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Chumbe Island Eco-lodge – OK Coral – Ashley Bruce – Zanzibar

27-09-2010

Zanzibar - sounds magical, but would the place live up to expectations? Actually, it was even more promising than that, a coral island with only 7 eco-lodges, a reef sanctuary and a forest reserve. And I was going to have to stay there for four days - oh well, somebody's got to do it! Two weeks of second guessing what the Chumbe Island Coral Park people would be like when confronted by a demanding camera developed into daily email exchanges between what felt like friends. Sybille remained aloof though, with absolute commitment to turn up not clear until the last moment. Sybille Riedmiller is the founder, after frustration with mainstream nature conservation, who's spent years carefully negotiating her way to a private nature reserve, set up in 1992. For the story to be told, it would be strange if she wasn't in this particular World Challenge film.

Much more pragmatically though, there had to be way of filming underwater. With our limited budgets, the only option was a plastic bag affair that enveloped the camera. Two problems with this, it wasn't going to be my brand new Panasonic with mainly sound stuff carefully engineered to be more-or-less permanently attached and there wasn't a Sony Z1 version available with only a weeks notice in July. So with a Z7 version and wondering if I could remember how to snorkel, I set off for Heathrow. Kenya Airlines kindly cancelled the plane, effectively for 24 hours, so after a riveting time hanging around and frantic calls to Tanzania, off I set.

Karlyn Langjahr, the manager, turned out to be more calm, cool and collected than I'd imagined from the email exchanges but she did attempt to excitedly tell me everything while we bounced about in the noisy small boat you catch to get to the island. It's this strange thing about getting anywhere, I always feel the need to shoot straight away - I never use the footage, but it does get people used to me always having a black metallic 'growth' beside my head.

Of course you can't go wrong with an idyllic coral island off the African coast with coconut crabs, turtles and articulate guests holidaying in eco-luxury with solar powered lamps and Zanzibar spiced food. The lost day drove a more than frantic pace from dawn to dusk, which was a pity as this was the (underlined the) place to chill, as one of the children said. I never did, not least because Sybille and I had so much catching up to do - we'd never met before, but it felt like we had.

The plastic bag housing was completely useless, which didn't matter because volunteer Lucy Marcus's underwater filming was terrific, and so were the rangers and the staff and the school kids who came, like me, to experience a magical castaway island.

Posted by Ashley Bruce

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Bottom Brance

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Leo Johnson

Robert Lamb


look back

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