It’s the first time in Mozambique for most of us. Discovering new landscapes, new colours, new flavours, red sand roads, blue stretching ocean, colourful women’s skirts, matapa.

Camel spiders, look it up. That’s the first animal we saw on arrival to Mozambique! We were welcomed by a warm and inspiring team who will support and teach us during our next five weeks.

We arrived just in time for dinner, which involved a lovely walk down to the restaurant on the beach where we were greeted by our first breaching humpback whales. We all introduced ourselves and shared our origin stories, having travelled from all corners of the globe. The next couple days were a plethora of firsts, some of which included…

The first of many beach cleans had us collecting bottle caps that will later be repurposed into beautiful ocean-themed jewelry (which you can purchase yourself on Love The Oceans Etsy!). We cooled off with our first swim in Mozambique and the Indian ocean said hello with some big waves!

Our first 5.00 am wake up was made easier by our first astonishing Mozambican sunrise on the way to….

… Our first time at a local fishery! We were tasked with measuring and identifying the various species that the fishermen of Paindane caught that day. At the end of the day we all learned the line dance to cotton eye joe and steps to Mozambican dances.

We went out on our first dives. The boat was launched from the beach using a huge tractor, waves were crazy. We saw so much on the reef, two turtles, jellyfish, sting ray, octopus, eels, lionfish, nudibranchs and many reef fish. We were all nervous but really excited and couldn’t wait to rollback off the boat into the water, which was a new experience for most of us. Maria and Faith had never dived in the sea before. Verity and Liv got their first certified open water dives, which was exciting! Ruhi, Bleddyn and Anne-Lise collected the first coral transect datawhich was tricky with the strong current. We were so happy to finally be in the sea and getting to contribute to marine conservation!

… Those dives lead to our first, and hopefully last!, time late night logging! Logging commenced at 15.30 pm and ended at… 22.30 pm! Let’s hope we can beat our time over the next four weeks!

Pascoal guided us on our first cultural tour through Paindane and Guinjata schools and the village. We harvested cassava leaves and roots with Cristina. We grated coconut and ground the cassava leaves in traditional ways. The result was a delicious matapa cooked by Cristinathat was devoured in seconds!

This is the end of a busy and beautiful first week. We can’t wait for the next ones!