Scuba Diving Around Mahé Island In The Seychelles, And Not Freaking Out About Worms In Your Food

I am quite behind on my posts, there’s already a whole island experience between us and Mahé, so this will be brief and more picture driven.

We found a place on booking.com, that should have been pretty close to the dive shop and the beach, possibly with an okay view of at least greenery. Instead we got a major road with a bus stop and a crazy ATM trying to communicate in demonic morse code. The light blue pin is where the site said our place would be, the red X where it actually (or close enough) was. Big difference, big disapointment, but when life gives you lemons you make cocktails with the local rum, and we did.

Many divers warned us that the scuba was not as nice here as it was on Praslin. It was different no doubt, not as majestic on the landscape, but a touch better on the coral and lot’s of life to see. We enjoyed 10 solid dives. It’s all about going in with an open mind and no expectations.

The coral was almost completely killed off in 2016 by an El Niño event, the water temperature rose to 34-35 degrees C for about a month, and most of the coral died. One guy we met said he was so depressed that he stopped diving at that point. Today the coral is making a comeback, and the fishes never left.

Dead stag horn (?) coral carpets this dive site.

Peppered moray, I think we call them tattooed morays in the Caribbean. This one on a wreck at a site called Twin Barges.

A rare frog fish. There was a few of them around.

There’s a hidden scorpion fish in that pic. Look for the fin and the eye. Yes they are venomous.

Quite a few of those sea slugs when you take the time to look (varicose warted?). Something like that).

Going down the anchor line. Yes, there’s a diver with a flower in her hair, guess who? And look at that viz.

“Porcelain” shells, there was a lot of them, no we did not take any, ethics underwater and all that.

That humphead parrot fish was about three feet long.

Storm of grunts, lovely feeling to float slowly through them.

Octopus! On almost every dive we saw them.

More stunning coral. Some of these colours sometimes, wow.

Looks a bit like a sea cucumber but with all those “feet” in the front (yeah, I should have looked it up first), a lot of them and quite fascinating. You can see their poop all over the place.

Quite a few of those cool looking big conch-like shells, and they were all alive.

Zebra moray. Yeah, people that name fishes are not the most creative.

Super cool gold spotted flatworm, notice high tech pointing tool (spoon).

A batfish, a super curious and playful animal that swims both vertically and horizontally, they get very close to divers as if they were curious.

And that is just a sample of what we saw, so great diving, but what about the worms in the food you might be wondering…

We like to eat on the adventuresome side, and sometimes that pays off, sometimes less so. We were at a really cool night market, drinking coconut wine out of the trunk of a car, walking around, chatting up people and basically having a good time. Then it was time to eat.

Had octopus curry there one day. Tasted good, made my stomach rumble a little.

So we made our selection, Gen chose something with a chicken leg. Half way through her dishe she noticed little white worms crawling over the meat. She finished the noodles though. Like a boss. Then we had some flavoured rum made by a Russian dude (he was selling it), as a preventive measure (also probiotics probably worked a treat).

In all fairness it was pretty gross, but there you go, the hazards of street food in tropical weather.

I want to post this before the battery runs out (plus it’s pretty much that time of the day where a cold beverage will be appreciated).

Farewell Seychelles, next stop Rodrigues island!

Diving & Chillin'

Scuba Diving Around Mahé Island In The Seychelles, And Not Freaking Out About Worms In Your Food

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