mainland ferry port and upon arrival in Stonetown (also called Zanzibar Town) would be most forceful. And so as we came to a rolling-stop in the taxi at the port, three touts already had forced their heads, sideways, through the half-lowered window in the cab and proceeded to hard-sell us bogus ferry tickets. So we wound the window up an inch to lock them in place and exited via the other door. (Just kidding, but I wish that I had thought of that at the time!)
From my point of view, I really didn’t find the touting all that bad. Certainly, having spent a month in Morocco has helped me understand appropriate techniques for dealing with this crowd, and you might be surprised to learn that meeting them with equal or greater force is not the most effective way to resolve/dissolve the situation. I think it’s fair to say that Claire found it a little difficult and so we crossed the road and took refuge on the shady steps of a church, where we met an apparently friendly gospel singer who wanted nothing more than polite conversation and, yes you’ve guessed it, financial sponsorship.
I left Claire on the steps and had another go at buying tickets without my backpack on my back (the previous tickets that we had bought, were for a ferry that had already gone at the time of sale!). All in all, it had taken us about five hours to travel about ten kilometres to get this far, but now we could finally board a boat. Being Africa, the first boat that we got on was declared overcrowded (it really wasn’t) and so we had to decant to another boat. After a further two hours of bobbing up and down, we arrived in Stonetown, Zanzibar and paid a small premium to acquire a taxi driver inside the ferry terminal to take us directly to our hotel, thus neatly avoiding having to deal with any touts, called ‘papasi’ here, outside the gate — if you’re already a paying fare, the papasi won’t touch you.
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South Beach, Dar Es Salaam: Relaxing into our trip
Posted by Squiffy on June 5th, 2008
Our budget hotel, Sunrise Beach Resort, is lovely. For the first two nights here we had a sea view wooden bungalow on the beach, from where we could hear the waves crashing onto the sand. This bit of luxury was due to the manager booking out all the standard rooms and then trying to charge us extra for an upgrade – but he should have known better than to try that trick with us and of course ended up giving us the better room at no extra cost. Tonight we’ve been downgraded as a standard room has become available…it’s still fine it’s just that now, rather than hearing the waves we can hear the awfully bad live singer at the bar, pumping out an eclectic mix of Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’ and Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman, No cry’.The food is good, although the first two pages of the menu are all Indian much to my disappointment and Dave’s delight.
We’ve spent a couple of days relaxing on the white sandy beach, drinking local beer and fresh coconut milk from the shell, reading the free papers from the Emirates flight and taking a dip in the warm Indian Ocean (although the locals think it’s much too cold for that!). Yesterday afternoon we ventured into the village and took our first dalla-dalla, a local minibus that makes Moroccan grand taxis look positively roomy. There must have been 24 people in a vehicle made for half that number and we stood with our heads touching the ceiling and hanging on wherever we could. Unfortunately, there was no chance we could get a photo! We’d gone in search of an ATM, which we duly found, but the machine rejected our cards straight away, hopefully not an indicator of things to come. Whilst in the village we stopped at the local stationery store to buy a supply of pens and a Tanzanian SIM card for our phone. The vendors all seemed happy to help, if a little bemused by us and our requests.
We came close to buying a Toyota Hi-Lux 4×4 with tent on the roof earlier today from a South African couple who are flying home and want to sell their vehicle. We were in two minds but when they finally decided on a price it was too much for us and we had to turn them down, reluctantly, as we both loved the car and have this romantic notion of driving Africa and sleeping on the roof. Whilst a Landrover is really the dream for me, this car was very sexy (Take note Jeremy Clarkson: this is the only time you’ll hear me refer to a car in this way). So it’s public, sweaty, cramped transport for us, beginning tomorrow with a ferry to Zanzibar.
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Africa: Leaving home, again
Posted by daveb on June 2nd, 2008
On the day, our apprehension had mostly turned to excitement. After six weeks of preparation (and we still don’t know our route!), we left the UK aboard an Emirates flight destined for Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, albeit with a connecting flight in Dubai. I couldn’t believe my luck at the departure gate in Heathrow – a well-stocked complimentary newspaper and magazine stand for patrons of the plane. I filled my proverbial boots.
Compared with the Sleazyjet-fayre that we’ve flown with in recent years, an Emirates jumbo jet is very luxurious, even in economy class:
- TV embedded into the headrest in-front with two movie channels, forty video games to play and the obligatory comedy channel with Friends for Claire.
- Hot meals. I was particularly pleased with the lamb biriyani and the mango chicken curry; Claire was less so, as she hates Indian cuisine!
- Free drinks.
- Blankets and pillows.
- Reclining seats with pockets.
- Distinctive lack of drunk, fat, abusive and obnoxious tourii with shorn heads and tattooed backs-of-necks. (Granted, there was one drunk, English bloke shouting obscenities into the air as we landed, but he was well dressed and groomed.)
Whilst the connecting flight from Dubai to Dar Es Salaam had equally impressive food as the jumbo, I have to complain that the leg room was really poor for a five hour journey. Claire found the leg room to be inadequate for her diminutive pins, so you can imagine how it felt for a bloke who is about a foot taller. Having said that, we were sat next to a couple of nice people on the plane, both of whom were experienced travellers, had been to Tanzania a number of times and imparted some useful location information to us.
After landing in Dar Es Salaam and pushing our way through the disorganised immigration checkpoints, we were happily greeted by our hotel’s welcome wagon to whisk us away to the South Beach area, a little way outside the gritty city limits.
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A is for Africa… and for Apprehension
Posted by daveb on May 27th, 2008
We’ve spent the last month of our journey back in the glorious United Kingdom. I (daveb) have spent most of my time in South Wales with family and friends, albeit with a short interlude in London to catch-up with more people and sort out our visas for Tanzania. Claire, on the other hand, has been staying with her parents in Leicestershire and has been out winning bread for the next leg of the journey. We’ve not blogged too much as we didn’t want to bore you with our every day life, so apologies to anyone that has been checking back each day, to find relatively few updates of late (note: you can subscribe by RSS or e-mail and let the updates come to you instead!).
We’re less than twenty-four hours away from stepping onto our Emirates aeroplane, which after a further fourteen hours, will drop us off in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania in proper Africa.
How are we feeling?
Don’t ask Claire. She’s curled up in a ball next to me on her parents’ sofa recovering from the effects of general anaesthesia, a malaria tablet and a cholera vaccine. I’m convinced that the cholera vaccine is mostly to blame for her state; I took mine a few days ago and still have a headache and aching tiredness.
I’m looking forward to our adventure across proper Africa. I’ve never sat on a proper paradise island beach like Zanzibar. I’ve never seen proper wildlife. And I’ve certainly never spent three months proper backpacking across developing nations where poverty and disease are the norm (apparently RV’ing across the USA in a luxury 36-foot motorhome doesn’t qualify as proper backpacking and nor does crossing Western Europe in a small camper van).
If the truth be told, I’m also quite apprehensive of Africa. On top of the normal pre-flight nerves, I’m also troubled by the stories in the media and those which concerned friends and family bring-up in polite conversation. I was positively outraged at the “advice” that we were given by an STA Travel consultant in London recently — I won’t reprint such horrific scaremongering propaganda here as I refuse to further distribute such claptrap. On the flip side, we got in touch with some fellow travellers who had actually been to Africa (the STA Travel consultant had not) and got a different (more pleasant) viewpoint from them.
From past experience, all I know is this:
“The fear of the thing is usually much worse than the thing itself.”
(David Bartlett, claimed after searching through five pages of a Quotations Page search.)
I’ll let you know how we get along.
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Making money while travelling?
Posted by daveb on April 29th, 2008
I’m back in the UK and enjoying a well deserved rest in-between Morocco and continuing planning for our sub-Saharan African adventure. Rather than eat chewing gum for the mind, I’m turning my thoughts towards ways of making money while travelling to help us continue to fund our trip.
When I originally put this Website together, I had delusions of grandeur: Thousands of people from all over the world, travelling vicariously with us, clicking adverts and buying products from our partners as they go — our partners pay us a small commission each time a purchase is made, without affecting the price paid by our readers. Alas, the reality thus far has been somewhat different. In fact, we’ve not yet hit the minimum payout amounts required by any of our partners — although we’re getting close in with Amazon and Google. We still have some way to go before Expedia, Lastminute and Hostelbookers open their wallets to us!
I should have thought a bit harder about my audience before spending a lot valuable time setting up partnerships and affiliations with advertisers for, what is essentially, a personal journal. After all, other than family and friends wanting to keep in touch with us, who’s actually going to read just another personal travel blog?
And so, my mind now boggles over all the opportunities out there to make money and travel. Some would say that it’s impossible to make money and travel at the same time: You’re either doing one, or the other. I’m not sure that I agree with this view. For instance, I just sold my first photo on Fotolia while I was sleeping!
Here’s a few other ideas that came to my mind during a quick brainstorm:
- Teach English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) — alright, Claire’s already doing this!
- Write travel articles for magazines and Websites (this one included).
- Review hotels, hostels and restaurants.
- Crew on a yacht or cruise, for a free/reduced cost ride.
- Repair/upgrade the computers belonging to fellow travellers and locals.
- Become a tourist tout — I’m joking, folks.
There are a lot of websites out there from people working while they travel. And some of them are making more money than they did with a regular day job. However, upon further investigation it appears that the vast majority of these folks are reliant on their major income coming in the form of remote freelance work. They tend to stay in one place for a few months at a time and work a few days a week. I can see that this life is a good one, however at the moment Claire and I are bouncing from place to place on a daily, or at least weekly, basis and don’t want to change that; else we’ll never get around the globe! So what I’m trying to figure out is whether it’s possible to continue travelling at our fast pace, changing our location often (with all the organisation that it takes) and make a couple of quid on the side to put the occasional plate of food in our bellies.
Do you have any ideas that we could use to make money while travelling?
When I’ve got enough plausible and feasible ideas, I’ll even write an e-book to help others too.
Filed under Thoughts • 5 comments »