Warriorbern on the Move

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

Our work day started with a review of the tasks still to be completed before the atlas can be finalised. It was clear that "workshop fatigue" had set in as only four of us were really participating in the discussions and two of those were the consultants responsible for producing the atlas. We finished everything though at around 11 am but everyone stayed on in the meeting room waiting for lunch. We had a little bit of light entertainment while waiting for lunch at the expense of our Malagasy colleague. We were all sitting quietly doing our own things when a very strange noise came out of the air conditioning vent in the ceiling. I said that it sounded like ice moving and that possibly Fabio and the Malagasy guy should move away. Fabio took my advice and moved his laptop and himself to a place at the table away from the vent but the Malagasy just stayed where he was. Five minutes later, with and almighty crash, a huge amount of ice fell out of the vent straight onto the

Day 2 of the workshop and it was not the most thrilling work-wise. We started off the day reporting back on    whether we had submitted all the promised national data to the consultants. All outstanding data was then to be prepared in the afternoon and submitted to the consultants. Since I am the teacher's pet (lol) I had submitted all the relevant South African data in December last year and I was, therefor, left with an afternoon of entertaining myself. I settled down and got to grips with putting together my presentation that I have to deliver on Tuesday. I am really hoping that we finish early tomorrow as one of my Tanzanian colleagues has offered to take me on a little walking tour of Dar. For now though you just get a few more photos from the hotel surrounds.  The neighbouring building to the hotel The hotel building - my room is on the fourth floor from the bottom of the photo.  The dinky little swimming pool that I have not been in yet - it is too cold!

It has been three years since I was last in Dar es Salaam and even then that trip cannot really be counted as I saw only the resort hotel I was staying at. This time I am staying and meeting at a hotel in the city centre called the Peacock Hotel. I am here for a follow up workshop on creating a fisheries atlas for the South West Indian Fisheries Project. Most of the dog work for this activity has already been done so it is just a case of reviewing what has been completed, writing some editorial stuff and supplying some additional spatial data. The trip up was not so bad. Durban to Johannesburg was a breeze. By the time we left Johannesburg though there were some pretty big storm clouds gathering around OR Tambo airport. Our pilot was, however, very good at dodging all the weather and even though the seat belt signs were kept on until we were passed Hoedspruit, it really wasn't all that bumpy. I was sitting next to a big strapping bloke who was going to work on a mine in Tanza

Our final day of sight-seeing was approached with a very laid back attitude. Maybe we had worn ourselves out over the previous two days but we decided that for our final day we would just take the bus. We looked into which bus did the longest route and had the shortest intervals between pickups and that was the one we took. Exiting the hotel   One of the statues on the way to the Colosseum   Constantine's Arch in the sunshine Decoration on one of the MANY churches The most convenient bus stop for us was at the Colosseum so we strolled down that way, bought our tickets and waited for the bus to come along. The sun was out and we enjoyed standing on the pavement, basking in the morning rays and chatting about nothing in particular. The bus arrived and we went up onto the top so that we could get a good view of what was going on. Wow, it was cold up there! The wind was icy and eventually we decided that we could not take it anymore and we moved downstairs.

We awoke yesterday morning to thunder and pouring rain but by the time we were ready to head off to the Colosseum the rain had eased to a fine drizzle. We ambled along the main street looking in the shop windows at all the interesting things on sale and then stopped alongside the Roman Forum to look at what was going on there. The rain started to fall again and we very stupidly ignored an umbrella salesman when he offered us umbrellas to buy. By the time we reached Constantine's Arch it was pouring again. Fortunately the queue to get in the Colosseum was not very long and it was undercover so we were fine. We also spent quite a bit of time inside the passageways so we were dry but when we wanted to have a look at the area in the centre it was so miserable. We ducked from archway to archway to try and keep as dry as possible but it really wasn't the nicest of visits. We eventually gave up on the Colosseum and decided to go and have an earl