Blue Ventures volunteering, andavadoaka Madagascar
June 27 - August 14
post by allana
SALAMAAAA!!!!! We’re back! Back to fresh water showers! With hot water! Dairy foods! Oh the joy! These past 7 weeks here in Madagascar has been a real mixed bag… It’s been challenging, exhausting, relaxing, hectic, slow-paced, tons of fun and now really sad saying goodbye. We’ve just waved off all the other volunteers as they head back to Tana on the overland tour. Now it’s back to just the two of us… or not quite.
Ian and Amy left us with a lovely parting gift, Amelia the Chamelia(n). She is our good luck charm and little travel buddy for the rest of the trip (keep your eyes peeled for future photos, you never know where she might pop up!). One thing is for sure, our Madagascan experience was deeply influenced by the strong friendships formed over 7 weeks of living and diving together.
Hopefully this page will provide a general overview of our time spent volunteering here. Blue Ventures (BV) is a UK based NGO, focused on community based marine conservation in the south west corner of Madagascar.. They also have a site set up in Belize (www.blueventures,org).
Ian and Amy left us with a lovely parting gift, Amelia the Chamelia(n). She is our good luck charm and little travel buddy for the rest of the trip (keep your eyes peeled for future photos, you never know where she might pop up!). One thing is for sure, our Madagascan experience was deeply influenced by the strong friendships formed over 7 weeks of living and diving together.
Hopefully this page will provide a general overview of our time spent volunteering here. Blue Ventures (BV) is a UK based NGO, focused on community based marine conservation in the south west corner of Madagascar.. They also have a site set up in Belize (www.blueventures,org).
Thinking back to our first week here we were shocked by how fast the days flew by due to the seemingly jam packed scheduling. An average day in the life of a BV volunteer goes like this:
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Thankfully by the last few weeks we had settled into a comfortable routine. In addition to the daily activities there were always a few spare hours to sleep, read or explore the local area with Jacks, BV’s awesome eco-guide. Or we would sit around and discuss food. After 6 weeks of fish, rice and beans for almost every meal, we estimate that by the end 85% of all conversations revolved around food. Pizza always rated highly in these discussions, in addition to cheese, burgers, yoghurt, chips, fruit and vegetables…Dunkin Doughnuts... pretty much anything other than fish, rice and beans.
To be honest after travelling on our own for all this time the whole experience was a huge change to get used to. Luckily for us the group of volunteers we landed with are awesome. Firm friendships were forged immediately on the overland tour (yay Elefun bus!!!). On the trip from Tana to Tulear we stopped off in some amazing national parks, saw our first Madagascan chameleons and lunched with lemurs. It was soon evident this was a fun group of people with some pretty awesome dancing skills.
To be honest after travelling on our own for all this time the whole experience was a huge change to get used to. Luckily for us the group of volunteers we landed with are awesome. Firm friendships were forged immediately on the overland tour (yay Elefun bus!!!). On the trip from Tana to Tulear we stopped off in some amazing national parks, saw our first Madagascan chameleons and lunched with lemurs. It was soon evident this was a fun group of people with some pretty awesome dancing skills.
We finally arrived at the BV research base at Coco Beach after 7 hours bumping along a sand road. Coco Beach is a collection of cute, colourful little smurf huts dotted along the cliffs overlooking various small bays in the tiny fishing village of Andavadoaka. Scott and I got special treatment being a newly engaged couple, which meant a hut all to ourselves! As the weeks wore on we relished our ability to escape every now and then, as communal living began to wear down our comrades :)
About halfway through the expedition everyone had passed their dive courses and fish and benthic exams, allowing us all to contribute to data collection for BV. The science or data collection side of things involves coral reef monitoring through fish belts and benthic point intercept transects. For the fish belts you reel out a 20m line and count every single fish species (looking at species richness and abundance) in a 5m radius along the line. Benthic surveys involve a 10m tape measure and every 20cm you record what corals and other invertebrates lie along it. Although we passed both exams, Scott and I primarily did the fish belts. This was fine with us because we are more into the fish, and you can still get a good look around the reef rather than having your eyes glued to the substrate. As you go along you record everything on your slate, which later on is typed up into the BV database on the Nosy Cao computers. This experience has definitely given us an even greater appreciation of coral reef ecosystems. It’s fantastic to go for a dive and know about the coral, tunicate or sponge you’re looking at and the 150 fish species we’ve learned has hugely expanded our general knowledge.
So although we are happy to be back in town now, and eating our way through every restaurant in Tulear, it is with real sadness that we say goodbye to our new friends and the tiny village of Andavadoaka. We will miss the little kids running up to shake our hands on the beach, and their cheeky smiles ever eager to be in front of the camera. We will miss watching the sun come up across the water as we gear up in the boat on early dives (but not the freezing cold!). We will certainly miss the amazement of surfacing from a dive only to find a humpback whale 100m away from us. But most of all we will miss our beloved new friends-- our temporary family from around the world.