Tofo Tangents

Humbled by my thoroughly embarrassing failure yesterday, I was meticulous today. The shallow dive at Fingers reef went flawlessly, the divemaster's only comment was that I should stay a little closer to the seabed where you don't have to swim as hard against the current to save energy and air. He greenlit me to try for my deepwater certification at Giants Castle reef. Again, I was obsessively focused, and everything went off without a hitch. Now I'm deep water certified! This means I can do my first research dive tomorrow. To top it all off, we saw a giant turtle and a giant ray. I'm over the moon, but also exhausted. We'll be back at it tomorrow and I need sleep. Diving is extremely tiring.

I remembered a lot less than I thought from my dive training. On my first dive in the shallows, I flubbed the negative entry, struggled with buoyancy control the whole dive, was the first to run low on air, left the group behind, and ascended too rapidly, forgetting the safety stop entirely. As a result, the divemaster told me I'd have to stay on the boat for the deepwater dive. I'll have to try again tomorrow in the shallows, delaying my deepwater certification at least a day, possibly more. I spent the next half hour feeling seasick and burning in the African sun, waiting for the second dive to end so we could go home. By the time we reached the beach I was exhausted from the nausea, from the disappointment, and perhaps from a little subclinical decompression sickness. At least sleep will come easy. Tomorrow I will do better.

I've finally arrived in Praia do Tofo, where my marine megafauna conservation volunteer work will start. There's just one flight to the nearest airport in Inhambane, and this little propeller plane makes the trip in fits and starts a few times a week. A comfortable 25 minute cab ride later, I was in Casa Barry, where the NGO Underwater Africa is based. It was built by the eponymous South African who, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and given 6 months to live, decided to come to Mozambique to live out his last. According to the staff here, on good days, he fished, and on bad days, he built. Maybe it was the diet, the exercise, or just something in the air, but instead of 6 months he lasted 10 years. What started out as just one straw hut became a complex of many cabanas, including a restaurant (specializing in fresh-caught seafood, of course). It's late now, and tomorrow I'll be doing a diving refresher course and getting my deep water certificati...

I find it striking, wandering around the streets of Maputo, and seeing avenues named for Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse Tung. They seem like remnants of the country's communist past, vestiges of the days when revolutionaries set out to end 5 long centuries of Portuguese colonial rule and replace it with communism.  This street, 24 de Julho (July 24th), is named for O Dia das Nacionalizações (The Day of Nationalizations), a long forgotten holiday commemorating when revolutionary and first president of Mozambique Samora Michel nationalized all real estate. I asked a few locals what they thought of the holiday, but none of them had ever heard of it. It's vestigial, a communist tailbone in the Mozambican calendar. The same is true everywhere, I suppose. Apparently the street name Bowery in New York comes from the Dutch word bouwerij which means farm. It's left over from the Dutch colonial period when it ran through farmland. These echoes of the past go unnoticed by the locals...