Full set of Mafia photos are here
Sarah loves lying on the beach in the sun. This is a sad irony for a redhead whose complexion would be more at home in the Scottish highlands extracting the maximum solar energy from the weak light at the extremities of the globe. The tropics has a different sun which bites when you cuddle it for too long. In Zanzibar too long was about ten minutes, even with a thick lathering of suncream (which by the way is incredibly difficult to come by in Africa. Obviously the locals don’t have much use for it but what about all the poor albinos and tourists? In Rwanda when we applied suncream to our arms, the local kids asked us if it was medicine). On tropical holidays Sarah invariably gets a heat rash. We used to have a theory that it was volcanic dust that triggered it as it has flared up in Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Hawaii where we visited volcanoes each time. That theory has been blown out of the water on this trip where extreme heat has been the only trigger for the bumpy rash that starts on Sarah’s thumbs and spreads, if not attended to carefully. Sarah nurses it with cortisone cream but the most effective treatment is to lie cold cans of drink on the rash. In Zanzibar Sarah bought three cans and a bottle of soft drink and rotated them in and out of the handy hostel fridge in reception. Picture her lying down for an afternoon nap or preparing for bed with her e-reader propped up on her legs and hands pinned down by cold drinks. Sarah becomes mildly obsessed by the rash, checking its condition often and scratching on occasion which brings exquisite temporary relief followed by more pain. I was beginning to get jealous of all the attention her red claws of death were getting when Sarah got a text message from her Mum, Jackie, with one line “Hi Sarah, how are the hands?”. The hands were pleased with this concern.
We now suspect that it is our malaria treatment, doxycycline, which is the issue. It has a side effect of making you more sensitive to the sun, which is a fairly large drawback for a drug that will mainly be used in the tropics. We’ve been on it since Ghana (December) and I guess the skin sensitivities are getting more pronounced. In Mafia Island the sun was incredibly harsh. Even by 9:30 in the morning it felt as though it was literally roasting the skin. Sarah just started covering herself in local cloth to try and hide but this negates the benefits of a beach holiday. We got a bit burnt on the second day on Mafia and that night it felt like light heat was pulsing out of our burns. Sarah got the staff to put wet towels in the freezer which she then placed on herself to get some sleep. It was stretching the English skills of the staff to ask “Could you get my wet towels from the fish freezer please?” I don’t think they teach that as a standard phrase in Swahili schools.
But despite spending most of our time sheltering from the sun, it was not all bad. The lodge we stayed at had a nice open-air bar on a cliff overlooking the blue water of the Indian Ocean where whale sharks frequently swim. We spent a good many hours lounging in the deck chairs there with our books. It was a shame that the lodge stuffed up our booking on the first night. We rang and booked a room with the manager Carlos, then sent a follow-up email confirming the booking which he replied to, saying that he would pick us up from the airport. When we rang to let him know that our flight had been delayed by thirty minutes he didn’t know us from a bar of soap. Sure enough, when we arrived at the airport he picked us up but then blamed someone else for giving our room away. Instead we were housed for the first night in a tent. Normally this wouldn’t worry us but the night was unbearably hot and the tent had one small hatch which did not let any air in. We sweltered through the night and stumbled out parched and tired in the morning.
The main reason for visiting was not the accommodation but the whale sharks. Mafia Island is famous for whale sharks and we jumped on a small local wooden fishing boat with two families also staying at the lodge to enact Moby Dick writ small.
The wooden boat was like a dhow with no sail, just a small outboard motor and a canvas roof. We had wisely taken some anti-nausea tablets which were miraculous in making the waters, rockier than off Zanzibar, bearable. We puttered around in lovely waters spotting dark patches of seaweed but absolutely no whale sharks. The only consolation was that we met someone in Rwanda who told us that she was on a boat that saw whale sharks but she was too slow in jumping in so missed swimming with them. We dropped some people off on the beach and travelled further south in the boat with JJ and his young son. JJ is a Dutch doctor who was working in rural Tanzania for a couple of years. He had some gruesome stories of the operating table which don’t bear repeating. Safe to say you don’t want to pick up any serious injuries in rural Africa.
We were a fair way out from shore and the waves increased in size as we went around a sandy point. Soon enough we were in sparkling turquoise water off the southern point of the island with a white sand beach. We dropped anchor and spent a great 45 minutes snorkelling around an offshore reef. There were big clams and some cute fish but, not wanting to sound like a snorkelling snob, we’ve had better (Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia tops the list).
It was the boat ride back that was the thrilling highlight of our time on the island. The swell had increased a lot while we had been snorkelling and now the small wooden boat was smacking down over the top of waves as we crested them. We were constantly being smashed by water coming over the side which was like have warm bathwater thrown over you, pleasant but annoying when it keeps happening. Sarah ran through her capsize procedure with me (strip naked, swim under and away from the boat) but my main concern was the small bag I had on board. As there were reviews of our hotel claiming that things had been stolen from the room I brought most of my valuables with me. Now my laptop, passport, kindle and wallet were being drenched in the bottom of a boat which was tilting precariously over the swells. The journey took forever with the small engine straining against the current and the boat-hand constantly bailing out water from the back of the boat. JJ’s young son was given a swimming mask to wear to stop the water getting in his eyes and eventually he got so cold that his Dad had to wrap him up in a hug.
We gratefully reached the shore absolutely drenched and waded back over the mangrove roots to the beach. My bag got damp but everything survived and we spent the next few days just nursing our burns and resting. We had been thinking about taking a boat from the island back to the mainland rather than the more expensive flying option, but the boats used for this purpose are relatively small and I’m sure jammed with people. It was also concerning that the boat mentioned in the guidebook, the MV Potwe, was lost. They were going to give us a call if it turned up but by that stage we had bought plane tickets for a flight back to Dar es Salaam. The Mafia Island airport is basic and intimate, comprising a long gravel runway and a couple of tiny, open air buildings – including a ‘waving bay’ for those bidding the plane farewell. The planes that ply this airport are necessarily small, mainly 12 seaters – well, 13 if you count the front seat next to the pilot, which we do because that is where I was seated on the flight over to the island. Sarah is a nervous flyer, which wasn’t helped by the plane’s call sign, but I think my presence in the cockpit gave her confidence, in spite of my lack of First Officer training.
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