Seychelles

Wednesday 27 November 2019

I was lucky and had a whole row of seats to myself, so managed to sleep on my 2am – 7am flight.

We landed in the Seychelles around 7am and were rather unlucky to have landed at the same time as an Air France. So the queue for passport was pretty long.

I had a taxi for the half hour drive to my hotel. Along the coast line, then across the jungle to the other side of the island. So pretty.

I was able to check in early. And have a shower and breakfast!

Then at 10am, off for a (free!) tour around the island.

I’m staying on Mahe island, which is the largest of the 115 islands of the Seychelles. The islands are made of granite – which results in the distinctive piles of granite rocks along some of the beaches.

We stopped at a couple of beaches. And a viewpoint across some of the nearby developed islands.

Then the botanic garden. This contained some coco de mer trees – these are native to the surrounding islands and are the largest coconut plant in the world. They also have some Aldabra giant tortoises here.

We walked around the capital – Victoria. This is the smallest African capital city. There were a couple of old buildings, part of the old port. And a fruit market. I bought some mangos and a papaya.

We stopped at a few more beaches on the north coast, lots of big granite rocks here. Really cool.

It was around 2.30pm by the time we got back. And time to go swimming! Although it was now raining.

And rained for the rest of the afternoon. So sadly no sunset.

Thursday 28 November 2019

Finally time to go diving. I’ve carried all my dive equipment around with me for the last month and haven’t been diving at all (mostly because Djibouti was cancelled).

There was quite a lot of faffing. So despite being asked to be at the the dive centre for 8.45am, we didn’t leave until nearly 10am.

And it was raining.

Because the weather had been bad, the sea was quite wavy. We couldn’t go far and ended up diving in the bay nearby.

It wasn’t very exciting. Lots of large granite rocks. And not a lot of fish.

A couple of stone fish. A large bumphead parrot fish. And that’s about it.

The second dive was at a reef. But it was all mostly dead. In 1998 the Seychelles had a large bleaching event where a around 90% of the reefs were killed. Apparently some have started to revive, but all the areas I saw were still dead.

It was quite a disappointing day of diving. I wanted some nice easy, pretty dives. But it was quite boring. And not very pretty.

And it rained for the rest of the day!

Friday 29 November 2019

Giving diving another chance.

Today we went to some more granite rocks, but a big further out into the ocean, away from the bay.

This was better. White tip sharks. Bat fish following us the whole dive. Leaf scorpion fish. A few small schools of fish.

I wasn’t going to do the second dive, as I was cold and i wasn’t overly impressed by the diving. But I was convinced. And actually it was the best out of the 4 dives that I had done. Some small patches of coral, which had started to regrow on the granite rocks.

And more rain all afternoon!

Every day, free food has been appearing in my room. But today, when I got back – there were vegan macaroons!! Incredible!! Wow.