MAFIA! (some journal entries from the past week)

8/12

at chileka airport. waiting. air malawi said the plane is fine today, but we were still supposed to take off an hour ago. watching the airline worker in an orange vest push luggage around in a shopping cart. i’d read but all i have with me is Moby Dick, which i thought would be cutely appropriate for a trip to dive with whalesharks, but really its just a more efficient substitute for prescription insomnia meds. (sorry ali)

although in the first chapter, Ishmael says he’s ‘ tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote’  I know the feeling, buddy

11/12

pruney. woke up. swam.dove. they took us out in the dhow to mageni -small rocks. Saw a lion fish an a spiney lobster on the reef directly under the boat. A little ways off, huge coral towers looming over head, 7ft moray eel threading though the fan coral below me. A giant parrot fish chomp away on coral morsels, their huge teeth remind me of a clown in some distant, creepy, memory. A bright yellow and blue school weaves around me. Giggling to myself makes a bubbly cloud. Some candy cane striped shrimp remind me that its almost Christmas. Serious visual overload at this point. Some nudibranchs flutter over the white sand bottom. Neon blue, they don’t give a damn about camoflage. Cant adequately describe the colors, the busy-ness of this underwater metropolis.  luscious.

the dive boat 

13/12

another day, another dive. Saw another lionfish, some black and white fluttering around in an anemone. Anemones like the ones in the little mermaid pop back into their spouts when I flick at them. An Indian ocean cushion star sat unassumingly on the bottom. Highlight? The turtle. A huge female hawksbill ate a coral lunch about 18meters down. Heard her munching before I saw her and then when she was full, we watched her paddle off.

Its sometime around 6:30 or 7 ( not really sure.. no watch, no phone), and twittering bat calls to feed are blending with Islamic  calls to prayer. Every night around dusk swarms of flying foxes cross the channel from Chole island to feed on Mafia mangoes. They look like birds of prey, or blackback seagulls. Flapping their wings slowly and elegantly, not at all like the tiny zig-zagging insect bats at home.

flying foxes over Chole bay 

So soothing to breathe salty air and hear the waves, I forgot how much I miss the ocean. Maybe I didn’t forget, I was just forcing myself not to remember so I wouldn’t feel deprived. Dhows are beached in the sand flats of the east African coast’s exaggerated tides, completely exposed, anchors and all. I wonder if boats feel naked when they’re out of the water?

My new Mafian friends taught me to play bao (a mancala-ish, bead game) after a dinner of charred changu –snapper- and mango with chili sauce. God its nice to speak Kiswahili again and actually hang out with people, unbound by the limitations of broken English. 

14/12

Whale sharks whale sharks! So amazing. Papapoto = sharkwhale kwa Kiswahili. We saw two (wapapapoto wawili) the first was a ‘baby’. 9 ft. Swimming along, mouth wide open, sucking in plankton filled seawater, tail swishing back and forth, wagging like a giant puppy. Still, getting in the water with him was super intimidating. Such poor visibility with all the plankton, that once I was in the water I couldn’t see him until he was 2 ft away. Felt the pulsing water from his gils before I saw the telltale gray polka-dotted skin, then I swam along side him, parallel to the remoras latched on to his belly.

 The second one was bigger, 6 meters and still juvenile. unlike the first, this one swam about a foot under the surface making him even harder to spot, and the water was murkier too. I had no idea where the  shark was when Musa the guide pushed me off the boat. Landed on top of papapoto. Again the soft jets of filtered gil-water pulsed against my belly.  Swimming as fast as I possibly could, I barely kept up. so amazing. When I was too tired to go on, I kicked back to dodge the massive tail. Incredible day.