Warriorbern on the Move

We have finally finished this workshop! There is just one more sleep before I will be winging my way home. There was more training offered to the participants this morning so I used the time to prepare all the data that needs to be handed in for the South African section of the Atlas. At least now I can go home and forget about this activity until the middle of January and I can get on with other things. My little Swahili friend went home yesterday so I had to amuse myself after the workshop ended yesterday. It was nice to have her here to keep me entertained for the time she was around but I have reached the point in the book I am reading where it is difficult to put it down so I was very occupied. To end for today and this trip here are a few photos:   The tide was really far out at lunchtime today!   The view of the hotel from the beach My view of the ocean from under a palm umbrella

It seems that we have covered all the required work in a far shorter time than was anticipated so today has been used as a day to train all the participants on some basic Geographic Information System (GIS) functions. These are things I learnt a long time back and the day has therefore, one the one hand, felt like a supreme waste of time but, on the other hand, I have been productive doing other work. I have had one ear listening in though just in case there were any tips that I would find beneficial. Last night I took my young friend for a short walk on the beach. It was astounding that the little thing was not keen to touch the shells at first but eventually I had her collecting EVERY shell on the beach. Soon though she tired of that and insisted that we rather go and have a swim in the pool. So insistent that even I could understand her Swahili! On our way back to the hotel we had to face the barrage of local guys on the beach but it was refreshing to not be the focus of their

After the meeting finished yesterday I retired to the pool and there I met Nimo's little daughter. We spent a wonderful two hours playing in the pool. Of course after that I was exhausted - 4 year old kids have far too much energy! The sun was still out when I got there and in that late afternoon sun I got a little bit sun burnt! I don't know how anyone survives in the pool through the heat of the day and yet they are there all day. After the swim I joined some of the other meeting participants for a beer on the lawn next to the beach. It really is the nicest place to sit because the breeze off the ocean is so cool. After drinks we headed off to dinner which was just a small variation on lunch: potatoes, rice, ugali (pap or phutu for South Africans), a spinach type vegetable and meat. The meat last night was oxtail stew and I was quite amused when the Italian consultant asked me, with a look of disgust on his face, if it was really the tail of the cow. He decided to give

I have received some remarks that I do not always say what it is I am doing so today,s blog will give just a brief idea about that. For the past five years I have been involved in a regional project called the South West Indian Ocean Fisheries Project which very basically was formulated to investigate the fisheries of our region and better understand the dynamics of the fisheries and the species that are caught. Now we are approaching the end of the project and we want to see as much of the fisheries and species information graphically on maps. This will give managers and scientists a better understanding of the regional distributions of the fisheries involved and how the species are connected across all the borders. The workshop I am at now aims at setting the basis on how these maps will be collated into an atlas. We are discussing things like was base information should be included (depths, sea surface temperatures, national boundaries in the ocean, etc), which fisheries shoul

Unexpectedly, I find myself doing one last trip for 2012 and returning to Mombasa, Kenya for the forth time this year. It is not the worst place to be visiting but it really is a bit of a mission to get here. Essentially Mombasa is about four and and half hour flight from Durban if there was a direct flight but yesterday it took me fourteen and a half hours to get here! My day started with a flight from Durban to Johannesburg which was delayed due to an excess (!) of birds on the runway. The question begs to be asked: What is an acceptable number of birds? Anyway we sat in the plane (Airbus A320) at the end of the runway while the airport officials chased the birds off the runway with a small vehicle. Eventually we were underway and the flight to Johannesburg was unusually smooth and the time spent on the birds was made up during the flight so we arrived at the original scheduled time. I had a two and a half hour wait between flights so I sauntered across from the domestic to