Honeymoon Pt 4 - Zanzibar, Ras Nungwi Part 1

Our next hotel was Ras Nungwi in the North of the island where we received a lovely bottle of chilled sparkling wine on arrival!  We planned to do 6 days of diving over our 8 day stay here and after drinking our fizz and having lunch overlooking the pool we went to check in at the dive center.

We ended up doing only 3 days of diving, the reasons for which I will explain...

Our first full day at the resort we booked to go on a diving trip to Tumbatu Island.  We had been told at the dive center that this was a great place to dive but required an early morning car trip to the other side of the island first to catch the boat from there.  We met the car at 8am and made our way to the other side only to have to hang about for half an hour before getting on the boat.  When we finally got on the boat it had started to rain and the sea was getting a lot more choppy.  We initially set off in the opposite direction to the dive sites, which we had been told were 1 hour away by boat, to collect more divers from another resort further up the coast.  We then made our way back towards Tumbatu in the pouring rain and very choppy conditions.  We were freezing cold and I was already feeling sea sick despite taking sea-sickness pills that morning.

It was a tad rainy and a wee bit rough out there!

Not enjoying our dive trip AT ALL!

Needless to say, we weren't enjoying ourselves!  When we arrived and started the dive we felt much better and warmer under the sea and I saw my first Leaf Scorpionfish but other than that it wasn't a particularly amazing dive.  Visibility was poor due to the weather conditions and we didn't see a huge amount of sea life.  The end of the dive did provide me with a great photo opportunity though as we found a Moray Eel having his teeth cleaned by a cleaner shrimp!  Between the 1st and 2nd dives we thought we would be given the lunch we had been told was included but we were given just a slice of watermelon.  As we were now tethered and the surge was still bad, I was feeling REALLY sick so I decided to go back into the water and just hang onto the rope attached to the boat to try and combat my sea sickness.  Unfortunately I made this move too late and ended up feeding the fish anyway!!

Moray Eel scale & polish!

Post-dive, at least the rain had stopped!

Our 2nd dive was a bit better than the first as we saw a bit more and then we made our way back to the main island, not before going past our beach to drop off the others again.  We finally made it back onto dry land expecting our transport back to our hotel which we again had to wait a while for.  We eventually made it back to Ras Nungwi at 4pm having had nothing to eat since 7am!  (Admittedly I wouldn't have kept it down anyway, but still...)  We both admitted that neither of us thought the diving was worth the boat trip out there and realised we'd been rather spoiled on our previous diving trips having had jettys to get onto the boats and dry areas to get out of the wind and rain while on the boat.  We immediately went to order lunch, before the bar closed to get ready for dinner, as we were both starving by now and decided we would take the next day off diving and just chill on the beach instead!

Yummy fruit for breakfast - I should point out this was pud after a lovely omelette, I'm not really that healthy!  ;)

LOVE hammocks!

My sexy hubby!

Complimentary fruit brought round the pool and beach areas at 11, yum!

We went along to a welcome meeting at the dive centre the next night and discussed doing some more local dives with the dive centre manager who said we could go out to some of the sites just 10 minutes away with him so we booked for the following day.