Trip out to the Transkei (Oct. 19 -25)

Although one may picture S.Africa as remote and rural (well, at least I did) I had yet to experience this side of it until I had the opportunity to spend a week in The Wild Coast (formerly called The Transkei).  I quickly discovered why it’s called The Wild Coast. No stores, paved roads or artificial beauty.  Just pristine and natural. I took a deep sigh of relief when we started our travels and I was warned the roads were going to be bumpy, there would be no stores for hours and there might not be hot water – I thought to myself, ‘yes, I finally made it to the South Africa I had envisioned!’  

It took about a day to drive out there. I went with the other Canadian intern, Mike, a master’s student, Olek, who is researching the community structures in the village of Tshani Mancozi and the fishing legislation, and Olek’s supervisor, Monty. We spent time with some fishermen, divers and other community members.  We managed to go swimming/snorkelling/diving in the ocean one time out of two attempts. I quickly discovered the rough conditions divers will go in to make a living. Not that I have the full picture, I will try to convey my experience and understanding. The divers are locals who make a living capturing crayfish (lobster) from the ocean. By capturing I mean that they wear a wet suit, flippers and snorkel set and plunge into the sometimes very risky ocean conditions and swim out varying distances and then free dive down as far as 8 – 10 m looking for crayfish. They wear gloves and have a bag tied around their waist so if/when they see a crayfish they can grab it and put it into their bag. The amount they capture varies significantly and is rather controversial. In saying all this, we decided to give it a go, since Olek has been working in the area over the past year we went out with about 8 other divers and figured we’d just go with them diving, or so we thought. Turns out we decided on the wiser decision of not swimming in the rocky not-so-forgiving ocean after a few feeble attempts. This particular time there were pretty strong waves, however, our second attempt a few days later proved successful, I did some snorkelling and the others free dived. Overall the trip was super amazing and felt like I was in another corner of the world.