Home » Tanzania Mozambique » Eastern Africa - part 1

August 22
Mocambique
I travelled alone for the first time in ages. North to Pemba, but soon met up again with some Spanish friends and Niklas from Sweden who is a really big ska music fan and has his own web fanzine.

Eastern Africa - part 1

Stevemonty
2005-09-23 18:53:09

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August 22
Mocambique
I travelled alone for the first time in ages. North to Pemba, but soon met up again with some Spanish friends and Niklas from Sweden who is a really big ska music fan and has his own web fanzine.
Wimbe beach in Pemba has long long palm fringed white sand beaches, cyan coloured water in a surf protected bay and some of the best coral reefs in the world. I stayed here at the laid back Russel's camp. Although most of my time here I spent wandering back and forward to the Pemba Dive shop on the beach. Huge lobster and chips in Pemba costs $3.
http://www.pembamagic.com

I dived here 5 times with Brenda, two geologist proffessors from JoBurg and a teacher from Galicia. It's literally a coral garden here. Flimsy paper fish in cave openings, sea cucumber snakes, a playful lion fish, a giant lobster that tickled Brenda's ears with it's tentacles and 2 rarely seen large octopus with tentacles as thick as my arms. I had to balance upside down controlling my breathing just above the coral so as to get a good look at them under a coral crevice. Highly camoflaged crocodile fish, bloated porcupine fish, cuttlefish, an old coral covered ship's anchor we found and delicate harlequin shrimps.

I also did my first night sea dive here with good moonlit visibility. We switched off our lights near the end and each of us shook our arms and legs in midwater to spark of phospherscent algae. The last dive was a locally famous site known as 'the gap'. Here we dived down to 30m and off a bottomless wall chumming with fish schools. We had a brief look in a cave then dived diagonally down through a 6m tunnel of black coral to 36m. From here we descended down to 48m keeping above decompression limits to have a brief look at very special orange fan coral about 2-3m in size. This was an incredible experience for me and I was glad of the knowledge and experience of my dive buddies and their confidence in my ...