The Ankle Deep Sea – Goodbye Rodrigues…. Goodbye Mum

My fellow passengers were a mix of intrepid tourists, government officials and Rodriguans heading across the gap between the two islands.  The little prop plane lifted out over the wide blue expanse of the lagoon, the reef, the sand, the fringing islands and then the deep blue Indian Ocean below me.  Another project colleague Paul, picked me up from the airport and I spent a difficult night at the project house in Calodyne.  At this stage I just wanted to get back to my family.  Every hour I was in the wrong place was painful.   I drove us to the airport the next morning, narrowly avoiding a speeding ticket from a cop on the motorway near Curepipe once I explained the circumstances.

Rodrigues – I hardly got to know you

The lagoon

As the plane pulled out over the Grand Port lagoon, turned left over the eastern part of Mauritius and set its course for the UK, I still felt numb.   I was so grateful at the understanding from Mike and Jeremy, from the consulting firm I was working for, and later I got so many messages of condolence from the people in the Mauritian government with whom I had been working – the incident over the visa issue totally forgotten.   The next couple of weeks would be intense, but in fact the whole of life would now be different.

The Ankle Deep Sea – Call in the night

The call came around 2 am.  I awoke with a start and fumbled to put the bedside light on, but by the time I lifted the receiver I already knew what it was.  My brother Christopher calmly told me “Hello mate, she’s gone”.

Equally calmly I told him I would be back as soon as I could.  Then rather pathetically stated that I hoped he was OK.  Of course he wasn’t but I could not think of anything more useful to say.

I lay numb in bed for most of the night – I can’t remember if I slept at all.  I certainly was moving by day break and took a long walk along the sandy beach to the limestone headland, watched the waves breaking for a while then ambled slowly back to the hotel.  I sat at the restaurant table long before the staff arrived, and waited patiently for Mike to emerge.  He came across with his usual ebullient mood, but he could see on my face that this was going to be a different day.  I told him about the conversation I had had with my brother the night before, almost able not to break my voice in the telling.  Mike was brilliant at this moment.  We would head into Port Mathurin first thing to try and make the travel arrangements.

Cotton Bay Beach was a good place to walk that morning

Cotton Bay

Cotton Bay – undercutting

Cotton Boy – bad news while in paradise

We needed to get me on the earliest flight to Plaisance and then I needed to rebook my final return flight with BA back to the UK.  Cotton Bay in those days had no reliable email, but Mike had stayed at a hotel in town that had some internet connection so we headed over the hill.  First we visited a travel agent and arranged a flight back to Mauritius.  Then we sat in this hotel, the TV blaring out Obama’s election to the US presidency, while I tried to get online to the BA website to rearrange my ticket home.  The ticket agent in Port Mathurin had found a space on the 2pm flight.  We had little time to get back over to Cotton Bay for me to throw my belongings in the case.  I knocked on Jeremy’s hotel room door and apologized for leaving him in the lurch, but would support him from back home.  Mike and I exchanged few words as we crossed the island – I kinda felt sorry for the guy – what do you say to someone who just lost his mother.  At the airport as he shook my hand and thanked me for what I had done, I had to say “ I won’t be coming back” .

The Ankle Deep Sea – Out in to the lagoon

The next day, Jeremy and I worked with SHOALS to show them how to survey the marine resources.  We met them at their shed in Port Mathurin and drove back close to Cotton Bay where we hooked up with a fisherman who was to provide his boat to look at the northern part of our area.  He had arrived on his moped to meet us and continued to wear his helmet while he readied out boat.  His little blue pirogue contained two SHOALS guys, a couple of students from the University of Mauritius, Jeremy, myself and this little man in his helmet.  We managed to work around the choppy Baie De L’Est for about half an hour, then the outboard motor gave out.  As we drifted towards some ominous rocks the captain pulled out an oar and dug deep down.  He found some purchase and pushed us back.  There was no way we could continue our survey under these conditions so suffered the ignominy of being punted back to our port of embarkation.

SHOALS

Choppy but so shallow

The SHOALS guys help

Pushing back to shore

Next day we travelled to Port Sud Est – a fairly sizeable community that relied on fishing in the lagoon and as a fairly high class residential area.  With another boat we were able to access the southern part of the pressure zone.  The problem was that the boat was over a kilometre from the main land.  The solution was provided by the nature of the lagoon; water is never that deep in Rodrigues so we started to wade.  And wade, and wade and wade and wade.  After about fifteen minutes we hauled ourselves into the boat, but the water was still only knee deep.  We managed to reach out across the lagoon very quickly and to be honest , it was pretty boring.  Yes it was crystal clear water and every natural habitat was amazing.  But there were no issues, it was a perfect, undisturbed natural environment.  Shh, don’t tell anyone, but Rodrigues was perfect.

Walking a mile out to our boat

Trying to get on board

Ankle deep

The stunning central hills of Rodrigues

Jeremy and I returned to Cotton Bay to report to Mike, who had had a busy day in Port Mathurin with the relevant agencies of the Rodrigues Regional Assembly.  He had also had a call from the Department of Environment staff wondering why I had been in the UK the week before, given I was supposed to spend the whole time in this country.  Mike had apparently put them straight, but the idea of quietly letting me visit my mum had dangerously backfired as it crossed this 90 day period limit.   As it was now sorted out, we spent a happy evening exchanging stories , sitting back in this tropical paradise and seeing how this was an example to the rest of Mauritius as to how to manage their coastal resources.  After several beers and a load of apocryphal stories, most of which both of my colleagues had already heard, I retired to bed, the windows open to let the Indian Ocean breezes in and the sound of the breaking waves send me to sleep.

The Ankle Deep Sea – Cotton Bay and the Priority Zone

The meals at Cotton Bay were not brilliant, though they did have some signature seafood dishes, and I was glad of a cold Phoenix after the rollercoaster travels I had come through in the last couple of days. We discussed our plans.  I had to visit the government departments in Port Mathurin and see what data existed.  Like on many islands, the mapping of Rodrigues was not great – part of the problem is no-one had ever really worked out a good map projection of the island and now everything was going digital, you could not fit one map over another easily.  I also was to sit in with SHOALS, our key collaborators in Rodrigues.  As opposed to the Ministry of Environment on the mainland, SHOALS of Rodrigues are a small  NGO trying to look after the huge lagoon that surrounds the island; they do an incredible amount of research with support from UK universities, as well as community outreach and education.  They were to be our partners for the marine and land surveys that Jeremy and I were to manage. They were based in a small shed adjacent to the little estuary where many fishing and other boats moored up in Port Mathurin.  Because of the lagoons, we could not always use the SHOALS equipment, but had to hire fishermen from our launch sites.

My view from the Cotton Bay Hotel room

And the other way

Our Priority Zone for this area was the east coast.  Several new hotel developments were planned along the cliffs.  The reef was limited as it was on the more exposed side of the island – I was a little surprise it had been chosen. It was an area where less research had been done by others, so we were balancing out areas of focus for SHOALS, I suppose, but it did not really move our work forward much.

Mike, Jeremy and I wandered along part of the coastline; not as part of the formal survey but to gauge some of the issues along here.  There really were none.  The coastline here was predominantly a hard limestone rock falling as a cliff into crystal clear waters full of coral and fish and other life.  Yes the coastal vegetation was degraded by overgrazing and the drought, but this was by no means irreversible.  There was no pollution to speak of, and if there were any it was quickly broken up by the energy of the sea.  No developments had compromised either the land or the sea.

The resulting landscape had probably not changed for generations and was a fabulous mix of small sandy coves in amongst the hard rock bluffs, and a well developed reef that was pummelled by natural forces but had learnt to survive them.  The local population obviously revelled in these locations – we saw a bunch of fishermen stripped down to their briefs trying to trap large pelagic fish in one beach.  Another bay was perfectly fan shaped – its narrow entrance managed to deflect most of the ocean’s energy away and only a diluted diffusion of waves spread between the two high limestone cliffs.  I snorkelled in here quite safely, although with the energy of the sea and the sandiness of the bay there were only a few shoals of fish to observe.  The waves undercut the cliffs and formed small caverns.  It was perfection.  If it were almost anywhere else it would be a highly prized touristic site, but this was Rodrigues where such natural beauty was almost taken for granted.

Walking the coast – Mike and Jeremy

Stunning beaches

Fishing off the rocks

A perfect beach

Another amazing beach

We walked back to the beach where we had left our rented pick up and, next to an enormous spider’s web, managed to assimilate this wonderful coastline and start thinking how it could be protected, and yes, exploited, for the good of Rodrigues.  Exploitation is a dirty word amongst conservationists, but we needed to find a way where people would healthily conserve this pristine environment and showing them a form of exploitation for them was the only way forward we could find, sustainable exploitation.  We had to persuade them that by keeping it almost the same as it is – with a little ecotouristic enhancement  – they could exploit people who came to experience the same life enhancing  moments we had for free.

The Ankle Deep Sea – Finally arrived

The ferry to Rodrigues takes 36 hours from Port Louis to the capital, Port Mathurin and goes a couple of times a week.  The plane takes ninety minutes and with only 50 seats each time there are only three, maybe four flights a day.  Considering these are the links between the two major islands, there is not a huge capacity for movement.  In fact the Rodriguans had long complained about this; there are no other flights from Rodrigues to other destinations.  And the Air Mauritius flight was incredibly expensive for a quick hop.

Arrival in Rodrigues

I landed in blistering heat of mid afternoon at Sir Gaetan Duval Airport at the western tip of the island.  The sun was blinding , the vegetation around me parched, and the peace and quiet audible.  It was the total opposite of the cold, dark, noisy environment of the UK that I had left behind only some eighteen hours before.

Jeremy and Mike were there.  They allowed me a cursory summary of my week in the north and the problems at Plaisance Airport, before spieling out their assessment of the island, the characters they had met and what our job was for the next five days.

Given it was Saturday, the island was almost deserted; we saw a few bodies under the shade of the few trees in back yards, the periodic vehicle heading along the road.  We took a circuitous route to our hotel, along the northern coast road, and the two of them pointed out various features.  We passed through the centre of Port Mathurin, almost deserted, and then drove over a big hill to the eastern flank of the island.  Livestock grazing is a massive part of Rodrigues life so, unlike the dense plantation fields of Mauritius, much of the island was taken up with huge open grasslands. Due to an ongoing drought the land was devoid of anything but the most hardy shrubs.  We descended towards the coast to a remarkable bay, the white sand fringed by palm trees and perfect size waves rolling in from the east.  Along a small sandy track we passed through an open gate in a high stone wall and we were at Cotton Bay Hotel. I was settled in to a first floor room overlooking a beach covered in filao and palm trees.

The Ankle Deep Sea – The hidden parts of “Mauritius”

Many people who visit Mauritius are unaware that it is just one of the islands in the republic.  Nearly 500 km north east of the island is a long thin archipelago called St Brandon, where around 60 fishermen live.  Over a thousand kilometres north are two sausage shaped islands collectively known as Agaléga, where about 300 people live cultivating coconuts and fishing in a narrow lagoon.  It has an airstrip and rudimentary social institutions, but no running water and secondary education has to occur off island.  A third island, Tromelin, is also claimed by Mauritius, which is little more than an airstrip on a coral platform, barely 1500 m long.  As with many small rocks in the ocean, the claims on its possession are more about the rights that gives countries over the sea and what is under it.  No wonder both the French and the Seychelles also claim Tromelin given it has no other land for 200km around, and so gives a nation an enormous  Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ.  All that fuss just for a colony of booby birds.  Mauritius even lays a claim to Diego Garcia – a contentious part of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

By far the largest sister island to Mauritius, though, is Rodrigues.  For most people it would be a distantly recalled name, and many I would guess place it as a former Spanish colony in the Caribbean Sea.  No, it is about 500km east of the main island of Mauritius.  If the twelve hour flight from the UK to Mauritius has made you feel like you have dropped off the edge of the earth, the extra hour and a half on a prop plane to Rodrigues would make you think you were now in a different solar system. East of Rodrigues, the next land is 5000km away in Western Australia. Apart from a couple of scraps of land the French claim, there is no dry land going south till you reach Antarctica.

My project manager, Mike, had made a visit there early on in the project and come back waxing lyrical about how different the island was from Mauritius – so much more relaxed, so pristine – and armed with a pack of the strongest pickles, the local delicacy, that  you could ever wish for, or not as the case may be.

So I was looking forward to my own chance to visit Rodrigues in the October of 2008.  We were to spend around a week there, work with the different agencies to build a similar plan to the main island, and conduct both boat and land surveys in the same manner too.  The tickets were bought, the hotel planned.  Then I got a phone call late one night.  It was a call I knew might have happened any time in the last two months.

Rodrigues (copyright Google Earth, Digital Globe)