White beaches and clear blue waters - Bongoyo Island
(sadly no pictures because of stolen camera and sand-water hazards while sailing, but I will put my new camera to good use soon!)
Last week we went to the island Bongoyo, just west of the Peninsula of Dar and a 20 minute boot trip from Slipway. It is an uninhabited island and a ‘marine reserve’ with one beautiful and carefully maintained stretch of beach at the tip. It is a small but amazing beach and, though it’s close to the city centre, it feels like a world away. We relaxed on the beach, mostly in the shade because the sun here is extremely hard on our fragile, white mzungu skin. We swam, we looked for large seashells (and found some), went snorkling (found very little) and ate some delicious seafood in the small restaurant there.
The only downside at this beach is that it is a little expensive: 6 dollars for the boatride to the island plus 10 dollars fee for the marine reserve per person (even though there’s still plenty of junk and waste to be found in the waters around the island) and once there, they charge you for use of the umbrellas and beach chairs. The beaches at Kigamboni are definitively way cheaper.
But this weekend we went back there, but this time with a little extra: we found out we could rent a small sailing boat at Slipway for only 100 dollars and because 3 out of 4 of us knew how to sail (I don’t), this seemed like a great extra experience for a limited extra cost per person.
While going there, we were brainstorming on what we could expect from a ‘small local sailing boat’ in Dar. We laughinly said it would be a hollowed out tree, with a mast we had to hold up, no lifevests or anker and a sail with a big hole in it, but it would probably be beter than that.
But it wasn’t. Once they showed us our ‘sailing boat’ we just started lauging. It was tiny. It was indeed a hollowed out tree with a small tree as a mast and a large rock tied to a rope instead of an anker. It did have floaters to the side and a small outboard motor ‘for emergencies’ and even 3 life vests. But once the sail came out, it really did have a large hole in it. Personally, I did not trust that boat at all when I got on it: I was convinced I was going to end up in the water within a few minutes. 2 local guys came with us on the boat to arrange the sails, so our experienced sailors had little work left to do.
But in the end it was an AH-MA-ZING experience! The boat, though small, turned out to be suprisingly stable and quick! We sailed around Bongoyo to the other side of the island and once it got on open sea, the sailing became a little harder but the little boat still managed surprisingly well. We ended up sailing to a beautifull stretch of deserted beach (though there was again quite some trash laying around further up on the beach) where we scared the massive crab-population and swam a little in the clear blue ocean. We sailed on to the main beach of bongoyo, ate some crab and fish and swam in the ocean some more, before our local sailors hurried us back to Slipway. There’s no pictures because we didn’t want to risk bringing electronics, but I have the memories of the beautiful views firmly stuck in my head.
The day after we discovered another version of our boat. In an open-air museum. Turns out this type of boat is a ‘Dhow’, the traditional boat that has been used by several people’s along the indian ocean for over 2000 years. And we sailed in that too!
The sailing was exilirating and relaxing and the swim we had at the deserted beach was quite the extra. I had never really sailed before but this trip on this quite unusual boat was so great, I decided I want to go sailing again, but maybe closer to home in a boat with less holes and more space :)
