I WOKE shortly before dawn, with my feet pointing in an easterly direction. This meant that I had only to sit up where I was in order to watch the most incredibly beautiful sunrise, if anything, even more lovely than the day before’s.
I sat, gazing out to sea, for a full hour, before Aiya woke me from my reverie with a cup of coffee. Only then did it occur to me that I was hot and sticky, covered in mosquito bites and sitting in a sleeping bag full of sand. To cap it all, the coffee had sugar in it!
Watching the morning ritual of the camp, I gathered that the correct procedure was to take a shovel and a loo roll and to disappear to the other end of the beach.
I was not very adept at digging and it took me rather a long time to accomplish my mission. I was somewhat embarrassed when I returned to find a queue waiting for the shovel.
Breakfast went down well. Even Deidre, who normally started the day with nothing more than a cup of tea, dug in with gusto. We started with oranges, followed by omelettes, suitably seasoned with salt, pepper and sand and the inevitable sweet coffee.
Aiya never did understand that it was possible to make coffee without sugar.
After breakfast, while the men went out spear fishing, Deidre and I decided to explore. We had, so we were told, 50km of beach to ourselves. A vast, golden crescent of sand, backed by palm-covered dunes, facing an endless ocean. We could just distinguish the broken wave movement which indicated the coral reef.
Apparently the most interesting part of it was more or less straight out from where we were camping, about 300m offshore.
Three hundred metres sounded a long way. I pondered on the possibility of meeting a shark and how I would react to the situation.
Pete said that it had happened to him a couple of days earlier, and that he was still trying to get his swimming trunks clean.
That settled it. We were not going to brave the stretch of open water. Nor could we walk along the top of the reef, as we had left our shoes in Inhambane and coral is pretty spiky stuff to walk on. So we had no alternative but to walk to where the reef met the beach and then swim across the bay, just inside the protecting wall of coral. It made it a long swim, but I was much happier, knowing that I could get above the waterline in a hurry if a shark came round the corner.
Eventually we reached the point at which things really began to get interesting.
It was a sort of underwater Times Square – there were parrot fish, all colours of the rainbow and starfish, which were mostly pink, together with all manner of stripy, spotty and spiky things.
Crayfish scuttled into their holes, for fear of being cooked for dinner.
I was just investigating a peculiar spiny object, when I became aware of a commotion ahead of me. A pair of flippers was flapping in a way no flippers ought to flap. Deidre had hit trouble.We should never have ventured this far on our own. Deidre was virtually a non-swimmer and I am the only person I know who has had to be saved from the shallow end of a swimming pool while wearing full scuba diving equipment!
Cursing myself for a fool, I drew level, turned on my back, took the snorkel out of my mouth and asked what was the matter. Deidre did eventually realise that I couldn’t hear her while she was talking into a snorkel, but forgot that she couldn’t breathe underwater without it.
After much spluttering on her part and shouting on mine, she turned on her back, took a gulp of air, and said that something had got her arm.
It was difficult to see properly in the water, but it looked like a row of very narrow burn marks. I had not the faintest idea as to what could have caused it, but I told her not to worry, it was only a jellyfish.
We climbed out onto the reef and sat for a while, until Deidre had stopped shaking and regained her normal colour. Then we sat for a while longer, trying to decide on the best way of getting ashore. Deidre didn’t want to go back into the water, while I was not at all keen on the idea of getting my feet cut to ribbons by walking on coral.
We were still sitting there, no nearer to an answer, when the men appeared round the end of the reef in the boat and asked us if we wanted a lift back. Boy! Did we want a lift back!
Pete took one look at Deidre’s arm and said “bluebottle”. This is a nasty little creature, with a head the size of a pea and a metre-long sting, invisible in the water, but you certainly know when you have met one. When we got to the camp, Pete went to the kitchen and emerged with, not the first aid kit, but a jar of meat tenderiser. Apparently most fish poisons are protein-based and, in breaking down the protein, the meat tenderiser also breaks down the poison.
During the course of the next week we met so many bluebottles that, by the time we finally acquired some meat, we had to eat it tough.
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