Warriorbern on the Move

I like Zanzibar and always have since my first visit here in the late 1990s. It definitely has a certain charm and the sunsets every evening are unbelievably beautiful. The only downside for me is the constant hassling on the streets by touts trying to sell me a spice tour or a trip to Prison Island or a taxi. The constant "Hello", Jambo", "Mambo", "Habari", "Hakuna matata" all get rather irksome after a while too. Nowhere else in the world do I get greeted by so many strangers. Fortunately I don't really have to deal with this for long because, since I am working here, the only time I am on the streets is when I walk to work and back and, when I am sitting in my favourite restaurant, Livingstone's, there is very minimal harassment. What really helps to make my stay in Stonetown so relaxing is that I stay in a fantastic little locally owned hotel called Abuso Inn . It has huge bedrooms which are safe and clean, hot water and fr

It is incredible how quickly the time disappears when you are busy. I find it hard to believe that I am almost ready to leave Grand Comoros, it almost feels like I just got here. The flight over here was really uneventful but it was long and having left the hotel at 3:30 in the morning, I was finished by the time I arrived just after midday. At least on the way I got one of the best views of Mount Kilimanjaro ever. It really was amazing! On arrival, I had to get a visa. It is a little bit of a back to front method here. I got stamped into the country and then applied for the visa. Fortunately I was getting a diplomatic visa (the perks of working with the government) so there wasn't much chance of the visa not being approved. My friend and helper here in Grand Comoros, Fatouma, was also there to smooth the way for me. I got the visa and the next stop was Customs but there wasn't any trouble there either. After finding out why I was in the Comoros and that I didn&#

My time in Kenya is rapidly approaching an end for this trip. Tomorrow morning, before the crack of dawn, I will be on my way to the Comoros. Despite having 24 hours of not feeling very well in the week, I have enjoyed the stay here and it has been capped off with a very relaxing weekend. Yesterday, after breakfast, I took a walk to the local shopping mall. It is about a 30 minute brisk walk from the hotel along a flat road. The walk was really good except for all the taxis stopping to see if I wanted a ride and some men sitting on the sides of the road trying to start up conversations with me. I spent some time wondering around the mall looking at all that is on offer and then purchased a few things to get through the weekend (mainly water). The walk back was a bit better because no taxis offered me any rides but one strange guy (not a taxi) did want me to get a lift with him. I just laughed and said no thanks and he zoomed off, music blaring, down the road. I got back the h

It isn't often that I get sick and since I started travelling in East Africa in 2005 I had only been sick once (a small case of food poisoning) but now I can say I have been sick twice. On Tuesday evening my entire alimentary canal staged a protest. Somewhere I had picked up a bug. The trouble with these trips is that there really is no time to be ill. So despite having had a very uncomfortable night and getting absolutely no sleep, the work had to go on. Wednesday was a very long day. Fortunately by the time I went to work there was nothing left in me eject and I could get through the day with my dignity intact. The work went very well yesterday and we are left with only six fisheries to review today. This means that the workshop will finish a day early. It will be good to have a day to work on other projects and not have to go anywhere in a taxi. These trips to and from KMFRI have been quite interesting because the taxi drivers, in their efforts to avoid the traffic, ha

Here I am on the road again after a good but busy week at home. My flights to Mombasa were pretty good but just really long. A direct flight from Durban to Mombasa (if there was such a thing) would be in the region of about four and a half hours but with the routing through Johannesburg and then Nairobi, I spent about 10 hours getting there. I was so disappointed because I didn't get to see Kilimanjaro en route. There was just too much cloud cover that was high enough to blanket Africa's highest mountain. I have a few more opportunities on this trip to see it in flyby so hopefully the weather will be in my favour on at least one of the flights. The final flight of the day landed in Mombasa at around six thirty in the evening, just in time to catch the "rush hour" traffic. There was nothing rushing about it but I shouldn't complain because traffic going in the opposite direction was at a complete standstill for kilometres and kilometres! It took over an hour

After a wonderful evening and night spent with my friends, Jo and Diets, in Johannesburg, I boarded an Air Seychelles Airbus A330-200 to fly from Johannesburg to Mahé Island in the Seychelles. I was so relieved to find that Air Seychelles have replaced their ancient Boeing 767-200s with these new Airbuses. The five hour flight was not bad at all and we had quite a smooth landing which makes a change from the way we used to slam into the runway before. I had asked for a window seat on this flight and the only one available was situated at the rear of the plane which meant I was last off the plane and last in the queue to go through immigration. I am carrying a food supplement with me to make up for my rather poor diet on this trip and I debated long and hard with myself about whether to declare it on entry into Seychelles. Eventually I decided that I should mark on the Customs form that I have a plant derivative in my bag and then see what happened. Well, nothing happened! The Customs

My stay in Tana has come to an end. It has been a very productive time but also somewhat boring with no outside excursions. The workshop finished up on Thursday afternoon with some very intense discussions around the information that has been entered for Madagascar. It really is fantastic to see people so passionate about getting things correct. They are very enthusiastic about WIOFish and even asked if it was not possible to have these workshops twice a year! Even I think that I could not manage doing this whole roadshow twice a year and I suspect there would be mutiny at home LOL. Yesterday I had the first of my "normal" work days on this trip. Due to financial reasons the workshops were all made one day shorter than previously but because of flight availability and an unwillingness (quite rightly) to work on weekends, I have these spare days that I have to use for work too. So I spent the day doing the analyses on the freshly entered Malagasy data. It is really amazi

I have embarked on my annual tour of the countries of the western Indian Ocean to update the fisheries information stored in the WIOFish database which I manage. First stop this year is Antananarivo (Tana), Madagascar. While I work with some great people here, this is my least favourite stop since it is the only workshop that is held nowhere near the sea. If feels quite ridiculous to be discussing marine fisheries when we are approximately 145 km away from the ocean. The financial constraints of the project dictate that the workshop should be held here though because this is where the fisheries ministry, and hence the people required for the workshop, is based. My trip here from Durban was fairly uneventful thank goodness. There was a half-hour delay leaving Johannesburg as Airlink had to swap planes as there was a problem with the one originally selected for the flight. Some of us had already gone through the boarding process and were sitting on the bus waiting for the transfer

Here is the final blog from my trip to Tanzania. I was unable to post it in Tanzania due to a lack of internet connectivity but as the saying goes ... better late than never! The day for going home has finally arrived and I am really looking forward to seeing my family and pets again. This has been a good trip though and it certainly ended on a high note for me. Yesterday was the final event in the series and it was the SWIOFP Donor Awareness Conference. The purpose of this conference was to showcase to the donors of the region some of the research that has been completed under the South West Indian Ocean Fisheries Project and also to expose the researchers to the funding initiatives that are available to them. In typical African style it started an hour late because the Deputy Permanent Secretary, who was to open the proceedings, arrived late. Things eventually got started with some traditional dancers entertaining us in the hall, followed by some short addresses by various gu

I thought that it would be another blog-less day as we have had an Internet drought most of the day but fortunately the connection has been restored, just before a major riot broke out. It is amazing how dependent we have become on the Internet to keep in touch with the world. It certainly does make my life less lonely while I am travelling. Yesterday we finished the first meeting, the end of project meeting. I have to say that these two days were characterised by the most spectacularly bad chairing of a meeting I have ever experienced. It really is terrible when the chair just loves the sound of his own voice! And to add to the problem, he was rude to other participants and when there were discussions he allowed them to meander all over the place letting everything go over the time allocated. As a result of this there was no time for me to give my presentation and it has been moved to Friday. Amazingly (or not) the chair did not inform me of this and just skipped over my slot. L

Yesterday was moving day. The Fisheries Atlas Workshop was concluded on Saturday at lunchtime and so we had to vacate our hotel rooms on Sunday morning and move to an area on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, called Kunduchi. We are here for a series of three back to back meetings. The first is the end-of-project meeting for the South West Indian Ocean Fisheries Project (SWIOFP), the second is a special sitting of the South West Indian Ocean Fisheries Commission (SWIOFC) and the final meeting, at which many of us are presenting the outputs of our projects, is a Donor's Meeting which is held to show the funding agencies what their money produced. The hotel that we are now residing in is located right on the beach and the views are really stunning. The hotel itself is newly renovated and we are its guinea pigs i.e. its first guests after re-opening. They are still sorting out some logistic facilities but overall it is very nice. The food is really good and, besides spending the ent