Second week in Stonetown

Hi there! This is the first post by Floriaan.

We have moved in to our new apartment in Stonetown (right across the hall from the other one). The moving itself wasn’t such a hassle but since our cleaner mr. Ali isn’t a very good cleaner I spent half of the next day cleaning, chopping of palm leaves that grew into the living room, removing dust and cobwebs and spraying insecticide. But now the apartment is fresh and clean.

The night before we moved in we had a party with the Swedish girls that used to live there, since one of them went back to Sweden. So we went to the market and bought some fresh barracuda, cooked it in the oven with butter, parsley and wine, and ate it together with honey/sesame potatoes and homemade garlic bread. It was delicious! The food was also accompanied by a perfect punch made with fresh tropical fruits, served from a bucket.

The day after we planned to do our first real sampling, so we carried all the sampling stuff to the harbor and got on the boat that took us to a place called Mbweni. When we got there we found the seagrass we want pretty quick and set out our sample points. But then when we were about to start the visibility dropped. At a certain point you couldn’t see your own hand 10 cm from your face. We waited for a little bit in the hope conditions would improve, but alas that was not the case. We headed back empty handed and hoped that tomorrow would be better.

The next day we went to the harbor again, but the weather wasn’t much better. So now since we don’t have any samples we also don’t have any lab work. We now spend our time snorkeling at the beach nearby, organizing our sampling and practicing our methods.  We also went to the market a lot and we are getting better at bargaining for a fair price. And of course we sometimes go to any of the amazing bars or restaurants around here, like the sunset bar at Africa house(see pic)

We also spent one day as proper tourist going to Jozani national park. The park consisted of 3 parts: Monkeys, a mangrove and a forest. We paid a small entry fee and a guide first took us to see the monkeys. They were very playful and curious and came very close. You just had to be careful not to stand directly under them since they may poo or pee. Then we went into the mangrove part. This was very interesting because we heard a lot about the mangroves in that part of the Island during the tropical course at uni. And now one year later we were actually walking there ourselves. Last part was the forest with huge mahogany trees and plants none of us had ever seen before. After the tour we took the dala dala to the East coast to have a lunch and lay at the beach. We also went for a swim but this was a bit short due to a load of tiny Portuguese man of war(a type of jellyfish) in the water.

Today we hired a boatman to take us to prison Island, a popular tourist spot and one of our sample locations, to find the seagrass and try some of our methods. After a while we were done with the work for the day, so we went and snorkeled around the coral reef for a while. It was very beautiful with tons of colorful fish and other marine life. Then we got tired and decided to lay on the beach for a bit. When we got hungry we went into the private part of the Island to have some lunch. We had to pay an entrance fee but with this we could also go into the tortoise sanctuary where you could just walk between the giant tortoises. I now have a bit of a sunburn(even with the factor 50 protection) but it was totally worth it.