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travel@pangolin.liChole Mjini - Activities
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home Travel directory Tanzania '03 main Sand Rivers, Selous Chole Mjini main Chole Mjini activites Zanzibar Gallery |
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contact last updated: 28-Jan-2006 All text/pictures are subject to copyright by pangolin.li |
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We spent our days in Chole Mjini with diving, walks around Chole, and an excursion to Juani Island and the Kua ruins.Diving Our
host Jean de Villiers is a dive master and knows the surrounding marine
national park very well. Well, JJ had dived at Pemba, and we both had
been diving in Rocktail Bay in South Africa before. Mafia was an excellent dive spot really on par with the two - we seem to like the Indian Ocean...All dive sites are only accessible by boat, and thus influenced by weather and currents, so we could only do one dive per day. The boat used is a dhow - the dive trip is always a sailing trip too. I remember all of the dive sites as very intact and unspoilt, with a good mix of marine life, from tiny nudibranchs to my first manta ray ever! Temperature was 27°C, visibility usually around 15 m. The best season to dive is October-March, because of the lower chance for rains and storms. A few notes from my log book: Dindini and Chole Mlila: max. depht 22m, several walls with many colourful intact corals (typically for Mafia are the bright blue lichen corals). We saw two big hawksbill turtles, curious napoleons and potato bass, and big shoals of sweetlips and fusiliers. Dindini offers a tunnel to swim through. Milimani: max. depth 18.8 m; in my log, I just noted down a morray eel and huge lobsters - and the words "overpopulated aquarium". This is an amazing coral garden with countless fish in countless colours to just swim through and enjoy. Very quiet, colourful and beautiful. Kinasi Pass: max. depth 24.1 m; this is a free-standing underwater hill crisscrossed by canyons, near the outer fringe of the archipelago, going down to 28 m and surrounded by stronger currents. But this was the site of my first manta ray sighting ever! Just after going down we followed a canyon full of surgeon fish, emerged into the blue to see a big electric ray - and there came the manta - like a 3 m space submarine approaching us but then gracefully gliding away. Awesome. Miewe: max. depth 20.3 m; a slightly tilted reef in the sandy open, but with quite strong current. We saw groups of batfish, murray eels, a 1.5 m blackspotted stingray, and a gang of hunting yellowfin trevallies, but also tiny gobies and nudibranchs. A very diverse dive. Walks and sights on CholeWe did several walks on Chole. The island is covered with forest, and the houses of the ca. 800 inhabitants spread more or less evenly over the island. I assume you can get lost, but someone would be there to show you the way back to Jean and Anne.Wandering into the forest, we found the hospital and kindergarden sponsored by Chole Mjini lodge, the shipyard where the dhows are built, and the somewhat famous Popo Park. This is a number of trees where Comoros Lesser Fruit Bats (flying foxes, Pteropus seychellensis ssp. comorensis) hang from the branches like ripe fruit. These fruit bats only occur here and on the Comoros islands further South.
Between the lodge and the main square, there are several ruins which are open and unguarded. Exploring them needs caution due to loose stones and strangler fig roots entangling your feet (no, they don't strangle humans, usually), but the atmosphere of dappled shade and greenery in old walls is mesmerizing. There is a slavetrader's mansion and a jail of arabic origin, but also a more recent church - I believe to remember it was built by Germans. Top of page Visit of the Kua ruins on Juani IslandWe spent one day with an excursion to Juani Island, to visit the ruins of the ancient town of Kua. Juani is a neighbour of Chole, and at low tide you can walk the channel between the two islands. With a local man as our guide, we walked through the forest and past the shipyard, and then trough knee-deep water over to Juani. The vegetation is somehow different, wilder than on Chole. We only rarely came across very well tended vegetable patches or little houses. Approx. 1.5-2 hrs after leaving Chole Mjini, we reached Kua.The ancient city of Kua was founded in the twelfth century by the son of the first Sultan of Kilwa (the great silver trading port on the Mozambique coast to the south), which remained a city until the early nineteenth century when it was sacked and razed to the ground by cannibals from Madagascar (info from ATR). The ruins are in different stages of decay. We entered near a former mosque, with only the mihrab still standing. However, at least two houses still had upper stories, but the stairs didn't seem too trustworthy. The basement of one of the houses looked as if it had been restored. There was an orchard surrounded by a wall, and a cemetary. Aside from an old man resting on a bench, we were the only people around. Only a gang of vervet monkeys and chirping birds interrupted this tranquility.
Having investigated the ruins on our own, we wandered onwards past a giant baobab (never seen a bigger one) to a small beach, where we would have a picnic and wait for the boat to bring us back - in the company of hundreds of fiddler crabs. They were an astonishing sight: one of the males' claws is much bigger than the other, and it is used to wave, while the other, smaller claw picks up food and brings it to the mouth in a fiddling manner. Claw movements are coordinated with little quarter turns of the body, like performing a highly stereotypic kind of dance. And the funny thing was, that not only one of them did this occasionally, to impress a crab girl or so - no, ALL of them waved and danced, almost coordinated - as if it was a medieval court dance! Crazy guys. After a rest, I walked out to the sea - it was lowest tide, and soon the boat arrived to bring us back to Chole Mjini. Top of page Go to:
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