Alive and Now Able to Breath Underwater

Dear blog: Yes, it's been almost a month since I wrote to you, but we had a long detour from our "rough" travels to relax in South Africa. If I told you how many days we spent lazing at a nice cafe or just hiking up Table Mountain (well I did do it one day) in Cape Town, you'd be embarrassed for us I think. Nonetheless, we packed our bags regretfully and made it all the way up to Tanzania. And I'm glad that we did. Zanzibar is our home at the moment. We've just returned to the main city from 5 nights on the beach at Matemwe. For those interested we stayed at Nyota Beach Bungalows, which is actually a little nicer than they manage to make it look on their website. The beachfront room is definitely worth a little extra though Emilie successfully negotiated a small discount. Unfortunately, something of similar quality is much further out of our price range here in Zanzibar Town.

Now the job is to organize a safari on short notice and hopefully fly directly out of Zanzibar rather than needing to return to Dar Es Salaam. We spent two nights there and managed to see pretty much everything that I think there is to see in one afternoon. Not really, but we were mightily hassled trying to buy ferry tickets to Zanzibar and we were stopped by the police since apparently a known thief was following us. He seemed like a nice guy to me... Anyways, we're hoping to check out the Selous Game Reserve as we hear that it's very uncrowded but still amazing as opposed to the Serengeti. Unfortunately that means we'll miss Kilimanjaro and obviously the Serengeti itself, but I think I can safely say that I'd like to visit Tanzania again at some point.

Matemwe was an amazing beach. The sand was nearly white and really felt like powder... When you walked on the wet part as the waves came in and out it was really like walking on a sponge. The water was crystal clear, turquoise and warm. I was a bit amazed to see that a beach you might find in pictures really existed without a touch of digital enhancing. It's a bit upmarket, not a backpacker party beach as well which made our time even more relaxing and enjoyable. In the morning, you can walk along the beach and watch local women collecting seaweed that has collected near the shore. At night, you can see almost every star in the sky. The tide swallows all of the beach around dinner time, perfectly cleaning it up for the next day.

I spent almost all of my time at the beach learning to scuba dive. I am officially a PADI open water diver now, which means I've got 4 whole dives under my belt and about 10 hours of reading, video watching, and exams... This compared to my instructor that mentioned in passing an old piece of equipment that held up for his first 3000 dives or so. Anyways, it's a different universe underwater, and I'm glad that I can check it out now. It's a bit like flying and a bit like just being one of the fish, especially when you float a foot from a school of 100 or so. The diving at the beach was great I believe, and I'm told that the fish life here is among the best in the world. The second day even included a very brief snorkel with some dolphins that passed near our boat. Luckily our next stop is Egypt which supposedly is even better along the Red Sea.

Internet is slow and expensive here, so I'll keep "getting around" to uploading pictures... Baadaye!