Transylvanian Tales

The weekend of All Hallows' Eve seems like the appropriate time to share some photographs from a trip that I took to Transylvania over the summer.  Scroll down for all manner of spooky scenery, snarling animals, scythes and castles, but don't be totally fooled; Transylvania in summer is a wonderful destination for hiking and for every day of mist and rain that we endured we also enjoyed two of summer sunshine strolling in high alpine meadows.  Despite failing my usual primary criteria by not being next to the ocean, I can attest that it's well worth a visit.  

The cross on the mountain top above the town of Busteni is enormous, although it doesn't look it in the top left of this image.

Is Vlad a pig?

Sodden sheep dogs doing their best impressions of hell hounds.

Bram Castle: home of Vlad the Impaler and the inspiration for Dracula's Castle.

The Carpathian Mountains offer some stunning scenery.

Yup, scythes.  Less Grim Reaper and more hay harvest in this case.

Bram Castle.

Carpathian Bears.

Shifting sheep, come rain or shine.

Brasov.  They put a big sign on top of the hill overlooking the town in case you forget.

Transylvanian tracks and trails.

Big as a Bus

Weighing in at around 36 tons and as big as a bus, Humpback whales are a wonder of nature.  They typically travel around 25,000km each year, spending the summers feeding on krill and small fish in polar waters before migrating to tropical or sub-tropical waters in the winter to breed and give birth, which is where most of their positive interactions with humans occur.  Prior to the International Whaling Commission ban on commercial whaling in 1966, however, their interactions with humans weren't so great as their population had been decimated by 90%, but since then numbers have recovered to an estimated 80,000.  Over the next couple of months there are a couple of events celebrating these gentle giants, World Whale Day on Maui, Hawaii on February 15th and Whale Fest in (lovely but not as tropical) Brighton, UK, over the weekend of March 14-16.  Later this year there will also be a meeting of the IWC, and I for one sincerely hope that the conservation of whales and other cetaceans continues to be an important issue amongst the myriad of problems facing the world's oceans.     

Call me a pessimist, but...

Sometimes I just feel like casting off the lines, hauling in the fenders and getting the hell away.

I'll apologise here and now for following a none too chirpy post with one with a rather bleak outlook, but the timing is rather appropriate for this one and you can blame my piss-poor planning. I promise to publish something far more optimistic and full of sunshine next week.

You see, this weekend saw the politicians of the world gather in Durban, South Africa, for another seemingly doomed climate conference although you'd be forgiven for not being aware of that. The world is rather preoccupied with global economic woes right now and as such the fate of the planet that hosts us and our silly games of gambling invisible money seems to have slipped down the agenda. No habitable ecosystem on planet earth = no venue for our global economy. Seems to me therefore that it ought to be higher up the list of things to do.

Back in September, on or around the 27th, humanity exhausted nature's budget for the year. Earth Overshoot Day signifies the point at which we start using resources that the planet cannot regenerate or absorb the waste from within that year. It's the point at which we humans started spending more than we earnt in the year 2011 in an ecological sense, effectively living off an environmental credit card. Every year the planet can only absorb so much CO2, grow so many plants or support so many fish, however each year we use more than that. In 2007, the last year that data is available for, we used 1.5 planets worth of resources. Since 1966 humanity's ecological footprint has more than doubled.

All of this really, really scares me. I guess I'd be even more scared if I was a penguin or a polar bear though.

Jackass penguins, South Africa, some 1,600km from where their fate is being decided.

So how's about we all pull together and each try to do a little so that together we can achieve a lot. If not then perhaps I'll break the piggy bank and buy this little submarine so that I can visit the cities of the world in 50 years time when they're all underwater. It's quite expensive though...anybody want to go halves?

"It's not beyond possibility that warming will actually cause sea-level rises which could threaten the centre of London. The stakes are very high. We know these changes are happening – the evidence is incontrovertible – and if they go on, they will have catastrophic effects on the human race."

Sir David Attenborough

Broadcaster and naturalist (The last episode of Frozen Planet, On Thin Ice, will be shown on BBC 1 on Wednesday at 9pm)

£28,000 + VAT. Who's in?

There's Lots to See Under the Sea

"THARE SHE BLOWS!"

We were out on the boat to take scientific samples of whale sharks. I was fully aware of the amount of sea life swimming around underneath us but I really wasn’t expecting a humpback whale calf to almost jump into the boat.

Friends who I’d spoken to about looking for waves in this part of East Africa wished me luck then told me to take a good thick book and that I’d probably end up in Tofo snorkeling with whale sharks by day and drinking the local moonshine rum by night.

I hadn’t realized that Tofo is centrally placed on a stretch of coastline that’s world renowned for the high concentration of large marine creatures swimming around under the surface there, although it didn’t take me long to work out after spending ten minutes on the headland looking out to sea. No more than twenty seconds would go by without a whale breaching somewhere out in the vast Indian Ocean leaving spray lingering over the Ocean in the distance.

But there’re more than just migrating humpbacks here. It turns out that Tofo is the base for The Foundation for the Protection of Marine Megafauna run by two experts in their respective fields. Dr. Andrea Marshall from the States who is the world’s leading expert on manta rays and giant rays (she was the subject of a recent BBC wildlife documentary “Andrea Queen of The Rays”), whilst Kiwi marine biologist Dr. Simon Pierce is a leading scientist in the field of whale shark research. Both giant rays and whale sharks (the world’s largest fish) are found in surprising concentrations almost year round on the reefs off Tofo so it’s the perfect location for a research base. Both Andrea, Simon and their resident PhD student present weekly lectures (Manta Mondays, Whale shark Wednesdays and Fauna Fridays) open to the general public and sending them away with probably more knowledge on those individual species than many of the world’s top marine biologists have.

This was how I ended up on a boat with Dr. Pierce and a group of volunteers from All Out Africa helping to collect samples. We’d jump off the boat and snorkel alongside the whale sharks, through and under the various boatloads of bobbing “ocean safari” tourists and then when we’d left them behind, dive down and use a Hawaiian sling to fire a capped spear into the giant fish, collecting a plug of skin as it was pulled free that could be analysed to determine the fish’s diet, and thus, where in the great blue it had been. Another, sturdier, sling is then use to fire a tag into the whale shark that trails a little sonar tracker which allows it’s movements to be followed by satellite. Underwater photos are taken to identify them as each whale shark’s spotted pattern is unique like a fingerprint and they can be logged into an international database and then tracked long-term by various dive operations around the world.

A happy humpback family

That was it, nature done for the day I thought. Nature wasn’t done though, as on our way back a family of humpbacks surfaced near us; Mum, Dad and a calf who was keen on showing off. The calf was learning how to breach, the acrobatic jumps, slaps and splashes that mature whales use to display their virility, and came up so close to us at one point that it nearly filled my entire viewfinder on my camera. Once he decided we’d seen enough, the family slowly swam off and then a larger lone, slow and ponderous humpback drifted along. Doc Pierce decided that this whale was mellow and slow enough to allow him to do something he’d never done before and jump overboard with a waterproof movie camera to try and film it as it swum past. I don’t think he expected it to dive under, double back and come check him out a second time. The thing was the size of a bus, one slap of its tail would’ve been the end for the curious Kiwi.

Humpback populations worldwide are back from the brink, having been hunted to the brink of extinction there are now about 80,000 individuals. These humpbacks were visiting the tropics to breed and give birth before returning to the Southern Ocean off Antarctica to feed for the summer months.

Dolphins. Old news.

We also saw dolphins on the way back too, I don’t think they realized what they had to live up to though in order to impress. We motored on to get our samples back to the lab.

This was taken by a real nice Aussie guy called Crewe Dixon, a volunteer with All Out Africa. He was on a dive looking for giant rays, looked up and saw this. Wow.

The Foundation for the Protection of Marine Megafauna are looking for two volunteers to assist with their valuable research in Mozambique, a whale shark research and admin assistant and a manta ray research and admin assistant. Check their facebook page for further details on the positions and how to apply.