Chapter 1 My arrival at the Comoros
As promissed, I started writing a "report" about my trip. I just started and it will take some time to complete. But here's the 1st chapter. Enjoy ;)
The effort of travels and sleepless nights were forgotten as soon as we met a group of 12 False Killer Whales on the motorboat trip from the Grand Comoros to Moheli Island.
However, the identification of these toothed cetaceans, Pseudorca crassidens, which are about 5m in size, was possible by accessing the incredible underwater video one volunteer managed to take.
An hour later the silhouette of the island took form and its beauty became apparent. Green misty mountains big enough to hold on to scattered shreds of clouds passing the Indian Ocean emerged from the volcanic island.
The arduousness of the 72 hours journey did actually no longer troubling me when I first saw the turquoise waters, the clearly visible corals we passed and the beach we were heading for: Moidjio beach.
The beach that gave the name to the organization is placed at the south coast of Moheli close to the village Nioumachoua and hosts the volunteer’s campground. Encircling are three tiny unoccupied islands, which are the worlds main nesting places for sea turtles and where we spent several nights guarding turtles that come to lay their eggs in the sand.
But I should start from the beginning.
As mentioned before the trip to the Comoros was exhausting and an adventure itself. From Munich I travelled to London to get a cheap flight to Nairobi, where I had to wait several hours for the plane to the Grand Comoros.
I thought I was well prepared with 3 phone numbers of local Moidjio members, my fully charged blackberry and a French dictionary. But when I arrived at the airport I found that I could only call the SOS number and I could hardly understand the broken English of the friendly taxi driver that decided to take care of me. He phoned my contact person which expected me not before the next day and found out where I was supposed to spend the night. His eye cataract let me wonder how much of the traffic and huge holes in the only partially existent road he actually saw through the cracked windscreen, but since the other passengers seemed quite relaxed I decided not to care too much about such details.
Thaobane's place consists of two colorful Nissen huts, an open air toilet (or rather jakes) and the foundation of a prospective house Thaobane is working on whenever he has some money left for building material.
Thaobane is an ‘old’ man with 50years of age and a chef usually responsible for the catering of the volunteers in the camp, but he didn’t spend the complete season on site that’s why Ma-Salim, the wife of the site manager Said and everyone’s mom at camp, already assumed responsibility for the camp kitchen when I arrived.
Thaobane's main hut houses his family in two separated bedrooms, the kitchen and a living room on no more than 20m2 in total. The dishes are piled in the front of the hut on the omnipresent volcanic rocks available to the loose chicken and waiting for cleaning.
The furnishing of the living room consist of three wooden chairs and a table, where a big thermos flask always filled with the typical ginger-cinnamon tea is on top and a coffee maker is hidden below. A tiny television and a radio are placed in the corner.
To that time I thought that's pretty much a typical Comorian home, a small hut with an external toilet and no running water, but this is only true for the Grand Comoros. Conditions can be much simpler and actually are on Moheli Island, the least developed island of the Comoros, where there is no electricity or telephone network in the day time and toilets are not usually equipped with a toilet seat at all.
I spent the evening with Thaobane and his lovely family enjoying a delicious fish soup and communicating with our hands and feet. After one night in the next-door hut I got up early and we took the taxi bus to Chindini, a port where Moidjio owns a cottage and where we met the team that just arrived with the motorboat.
A trip with the taxi bus sounds easy, but travelling on the Comoros is never simple and can barely be planned. We had to walk to the next street first to get a regular taxi that brought us to the taxi bus. When we found the right taxi bus the driver passed through the city center several times in order to maximal fill the bus (I’ve learned that 22 persons can fit into a VW bus with 12 regular seats) and to enable passengers to complete their daily shopping. From Thaobane’s place in Iconi it’s about 60km to Chindini, but that day it took us almost three hours squeezed in the overfilled bus to get there.