November 30, 2011
Last week we celebrated Thanksgiving on base. It is really hard to find most of the stuff to cook a good Thanksgiving meal here in Seychelles, such as turkey, sweet potatoes or pumpkin. However, we managed to cook a decent meal with a lot of desserts! It was quite a feast. With Sara we spent the whole afternoon also making “hand turkeys” for everyone on base, which is apparently what you do for Thanksgiving when you’re a little kid (I missed out!)
Friday and Saturday were pretty quiet days. On Friday me and a couple of other girls decided to go on an adventure south of the island. We took the bus and asked the driver to let us know when we arrived in Takamaka. He dropped us in the middle of nowhere, but we walked to the beach which was actually Anse Takamaka and it was great. It was very wild and the sea was roaring; these beaches remind me a lot of South Africa. We walked toward a little house and luckily, this little house was actually a bar right on the beach and we ended up having cocktails there.
On Saturday Emily and I stopped by the Blue Sea dive shop, where we will start working next week (so soon!) We met one of the skippers and one of the instructors, who is from Paris. We chatted a bit and he said I’ll definitely have an edge over the other dive masters since I can speak French. The shop is really well located, right on the beach, around some shops and a 5 minute walk from our house. We also stopped by the house since we know the current DM interns, and they gave us a little tour. We have a very nice patio outside with comfortable chairs – I’m pretty sure that’s where I’ll be every minute when not working. Saturday night was the usual night out at Lafaya and Tequila Boom.
On Monday we were FINALLY back in the water after a week of being dry. The sea was still a little rough but at least we could take the boats out. We continued our coral surveys, and as Nina, my dive buddy, and I were swimming around, we saw a WHALE SHARK!!!!!!!!!!!!! We dove with a whale shark!!!!! It was probably the last thing we were expecting to see since the season has been over for over a month and the season had been extremely bad. But yeah OH MY GOD we dove with a whale shark! I was clearing my mask so I looked up and here it was swimming above us! I banged on my tanks a couple times to get Nina’s attention and we tried to follow it but it was way too fast for us. It was a big guy, probably 5-6 meters long. By the time we gave up swimming after it, we bumped into the other divers but unfortunately for them, they did not see anything. I still cannot believe we dove with a whale shark! None of us had a camera, but we were definitely ecstatic for the rest of the day! These are photos from the whale shark we saw a couple weeks ago:
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