The chameleon week

Last week, rather amazingly, we had the best visibility we've had almost since I got here. Sadly, most of our volunteers could not take advantage of it as they'd drunk too much the night before and were therefore unable to dive. So, we only sent one dive out. But it was a really really gorgeous one - even though it was one of our near shore sites which are usually not so great, especially when the vis is pants. But it was glorious being able to
see more than 20 metres and to get an idea of the topography of that whole part of the reef. I saw some really cool fish that I had to look up, and we did a full hour's dive, which made it all the more special (most of our dives here are only 45 minutes long).
One of our field scientists was also out of the water with a hole in his foot (well, more like a cut that was oozing and needed to be kept dry, but hole in foot sounds more dramatic) so I ended up doing far more dives than I would have done ordinarily - 9 in the
last week in total! I even started to feel a bit dived out by the end of the week.
The water temperature is dropping too and I'm soon going to have to resort to wearing a hood to try and keep my body temperature up. Sadly, I think I acclimised too much during the very hot season and now I'm finding that I'm wearing jeans and a hoodie during the day, when temperatures are merely 24 degrees C. I'm terrified of how I'll cope when I get back to the UK (three weeks before my holiday! Yay).
Other than the lovely diving, and the science diving, it's been a fairly average week on site. No more dramas (phew), no more rules broken (phew) and the vis is back to being rubbish again, so it's business as usual again now!
We had had a particularly good food day last Tuesday (food is integral to camp life and my day seems to revolve around eating it, looking forward to eating it, and trying not to think of all the food I can't eat here). We had fish bok bok for lunch (fish which are deep fried in dough balls) and then fish kebabs and chips for our evening meal. The memories of that day will last a long time I think!
Justin and I also had a special pre-birthday lunch on Friday (it was Justin's birthday on Saturday) at Laguna Blu, so I'm feeling particularly spoiled in terms of food at the moment. I am also quite excited because I have ordered some peanut butter from the peanut lady. I shall go and collect it tomorrow I think.
Fruit-wise - there are bananas in the village at the moment (hoorah!) and we had another weird fruit for dessert the other night. Mandarins are also in season right now. That's it for this week.
Oh! But I forgot! Other than exciting fish underwater (new species for me include a sunset wrasse, a yellowsaddle goatfish and a blackedge thicklip wrasse) we also saw a chameleon on our sunset trip to the phone point. It was quite small (about 20cm long) and sort of orangey and green but with a big bulbous spot on its nose! It really was weird looking. I've looked it up in our reptile book and think it's a "Furcifer antimena" and we saw the female one. My first chameleon since I arrived in Andava! Hope it's not my last.