and so it continues........

There has been a significant amount of alarm setting and motivation digging to lever, peel, roll, extract myself to get out to make the most  of my time and perhaps sometimes missing out on just stopping......sayings like you can sleep when you're dead spring to mind..... But I just think you'll be dead. You won't appreciate the sleep, sleep is good it heals the body and mind and Icould probably be classed a professional sleeper until recently.

Time to tour the island bearing in mind we can only swing around the bottom third, I think it was the small 132 lighthouse steep steps that broke us. Only half the group made the top understably, there was either 8 or 10 steps per flight. I think depending on how much I was puffing affected my ability to count. As long as you didn't look up to see that the top was seeeeemingly miles away each flight went by and the view was worth it

My hut is the one in the bottom right hand corner of the photo.

Then came the discussion of heading back down....backwards, forwards or sideways? Whatever way just not the falling way.....regretting wearing my flip flops!

Now our guide Mohammed wisely said he was only going to tell us a about a few things on the island so that we remember some rather than none.....so here is what I remember.

The intertidal poll above fills up with the tide because the water comes up through the island not in from the sea.....mangroves love this.

Mangroves are great for building with, they grow tall and straight and tasty salty so the termites don't like them. They are also a great natural defence against erosion and a not insignificant CO2 storer and fortunately Zanzibar has now protected their mangroves.

Their ability to reproduce is also a marginally fraught game of vertical poo sticks

mohammed demonstrated with the mangrove seed pod how it needs  to fall vertically dig into the ground like a dart and then it will send out its roots. His landed at a jaunty angle soooo who knows.

Then there are the baobab trees these can live to 5000years easily and plenty more. This one was 6M in diameter and a mere baby at 500years old and to the delight of the day trippers there was a coconut crab hiding out, our first glimpse of these nocturnal creatures

Then there is the Bob Marley parasitic root tree that engulfs and lives of another tree 

The candelabra cactus that produces a poisonous white sap that the fishermen use to use and if you accidently got it in your eye you would go blind........unless, wait for it, you squirt some breast milk in you eye, then you are all good. Told from personal experience of Mohammed.

Maybe I won't rush to have one!

As we continued on our walk we eventually got to the east coast where the Coral Rag can be clearly seen and the fossiled corals prevalent 

A giant clam

The view back to Zanzibar and my highly in appropriate walking set up!

Another snooze a swim in the sea and spotting the ever growing Sebastian's of this world

Candlelight dinner and then the search for the nocturnal coconut crab. This time I was much.more appropriately clothed ready to keep my eyes peeled.

they didn't need much peeling the first one we saw hanging out on the highway! The coconut crab can live happily to 50years but possibly 120years. They are born in the water but the lungs develop when they are juvenile and then they can longer be on the water without drowning. They can weigh over 4kg and come in a selection of colours those reasons for this are yet to be discovered.

Any there's loads of them!

We don't stay too long as putting torches on a nocturnal creatures isn't really fair. 

From here I wandered back to relax and find myself chatting to Sea Urchin Man, called such because he never gave me his name and nor did I give mine. But he did tell me about the 23 sea urchin sounds he had pulled out his foot and was off to hospital to see if they could get more out as he was fairly sure the NHS would do nothing🤣. He he up on the South of France and now worked between South Africa and London as some kind of lawyer and for such a young chap he seemed burnt out. We simply chatted away for hours about places, people things with a thunderstorm rolling by on the horizon.

After which I went back to my hut and I drifted off to sleep with my lampshade quandary..... Less hat more big skirt from Victorian times!