Ile Moyenne

Before getting to the serious work, I had the chance to spend my Sunday on a boat trip. The St Anne Marine Park consists of several small island and coral reefs with plenty of fishes. Each small island is known for something else: one of them, Long Island used to be a "quarantine island" where ships had to stop and the people coming from the ships were examined to detect if they had any disease or illness before debarking on Mahe Island. Then later there was a prison there...the Alcatraz of the Seychelles! I'm sure prisoners had quite a nice sea view from their prison cells. After the not so brilliant past of the island, it will finally be known for something nice: currently

they are building a Shangri-La hotel on the island. My favourite island was Moyenne Island. Huge turtles are living on the island and the island was once also a home for a dog shelter. The dog shelter was founded by a British woman: she took the stray dogs from the main island Mahe, and took them to Moyenne Island. When she opened the shelter , it provided home to 5o dogs and later when she died, there was 70 dogs living there. The dogs are not there anymore, but the giant turtles are still there, more than 120 of them. They are strolling around the island freely, we were even feeding them - they like all kinds of leaves, they are not very picky. There is a trail going around the island, takes about 45 minutes to go around, the first half of the trail is easy, the second half needs a little bit of climbing skills, but it's nothing that wouldn't be manageable in sandals or flip flops. There is also a small cemetery where the owner of the island was buried when he died in 2012. The owner was Brendon Grimshaw, also a Brit, who bought the island for 8000 pounds roughly 50 years

ago. Thanks to him, the island is untouched, no hotels, just untouched nature.
We were travelling with a glass bottom boat so we were able to see the corals and the different fishes, the zebra fish or the sergeant fish. The corals were a bit destroyed by the big waves caused by the El Nino. These corals are also very sensitive, the water can't be either too hot or too cold, otherwise they die. There was also a submarine tour planned on our excursion but it was too wavy to move from our boat to the submarine, so we had to skip that. We could do some snorkelling, which was also very nice. Lunch was a BBQ on the beach of Cerf Island, with some typical food Seychellois - grilled pork, fish, chicken and sausage. What I really liked, was the delicious salad and chili sauce that came with.
My excursion companions were all very nice people. Chinese couple taking 10000+ pics, and even more selfies. Russian family with just usual drinking habit, but the star of the day was without doubt the South African man (but probably originally more like an Indian Maharaja) who just tore the whole ladder out of the boat as he was trying to get back on the boat after snorkelling. With my adopted german family (2 very kind couples) we nicknamed him walrus and were laughing so much...we just realised later that the word walrus means the same thing in English as in German, well oooops..

That was a first Sunday well spent on the island..to be continued...