June 21 - Tanzania: Zanzibar and Dar-Es-Salaam
Deep Dive
It's 11:00AM on June 21, and I'm writing the daily journal because we've already had the most amazing day! Jon and I woke up at 6:00 to go to the dive shop (Zanzibar One Ocean www.zanzibaroneocean.com - best dive shop on the island!), where we met with one other diver to do a deep dive. For those of you non-scuba divers, most dives are fairly shallow - around 13-18 meters (30-40 feet). You have to have Advanced Open Water training to go very deep, which Jon and I have. So we arranged yesterday to do this dive because the dive masters said we would never see anything like it again. They were SO right.
The wreck we went to is a wreck that only this dive shop knows about, and they try to keep it as secret as possible. They call this the "deep wreck" because they don't know its name or any history about it, but it's at 40 meters and has been there for at least 50 years. The four of us (3 divers and Xavier (Chubby) the dive master) descended slowly so we could equalize well and got to the bottom in just a few minutes. Chubby took us over the wreck and we saw the most amazing sights we've ever seen. It was like swimming in an aquarium.
The wreck itself was covered with coral and hundreds and hundreds of small, colorful fish. But that's nothing compared to what was around the wreck. Everywhere we looked there were schools and schools of huge fish swimming around us. Gigantic mackerel, batfish, lionfish and 10-11 cobias that were at least 1 meter long. I felt like I was watching an episode of the Discovery Channel. At one point, I just stopped and stood on the ocean floor and turned around and around. There were fish absolutely everywhere! The batfish are especially curious and followed us all around. All we had to do was turn to see them. There are apparently 3 grouper that live there, but it was a little early in the day for them to come out. (late night last night for them) Xavier says that they're about 3 meters long and weigh up to 200kg. That's a lot of grouper! I wish I had a picture to describe this, as I know I haven't done it justice in only a few paragraphs.
Since the dive was so deep, we only stayed on the bottom for about 16 minutes before we had to begin ascending slowly. We made decompression stops at 20 meters, 12 meters, 9 meters, 6 meters, and 3 meters. The beautiful batfish followed us up for as far as they could, but left us somewhere between 9 and 6 meters. At 6 meters, we could look up and see shrimp swimming just below the surface and a few jellyfish. At 3 meters, we saw that it was pouring rain outside, and spent the decompression time looking up at the raindrops on the waves. The entire experience was phenomenal.
So now we're packing to leave. We'll catch the ferry and go back to our campsite at Dar-Es-Salaam. I'm sure that nothing exciting will happen for the rest of the day (at least, compared to the morning), so this is it for today's journal. When we leave Dar-Es-Salaam, we probably won't get to an Internet Cafe until Nairobi, which is a week away. Hope you all have a good week!
Later.....
Solar Eclipse
OK... I wrote the above paragraph much too soon. I'd forgotten about the solar eclipse, which is almost as exciting as the morning's deep dive, but not quite. We boarded the ferry at 1:00 and it took about 2 hours to get there. They did show "The Fugitive" which was nice, but I hardly noticed since I'd turned a little green. Jon wants me to mention that I did more than turn green and that I left the boat a little lighter, but I survived.
When we got onto the dock at 4:00, the solar eclipse had already begun. We knew about the eclipse when we were planning the trip, because many tour companies were charging more for overland treks that were in southern Africa today. The eclipse was only partial in Tanzania, but it was a full eclipse in countries further south. We layered sunglasses one on top of another so we could see it happening. And Brenden (the Aussie) took out some film negatives so we could look through the negatives at the sun as well. It was cool, and was over by about 5:00.
Silver Sands Campsite
We camped again in Dar-Es-Salaam at the same place we camped before Zanzibar - right on the beach. There's a nice breeze this time which is good because last time it was insufferably hot. Jon and I sat on the beach in some comfy chairs and watched little sand crabs burrowing in and out of their holes. We also tried to point out certain constellations but all we could remember were the Big Dipper and Orion.
The Gang at the bar
After dinner, Brendon (the guide) told us that the tide had moved out significantly, and that we could see some cool stuff on the coastline if we wanted to walk out to see. So we followed him and Vanessa out, and were amazed at how far the water had gone out - at least 1km. There were a few inches of water in some places, but it was mostly just wet sand. Unfortunately, there also wasn't much of anything to see and we kept walking out and the mud got mushier and mushier until it became quicksand. Seriously. Our feet were sucked in and the more we struggled, the deeper and deeper we were sucked in. It was so weird. So after a while of struggling with the quicksand, we all decided that it was much to bizarre to remain any longer and made our way back to the shore to go to bed.
Jon and the Aussies in quicksand (note that you can't see their feet!)