Muddier than a muddy thing

This week, I finally left site for the first time for more than a day. It was very exciting! We had a group of 9 volunteers and three staff members, and we went up north to a village called Bevatu (big stones) to survey some mangroves and some baobabs.
We left after breakfast and travelled on the sea by sailing pirogues. We had three altogether. The wind wasn't too bad and all in all the journey took us three hours. In three hours in the Uk you can get from Manchester to London and across London to my parents' house in Wembley. Three hours here gets you barely 20 kilometres (as the crow flies) if there is some wind (though not necessarily in the right direction).
It's pretty peaceful travelling by pirogue. You can't really read like you would do on a train, and there's no way you could watch a film, like you might on a plane. The only thing to do is to sit and be. That's it. And maybe chat to your fellow passengers - who, in this case, were Eamonn (18 from Ireland), and Monika (45, from South Africa). Eamonn spent most of the journey sat on the balancoire though so I mostly chatted to Monika, or just sat in silence, enjoying the peace.
It felt like a holiday - being as I couldn't really do any 'work' whilst sat on a pirogue. We arrived at Bevatu at 11 O'clock and set up residence in the yard of one of the nahudas of the village. We left our bags inside a big wooden hut with a concrete floor. Also within the enclosure, which was fenced in with bits of wood, were two more small huts.
They don't get many tourists in Bevatu. So, we were quite an attraction to the children of the village who came to stare at us eat, wash, and sleep. They laughed a lot at us. When we were lying down, getting ready to sleep on the pirogue sail, they thought we were hilarious. As I said in a previous email, if you ever have a fear of being laughed at, then come to Madagascar.
In the afternoon, we surveyed the baobabs in the spiny forest. They're pretty characteristic trees. Absolutely massive trunks, with tiny branches on the top. My group measured (and some of them climbed) 26 trees in the spiny forest. Which is very very spiny. In fact, I would go so far as to say it's even spinier in Bevatu than it is round our way.
Also interesting is that most of the land is actually rock - old coral reefs, limestone. Pretty spiky and hard. And yet there are things growing in amongst the cracks and wherever there is soil in between the rock. The forest is in fact pretty dense, making walking through to the baobabs pretty tricky without scratches or other injuries. We saw some huge spider's webs too, and a few cool birds.
Back in Bevatu, we hung out with the children or each other before being served some rice, mashed beans and goatfish by the village women.
Bevatu is greener than Andavadoaka and has some huge tamarind trees in the village, and one on the beach, providing some much needed shade from the heat of the day. Like Andavadoaka, the beach is sandy and all the village pirogues are lined up at the top of the beach before the houses start. Like Andavadoaka, the toilet is a section of the spiny forest reserved for that purpose.
Unfortunately, it is inhabitated by a particularly vicious mob of mosquitos and most of us left Bevatu with many mossie bites on our bottom from whenever it was exposed. Not a very pleasant experience. All I can say is I dread to think what mine would have looked like if I'd had a particularly bad bout of constipation or anything (sorry peeps! Too much information, I know!).
We slept that night under the stars and on top of a pirogue sail. I had my sleeping bag, which is particularly warm one. I ended up sweating like I was in a sauna, but resolutely refused to get out of the bag because the mosquitos, sensing the fresh meat, had left the spiny forest and came to visit us on the pirogue sail. I didn't sleep much, due to the buzzing of the mossies. Although, I must have slept at least for a while, because you need to be asleep in order to be woken up as many times as I was woken up.
There were other noises too - children laughing (at first), goats doing their goat thing, turkeys gobbling and staring at us at dawn, women singing in harmony at 11.30pm (there had been a death in the village), men chanting something before dawn (announcing the deaths to the village before the sun came up).
Breakfast was freshly made bok bok (doughy doughnuts) which were delicious, and very very sweet coffee.
After that, we were briefed by our mangrove 'experts' (three volunteers who'd done some surveying earlier in the expedition) and headed into the mangroves. The mangroves were even denser than the spiny forest and we had much fun clambering over the roots and counting the trees. I got muddier than a very muddy thing. Back in time for a late lunch, and then we took our pirogues back. The journey took half the time because the wind was in the right direction, and then we were home.
So, that was my adventure. It was really great to see somewhere different. See a different village and get mobile phone reception for a short while too. The mangroves and baobabs were stunning.
Since getting back, the visibility has been good enough for us to go out diving again too and so I have been out on a few science dives. Had quite a few lovely dives, including one to a reef we discovered in Christmas, where I saw some
barracuda and a really cool stingray.
Okay, I'm running late for a staff meeting, so that's as caught up as I can be for this week. I have a cold and can't dive tomorrow, and I feel pretty run down, so I'm looking forward to a little bit of peace after the expedition ends on Thursday (hoorah). I hope to have at least a little bit of a rest before it all starts again a week today.