From icy cold to glacially cool 8 July 2006

 

Hi again,

Just finished a week in Brazil – what a place. I strongly suspect these are the coolest people on earth – they’re cool at a genetic level. They’re just….cool. All the time. You feel like a grotesquely gangly pale skinned Englishman the moment you step off the plane, as everyone here is also so absurdly beautiful. They are all six feet tall, have olive skin and flashing brown eyes, pert bottoms and perfect bosoms, and sashay around in the tiniest of bikinis – and that’s just the blokes. I felt thoroughly out of place in my lucky boxer shorts with the gusset rotted out and the dodgy waist band elastic I can tell you.

 

We traveled down to a wonderful place called Laguna, where the dolphins hunt with the fishermen. I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice to say it was quite incredible to witness them working in perfect harmony. These are completely wild dolphins, and every now and then they would dish out a good ticking off to the fishermen, running past them and slapping the water with their tail flukes if the nets were missing the fish they rounded up. One of them swam past the line of boats flipping a fish into the air again and again, as if to say “This is a fish chaps, this is what we’re all after. Everyone got that? Good. We may continue.”

 

The resort we stayed in was absolutely lovely. One of the most famous surf beaches in Southern Brazil, with log haciendas tucked discreetly into the trees behind the beach. You wouldn’t want to go surfing there though as the locals are all hard core surfers who don’t really like incompetent outsiders, and there are stories of impromptu dental work taking place under a flurry of tanned fists in the local car park.

 

On the last night we were invited to a barbeque by our hosts (Argentinians), in Brazil, as an English camera crew. The reason for mentioning this is that all three countries had been knocked out of the World Cup in the previous 24 hours, so all in all we weren’t expecting a wacky evening.

 

It turns out that an Argentinian barbeque consists of pretty much the entire hind quarters of a heifer being lifted onto a raging fire, with bits being lopped off and then carried to your plate still twitching. It was a faintly primeaval scene as we slavered and gobbled raw meat, the lights of the flames dancing off the blood and oil dripping down our chins.

 

And so to the Forbidden Island – Fernando de Noronha. A tiny speck in the Atlantic circled by the largest resident pod of dolphins in the world. There’s a rock rising from the middle of it that dominates completely, and is said to look like a willy. There are also a couple of rounder rocks that are said to look like boobs. I couldn’t see it myself, however I suppose the chaps who discovered it had spent months in a boiling wooden hull surrounded by sweaty men, and most things looked like boobs by then. I bet the guy who said “Yeah, and the thing in the middle looks like a giant willy” struggled to get someone to share the night watches with him though.

 

The spinner dolphins were quite amazing, and once again I won’t spoil the surprise! Incredible level of interaction with us though, quite beyond anything I’ve ever experienced before. We also caught and tagged a turtle underwater with the help of the world’s tiniest scientist. He looked like Frankie Dettori standing in a hole, has taken a number of good kickings from irate turtles, and should seriously look at another profession.

Hope all is well at home. Off to Mexico (ola) to exchange uppercuts with giant squid.

 

All the best,

Mont

20,000 legs under the sea – the quest for the giant octopus 7 August 2006

 

Hi all,

 

Just got back from British Colombia – very interesting too.

 

Northern Vancouver island is chocolate box beautiful, absurdly green and lush, with pine forests plunging theatrically into ribbons of shining sea lochs criss-crossed by whales and sea otters, interspersed with the odd splash of a bald eagle spoiling a trout’s afternoon.

 

The best way to get around is on the water. This is for two simple reasons – the first being that you see all manner of extraordinary activity as you putter through shaded inlets, and the second being that the roads run out just as you get to the really interesting bits.

 

We were here to see killer whales, giant octopus, and – a personal ambition of mine – wolfeels. Before we could do any of that, we took an afternoon trip with some particularly intrepid tourists to go and watch the grizzlies fishing for salmon. This involves creeping up on a bear as it peers into the water, trying to be as quiet as possible in a bloody great big aluminum boat. Try pushing a skip quietly down your local high street and you’ll get an idea of how tricky this is.

 

We got really close to a bear (large), and then crunched on some gravel. The bear looked up and the cogs plainly whirred in it’s “I eat absolutely anything” brain. It’s thought process went along the lines of, “Why bother chasing salmon that swim like bullets when I can just wander over there and hoik out a fat American tourist and eat well for a week.” He duly ambled over, causing our guides to reverse our skiff (no engine, it’s all done by hand). The idea was to get to deep water, which we did as the bear was an exhilarating few metres away. This was accomplished by our guide actually swimming in his waders, his little legs whirring frantically whilst all we could see was a white set of knuckles on the side of boat. When I asked him later if that was normal, he looked at me with hollow eyes and, rather huskily, said “No.”

 

Anyway, on to our backwater hideaway. This was an unbelievable place – incredible. It is so remote it can only be reached by a two hour boat trip from a tiny fishing port. It’s called a float home, and is essentially a floating shack up a tiny creek, owned by an amiable giant. The giant is called – rather appropriately - John, and is a great big scarred ambling thing of a man. I very badly wanted him to be my friend, as the alternative was too awful to contemplate.

 

Our first dive was with the wolf eels. Eight feet long, with a face that would make a funeral cortege turn down a side street, they are one of the friendliest of all fish. They associate divers with food (as divers have been feeding them for years), and also – bizarrely – like nothing more than having a dam good scratch. We had a wonderful dive – wonderful – with a huge wolf eel that gazed at me adoringly from about an inch away as I scratched it under the chin. The last time I was that close to something that ugly was an unfortunate lapse of judgement during a slow dance in Plymouth many years ago.

 

Our giant octopus proved to be a tad more elusive. You have to dive at night, and after a great deal of looking over a great many nights we finally found one crouched in it’s gloomy lair. They are curious animals, and we had been widely assured that if you wiggle your fingers (glove off) in front of the hole, the octopus will emerge. This I duly did, forgetting that the octopus is a distinctly bendy affair. Six of it’s legs stayed glued to the inside of the den, and the remaining two wrapped themselves around my hand and dragged me in (well, my arm in – the rest of me stayed resolutely outside). We gurned at each other for about ten minutes from this position, both pulling in different directions and getting nowhere, until Jason (small underwater cameraman with a big lens) got bored and hauled on the bits of me that remained outside the hole. The octopus emerged smartly, and a tremendous ten minutes ensued with him being filmed from all angles. Before we left, we guided him towards two fat crabs that had the misfortune to be ambling past, and left him munching on them contentedly.

 

From there we threaded our way through endless inlets and sleepy hollows trying to look for orca’s. Not a huge level of success I have to say, but it did give us all a chance to sit and listen to John the Giant tell us his many stories of years at sea. His “freak wave and the boat was 60 feet underwater before I knew it” put my “felt a bit squiffy in gusty conditions off Scotland once” story neatly into perspective.

Anyway, speaking of Scotland, we’re off there now to seek out basking sharks.

 

Up your kilt.

Best, Monty

 

Whisky and Wildlife 31 August 2006

 

“You don’t want much do ya laddie?”. This comment was accompanied by the rasp of a weathered thumb over graying beard, and a whimsical look from the small, dungaree’d figure of our skipper. Picture a Scottish fisherman, oozing the wisdom of the Western Isles whilst peering over half moon specs, and you have in your head an exact image of Paul from the good boat Silver Swift. The plan was to putter about the Isle of Mull for four days, and I had just presented Paul with our ludicrous list of target species.

 

Top of this was the basking shark. The second largest fish in the sea, the basker essentially swims around for most of it’s life with it’s mouth open, treating everything in front of it as an all-you-can-eat buffet. These things are massive, and yet have a brain about the same size as that of a rat. Stick one in a pair of shorts and a scrum cap, and you have an uncanny resemblance to any one of the forwards from the Old Bristolian 1st XV.

 

Having left Paul still peering anxiously at our list, we drove off to our B&B. Pleasingly this was once again precisely how you’d imagine a B&B in somewhere called Tobermory to be – picturesque in the extreme, with the occasional stag peering through the flowerbeds, and run by a landlady who was 4’10’ tall. I know that because she rather proudly told me when we met, although initially I had no idea where the voice was coming from and peered about me wildly before looking down and spotting her.

 

The next morning saw us all scanning a grey horizon optimistically as the boat weaved it’s way around the islands. The problem with looking for basking sharks is that although they are 35 feet long, only the very tip of the dorsal fin shows at the surface, leading to numerous excited shouts every time anyone saw a distant puffin. Our assembled dive team stuck to the job manfully, squinting through slitted eyes into the ubiquitous Scottish rain as it hissed into a bleak and choppy sea. The team were an eclectic mix of cameramen, lantern jawed ex military types, and hard core technical divers. This disparate group had a vast range of experience and the powerful unifying factor of consistently finding the act of breaking wind amusing. Our tranquil passage through the Western Isles, for so many years an inspiration for scholars, poets and writers, was therefore punctuated by peculiar parping noises followed immediately by roars of mirth and mutual congratulation.

 

By now the rain was the classic horizontal Scottish variety, and it seemed to me that every living thing was cowering in whatever passed as home. Only idiots like us were out in the teeth of the squall, and hope was waning as any basking shark would be deep in the gloomy water beneath us. Voicing my fears to Chris Holt, an ex Royal Engineers mine clearance diver the size of a well fed bison, he looked at me witheringly and said something splendid.

“Monty, I reject your reality of not seeing a basking shark, and I insert my own. At precisely 1230 we will see our first shark.” Turning smartly on his heel, he returned to his post, rain dripping from a granite chin thrust defiantly into the sheets of rain. If the boat had sunk he would still be there, grimly scanning the horizon whilst stood to attention as he slipped beneath the waves.

 

And at 1228, what do you know, Russ (large unflappable commercial diver who doubles as my brother in law) said “What’s that?” and pointed at two fins moving through the water’s surface. The sun burst from behind a cloud, the water miraculously stilled, and suddenly we were surrounded by basking sharks. It really did happen like that, resulting in us all standing with our mouths open, remnants of the rain steaming off waterproofs, pointing wordlessly in ten different directions.

 

It’s actually pretty intimidating approaching basking sharks as one is messing with a fundamental, visceral instinct. Generally when floating on the waters surface as a large fin approaches, the standard reaction is to soil oneself and flee to the boat. Basking sharks are of course filter feeders, but to see one pass beneath your twitching fins like a submarine still awakens some fairly primaeval urges. After a while we all relaxed, sharks included, and began to enjoy each others company. Fabulous stuff in the sun kissed Western Isles.

 

As a very brief footnote I should point out that I took Chris – aforementioned large ex-Royal Engineer – to a local golf course on our last evening. My golf experience – considerable. Chris’s golf experience – nil. As in he’d never, ever, picked up a club. After a brief and intensely patronising introduction to the subtle arts of the game from myself, we tee’d off.

 

Fast forward to the ninth hole. Chris is now striding the undulating course, head up, swinging a golf club as an impromptu walking stick, inhaling glorious Scottish air extravagantly through his nostrils and telling me this is quite the finest evening he’s had for months. I am trailing several yards behind him, muttering darkly to myself, and kicking stones. Quite unreasonably, he has in the interim cracked a series of 250 yard arrow straight drives down various fairways, and is thrashing me. Each of his glorious shots is greeted by a truculent mumble from the surly git I’ve miraculously become, and a beaming smile from him. We end up on the final green with me staring at my shoes, shaking his outstretched hand in much the same way a man would respond to being handed a turd.†

 

And so we leave Bonnie Scotland. I feel elated at our basking shark encounter, and yet curiously unmanned by the humiliation on the final evening. On to Tonga, where I understand humpback whales lurk, and golf courses are few and far between.

 

Massive 8 September 2006

 

Just leaving Tonga in a rattly old Dakota-type Indiana Jones "having a fight whilst entangled in a cargo net hanging out the back door" style plane. The islands are passing beneath me in a blur, not due to the speed but more down to the fact that I'm being rattled to death by engines that haven't had a good service since the Berlin airlift, causing me to tighten my webbing seatbelt and hunker down in my wicker seat.

 

I intend to live in Tonga for the rest of my life! As we flew in on arrival, I glanced down and saw two things. The first was a humpback whale, rolling in the surf at the end of the runway, the second (and far more significant) was about twenty games of rugby going on.

 

Rugby's a good game for the Tongans. There are many ways to describe them, but perhaps "scarily massive" is one of the best. This is where Jonah Lomu comes from, and he only left because the big boys kept nicking his dinner money and giving him wedgies in the playground. Fortunately for the entire rest of the world, another word is "friendly". I like to think that I'm a large-ish chap (6'3" and about fifteen stone) but in the space of one short flight from Auckland to Tonga, I went from being a big bloke to being a skinny amaemic runt. As we hefted our bags into the taxi I said to the driver as he approached one of the more ridiculous ones - about 70lbs or so - "Be careful with that one, it's pretty heavy". He gave me a look of genuine bewilderment as he picked it up and flicked it into the back of the cab.

 

As he climbed into the taxi, I suddenly had a vivid mental image of an elephant trying to get into a fridge. The suspension of the cab groaned, and he grasped the steering wheel delicately between two fingers and thumbs, peering through the windscreen out of one eye, his head at an angle against the roof and one buttock-sized cheek pressed up against the glass. I spent the entire week feeling like the Dennis Waterman character in Little Britain.

We were there to see the humpbacks of course, and received a warm welcome from the (relatively) Lilliputian figure of Al, the owner of our host centre Dolphin Divers. An ex fireman from Wolverhampton, when I asked him if he missed home he replied "No Monty, not at all." Substitute the word "Monty" in that sentence with "you blithering idiot" and you can probably get an idea of his facial expression at the time. And he has a point. Tonga is wild, untamed, full of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet, and remains relatively unsullied by tourists.

We were assured by all and sundry that sharing the water with the humpbacks would be a dead cert, and with six days to do it, we had provided ourselves ample time to get stunning footage.

 

Next morning, bright and early, there we were, bobbing about in the middle of nowhere, getting sunburnt noses, and squinting at the horizon optimistically. Day one became day two (not alarmed at all), day two became day three (mildly perturbed), day three became day four (moderately alarmed), day four became day five (mildly hysterical), day five became day six (last day, gently sobbing). We had about three hours to go, three hours from the hundreds we'd spent scanning the sea around us, getting burnt to a cinder, frying our corneas, and generally getting pink, sweaty and irritable.

 

As the shadows lengthened, a broad, glossy back broke the surface a few hundred yards away. We'd seen this a few times, so didn't get dreadfully excited. Myself and Simon clambered onto the back of the boat, sitting there in snorkels and wetsuits, frying in the heat. We looked at each other grimly. "Last throw of the dice mate" I said. If this whale didn't co-operate, we (and the show) were knackered.

 

We slipped off the back of the boat - still about fifty yards away from the whale - and looked down into the deep water, an absolute rich, dark blue with the suns rays lancing all around us. Deep, deep down, I saw a vague shape, then a touch of white, then a sense of form. It was a tiny humpback, about three weeks old. I hung at the surface, hardly daring to breathe, and gradually it sculled towards me. It ended up about six feet away, peering intently into my face, mystified by this peculiar floating lump of plankton.

 

Looking down again, the water darkened on all together more massive scale, and mum appeared. Rising towards me and the calf, she touched the calf with a giant white pectoral, and they both turned away into the blue.

I have never in all my travels encountered anything like it. I was completely overwhelmed when I got to the boat, and really didn't want to talk to the camera. I had to of course, and babbled all sorts of nonsense. There are very complex arguments about swimming with humpbacks here - does it disturb them, are we distressing them by chasing them about in boats? All very relevant, and something we explored in the programme, but I have to say it really was a wonderful, overwhelming experience.

 

Just as an aside, I spent pretty much the entire week whipping our Tongan dive guide into a frenzy about how I was going kick his steely butt in a game of rugby at the end of our stay. This was, of course, complete nonsense, matching an occasional Old Bristolian 2nd XV wheezy winger (when selected) against 300lb of snorting fast twitch muscle with a warrior heritage and tattoos created with a sharpened pig bone. The resultant feeling of being picked up and driven face first into concrete hard earth with the rest of my body being crammed accordion like into my skull would have been moderately unpleasant, but no more than I deserved.

 

Judicious juggling of the itinerary meant that the game never took place. As I shook hands at the end of my stay, I told him how he had got lucky that I hadn't had a chance to give him a good going over on the pitch. As such the final sound I heard as I walked through the departure gate was his hysterical mirth, an appropriate soundtrack for a people who's default setting is the smile. Paul Theroux wrote a bloody awful book about these islands where he slagged everyone off. The only thing he got right was the title - "The Happy Isles of Oceania". I'll be back.

 

A sharks tale 22 September 2006

 

For every moment on these trips spent arguing with a bovine check in clerk at an airport, or sitting on a loo in a fly-blown hotel with your ashen face greased with sweat illuminated only by a flickering neon sign by your window as the latest local delicacy thunders exuberantly out of your system, there is at the end an ultimate reward. Being a firm believer in karma, and having braved the three hour trip up the coast of Cebu with a driver who obviously held equally strong views about reincarnation, it all seemed rather apt that the island looming on the horizon was classically beautiful.

 

Rather unusually for one of our filming projects, we would be spending our entire trip on the tiny island of Malapascua, measuring approximately 2km by 1km. Our huts on the beach were perhaps the ultimate in a romantic hideaway, the perfect place then for me to share with a big hairy cameraman.

 

We had been assured that our dive operator was a mere ten minutes walk away. What this quietly ignored was the absolute warren of tracks and paths through the tiny fishing villages that dotted the island. My first trip to the dive operator, begun in the glow of a tropical dusk and ending in pitch darkness an hour later, was only made possible by the intervention of two tiny children. Finding me crashing, sweating and swearing amongst the pigs and chickens in the darkness at the back of their hut, rather than chase me off with sticks, they took a hand each and led me to the dive operation. Mission accomplished, they skipped off to find more tourists. I got the impression this was a distinctly well worn routine.

 

The entire reason Malapascua should loom large in any travelers itinerary lurks off the steep sides of Monad Shoal, an undersea mountain several kilometers off the coast. This is the thresher shark capital of the world, a creature of near mythical dimensions for any diver. The steep sides of the shoal plunge into the dark waters that are the home of this most mysterious of all the sharks, and yet every morning they spiral up out of the darkness to visit the cleaning stations at the lip of the drop off.

 

Morning in Malapascua really does mean morning, and the inhuman hour of 4 a.m. saw me pawing at my alarm clock before shuffling towards the dive boat, the distant horizon touched by the gentle glow of the day to come. Still in this catatonic state of semi consciousness, it seemed only moments until I was rolling into the dark water, the edge of the shoal a mysterious outline beneath me.

 

We drifted down to the edge of the drop off, and settled beside what was plainly an ancient cleaning station. Preparing for a long wait, I looked down to seek out a spot where I could lay for the entire dive without damaging any coral. Settling like some gigantic cuttlefish in a puff of silt and sand, I glanced up and there, about fifteen feet in front of me, was a thresher shark.

 

We stared at each other for a moment, both thinking the same "Now that is one weird looking thing" thoughts. The thresher than gathered it's wits and swept past, that magnificent tail undulating gently, the huge eye regarding me with what seemed genuine curiosity. Here was the creature of myth and legend made real, an encounter I'd firmly believed would never take place. Coming to what remained of my senses, I turned and babbled at the camera. The shark dutifully circled us for several minutes, despite my rapidly increasing enthusiasm and volume, even pausing for a swift polish and brush up at the cleaning station before finally drifting back into the deep water at the edge of the drop off with a final disbelieving glance behind it. He's probably writing a very similar diary to his mates right now on thresher mail.

 

After the dive we puttered back to shore, and trudged wearily through thick white sand towards the intoxicating whiff of breakfast. As a shapely lady in a sarong placed a latte in front of me, magically produced from a wheezing machine in the corner, I glanced at my watch. It was 8 a.m. - and our target animal was already framed, filmed and filed. Some day all wildlife filming will be this way.

 

I also tried hookah diving. This is the most basic form of diving imaginable, using a small hosepipe clutched in the corner of the mouth, and a rattling compressor pumping diesel laden air to the diver below. Even so, the locals dive to prodigious depths using this gear, and have - sadly - had a significant impact on some of the reefs in the region using it to hunt for aquarium and edible fish species.

 

Clamping the hose in the corner of my mouth, the camera's whirred as I stared flintily into the lens and waked lyrical about the urge to dive, and how I was going back to basics. Raising one laconic eyebrow, I slipped beneath the waves. I reappeared (very) shortly afterwards spitting out several gallons of seawater followed by several very bad words on a gust of diesel laden breath. The boatman, who spoke very little English in the first place, has now added some exhilarating new expressions to his vocabulary. How these guys do it is beyond me.

 

Anyway, great stuff. Onto Bali where the mighty sunfish is said to lurk.

 

All the best,

Mont