Curieuse Island (a little bit of paradise).

Our initial group of 6 were met by the GVI team and told we were to be based on Curieuse Island for our 5 or 10 week rotation. This was brilliant as we all thought we were only going to get a week on the island if we were lucky.

After getting the ferry from Mahe to Praslin, the Curieuse team collected us in their boat and transferred us onto the Island. It was already dark by now so we just had enough time to dump our stuff in the tents and get some dinner. Island orientation will be another day.

We woke up to absolute paradise and a few of us went for an early morning swim. You would not believe the temperature of the water; we are talking 30C at least. Crazy! For the first two days the GVI team were kind enough to let us ease our way into the swing of island life; get to grips with our surroundings i.e. we got a lot of swim/snorkel time!! On Saturday Carl & Sally (GVI team) took us on a small walk (15 min) to see the giant Tortoises and a bit more of ‘our’ new home. Sunday morning we were taken for our first dive just to test out our dive skills and get a wee taster of what we will be learning. In the afternoon we went to see the Doctor’s house (Curieuse used to be an island to contain all the lepers and Dr McGregor came over from Scotland to help out) and afterwards we checked out another snorkel site. Some of us saw our first turtle and others saw our first white tip reef shark.

Monday sees the start of our first full work day with camp duties; we are split into two groups with one on Kitchen duties and the others on Tanks & Grounds. I think we will leave the details of that as a mystery and you will have to sign up to find out. Jason also joined us at this stage so 6 became 7. Later in the morning we sat down to our first coral workshop and all the information we were given before the start of the trip became a little clearer. That afternoon we got to do another dive but this time we were shown all the various families of corals that we learnt in the morning. Things started to make a little more sense. After a successful dinner we all went to bed about 8pm!!! Trust me it felt like midnight.

Tuesday we got to complete a double dive in which we were identifying all the corals we learnt yesterday. All in all this was a fab day.

Wednesday started great with an early morning snorkel where we felt like we were in an aquarium and saw our first Eagle ray. Later that morning we moved right onto Coral workshop two. As you can imagine this is harder than workshop one and I think we were all feeling a little overwhelmed. I am sure by the end of tomorrow things will make more sense.

We woke to another beautiful day, managed to squeeze in two dives and workshop two did become a little clearer. Thank goodness.

Well we have now reached the end of our first week and we have all survived . . . yay! Tonight is party night and we will have a BBQ in our newly made BBQ area. Oh and we get the weekend free from study.

Visiting the giant tortoises at the rangers station

By Janine Watson

Curieuse Island (a little bit of paradise).