January 17th, 2024
After my one night’s stay in Pongwe, I ventured further up
island to a small beach town called Matemwe.
My accommodation, Mohammed Bungalows and Restaurant, was located right
on the beach but it was definitely a step down facilities wise compared to last
night’s place. I had a single room, but a
shared bathroom which was down some steep steps and on the other side of the
property. However, the beach made up for
this. The sand was super fine and almost
white. There was a reef about 500 meters
out from the shore which quelled any waves so the water was always calm.
The chill road heading up island:
When I was in Stone Town and I visited Prison Island, this
French couple I had met showed me their pictures from a snorkeling trip to Mnemba
Island, which is a few kilometers offshore of Zanzibar Island, and it looked
fabulous. In fact, that was the reason
that caused me to come to Matemwe. After
talking with Mohammed and a Polish woman name Monika, I found out that there
was good scuba diving around the island too.
Well, I’d rather do that than snorkeling as it’s been a few years since
my last dive, and you can see a lot more when you can stay under the water for
a while.
I hung out chatting with Monika for an hour or so. Turns out that there are a lot of Polish
tourists and business owners in this area.
She had built a house but didn’t put a kitchen in it as she didn’t want
to deal with rats…lovely. So she was frequent
diner at Mohammed’s as she liked his food.
The dive centre couldn’t have been more conveniently
located, it was about 40 meters away, two doors down on the beach. It was called Kibwana’s, named after the
owner who was probably around 30 years old with some small dreadlocks. He had a good energy about him, so I signed
up for a couple of dives for the following day.
Kibwana's Dive Centre:
Back at the dive centre at 8:30 am, a divemaster named Tim sorted
me out with a shorty wetsuit and some fins.
As I hung out on the front deck, I met a couple of Spanish guys, Victor
and Pedro, who were just finishing up their divemaster training, and they were
super friendly. Next, I met a married
couple in their mid to late 30s who had been married since 2010. Luke was from Australia, but he had moved to
Germany to be with Ines. They were on
day 3 of 4 of diving, doing 2 dives a day.
They had just done their open water certification a year ago. The final divers in our group, whose names I
sadly never got, were a Swedish couple who had no experience whatsoever.
On the boat ride out to the island, Pedro gave the Swedish
couple a brief overview on hooking up a BCD (Buoyancy Compensation Device – a vest
you wear that you can inflate/deflate with air) to an air tank. I could see the woman slowly getting a little
more concerned as to what she had gotten herself into. Meanwhile, the other divemasters prepared the
gear for the rest of us. I was going to
be diving with Ines and Luke with Tim as the lead divemaster. Since I hadn’t gone diving in a couple of
years (an awesome dive with hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos Islands), Tim
assigned Victor to be my buddy and to stay close to me…sounds good. Tim gave a briefing about the dive, that we
would work our way down a sloped wall to our deepest point of the dive, turn
around, and work our way back towards the boat along a slightly different
route. He stated that we should relax,
enjoy and take it “Pole, pole” (pol-Ay), which means “slow” in Swahili. I also liked that idea. As a non-regular diver, if you go fast, you
will breathe faster and likely more irregularly which can then cause a bit of a
panicky feeling.
The boat ride to the dive site:
Shortly after rolling backwards off the boat into the water,
Victor found out that he had a problem with his BCD that would need a
repair. Tim told him to head back to the
boat and we would continue without him.
Oh great… I was the last to join
up with our group. “Okay, let’s go down.” Wait a sec, I just got here, let me catch my
breath and slow my heartrate down. It’s
not like it was a big swim, but the combination of a bit of exercise, the constraint
of the BCD around my chest, and a bit of trepidation, I really wanted a minute
or two to chill, but it looks like I’ve got to go. I deflated my BCD and wasn’t sinking in the
water. They had given me 4 kilograms of
weight, but that didn’t seem to be enough.
We headed back towards the boat and Tim slapped a couple of 1 kg weights
in each side of my BCD. This definitely
helped me to descend.
Down about 25 feet, we started to work our way down the
wall. I was still trying to regulate my
breathing and focus on relaxing, but I had forgotten how it takes some time to
get used to breathing through a regulator.
Come on Dave, you’ve done 60+ dives…get it together.
Ten minutes into the dive, with me at the back of our group
of four, another diver came up from behind and was trying to signal something
to me. It took me a few seconds to clue
in that it was Victor. He must have
changed BCDs and caught up with us.
Okay, cool.
Initially we saw a variety of tropical fish including some
trumpetfish, which are long and skinny.
Not sure why they aren’t called flute or recorder fish, they don’t really
look like a trumpet. We then had a real
treat of finding an octopus hiding in his den.
Most of his skin was white and I only really saw a tentacle or two, and
briefly an eye. They are such cool
animals. If you haven’t seen the documentary
“My Octopus Teacher”, I highly recommend it.
A Moorish Idol - I saw these snorkeling in Kenya too:
A skunk clownfish, who likes to hide in anemones.
After reaching 60 feet in depth, the deepest point of the
dive, we slowly turned around and started our way back up. For some reason I started to have some pain
in my right ear and jaw. This is a bit
odd as usually it happens on your way down, when you can’t equalize your ears,
but we were on our way up. Eventually it
subsided, but it did cause me to just wish that the dive was over, yet we still
had about a 1/3 of our oxygen left. I
could have signalled to Victor that I wanted to go up, but I wanted to see if I
could get through it mentally.
The ledge took us back up to about 20 feet and then we did
our 3-minute safety stop just above the ocean floor (this is to release any nitrogen
that has built up in your body). Back on
the surface, I have to admit that it was nice to breathe fresh air. At that point I questioned whether I would do
the second dive. If you’re not having
fun, why continue doing it. Let’s wait
and see.
Back in the boat, my jaw definitely felt strange, like it
was hyperextended or slightly dislocated.
I was able to grind my lower molars against the uppers in a way that I
can’t normally do. Weird. I definitely should have had a full wetsuit
too as I was shivering, even in the partial sunlight were receiving.
We ate some fruit slices and drank water as we waited for
the Swedes to return. They had been paired
off with a divemaster each, with Pedro going with the guy and Kibwana with the
trepidatious woman. They weren’t doing a
full dive, just practicing submerging to 10-15 feet and returning to the surface. They may have been learning some other basic
skills too. Returning to the boat, the
Swedish woman shed a few tears. I felt
sorry for her.
The boat headed over to another dive spot (there 15 of them
in a ring around Mnemba Island). Tim
said “Let’s not waste time, why not do the second dive and then we are done for
the day.” What happened to “pole pole”? I decided I was going to give it another go,
and I was glad that I did.
On the second dive I felt much more comfortable and relaxed. Oh yeah, this is what diving can be
like. We saw some fish that I’ve never
seen before like a couple of pairs of devil firefish and a “walking” frogfish (it uses some of its
fins to walk along the ocean floor).
Only Victor and I saw the frogfish which I guess is rare to see as he
was excited to have spotted it, which was not easy to do as it was quite well
camouflaged against the seabed.
A frogfish:
The devil firefish are crazy looking too, similar to a lionfish
(they may be related). They were black
and white striped and it was pretty obvious that it was a male and female pair
as they were slightly different in size and shape. When their eyes were not looking up or down,
or forward or backwards, they actually blended in with the stripes of their body…super
cool.
In a barren area, near the end of the dive, there were a
bunch of spotted garden eels sticking about 6-8 inches out of the sand, all
looking in the same direction. I really
liked these guys but if you get too close, they just disappear into their hole.
They're like sentries on watch duty.
We saw a few of these, tough to spot, finless soles, that undulate their bodies along the ocean floor.
We seemed to finish our dive a bit early, as I, being the “air
slut” of the group, still had oxygen to spare.
That was fine though, I think I had had my fill. Once again, we were back on the boat before
the Swedish couple returned with their instructors and it was nice to see that
the woman smiling and happy.
Returning to shore, the tide was now out enough that the
dive boat couldn’t make it through the reef.
Our boat went to an area north of Matemwe Beach where we hopped into a
smaller boat that took us through an opening in the reef. We transferred to yet another boat which was
of similar size, but it had a covering to protect us from the sun for the
twenty-minute ride back. A few of us
were joking that we were playing musical boats.
Kibwana is on the right. (I should have been wearing my shades!)
It was a fun group to dive with and Ines and Luke came to
Mohammed’s for lunch with me. Luke had a
GoPro on the dive and I’m kicking myself for not grabbing my laptop and taking
a copy of his videos…oh well, I’ll have to rely on my memories. Even though the first dive was a bit
challenging for me, I’m glad I went.
I had a nap and then went to the restaurant next door for a
chill late afternoon and evening…I was wiped out.
Hard to tell, but I watched some locals, and one mzungu, play football on the beach as I enjoyed a beer from a chaise lounge.
That night I felt a fever coming on and did not sleep well. Luckily I was good enough to take a boda boda to my next destination, Nungwi, at the north end of the island.
This was fun, the motorcycle taxi used the beach instead of a crappy road to get to the highway.
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