So today we headed to Mussulo Island, or Ilha de Mussulo. We met Blythe and the BP folks we met the other at the Chicala residences and headed from there in a BP Organised bus with driver. Gotta love the Petroleum Industry! 🙂
“Paradise” – Ihla de Mussulo
The journey of about 15kms took us around 50 mins that morning due to the Great Traffic that we so love in Angola. It was crazy. You literally never go over 20 kph. It is insane. There are 2 ways of getting to the Island. One way is to drive, we chose the easier route – by boat! You leave from a jetty and get a quick speed boat ride across the lagoon, and voila, you step onto a little bit of paradise. We immediately hit the drinks at the bar, suprise, suprise, and parked off for a bit.
A little later we missioned across the island on foot, to the West Coast (Atlantic) where we went swimming. Wow, the water was amazing! Mid 20s and fantastic vis (visibility). There is virtually no swell and even 6 metres into the water it is fantastically clear. I have to get my ass into a dive suit to do some diving. Pronto! That is a definite! 🙂 The beach is stunning and definitely competes with the likes of Mozambique for sure. There are little huts that are actually beach bars, but were closed, which was a bummer as it is really cool to sit there and chill. The sun made an appearance, actually quite a long one, and for the first time since arriving in Luanda I truly felt the effect of the rays. Man, it gets hot, and I reckon you will get pretty harshly burnt up here. I suppose I am just south of the equator, literally 1000 kms, so it would be stronger here than anywhere else. Well, it was great. Luckily the one BP dude had bought sun cream, otherwise we all would have been fucked, but it was wicked. I really couldn’t get my head around this. Being just south of Luanda and all it’s chaos, and yet chilling here in the calm, quiet, warm waters of the Atlantic. Unreal!
No one ever said Life in Africa was going to easy!! 😉
We got a call from Sly who said the FPSO was the most amazing thing he had ever seen in his entire life, and he sounded pretty chuffed to be on it. But he also conceded that it appeared he was only going to be back on Tuesday! Told you so. 🙂 Hopefully they do let him go though, as they have a habit of keeping the good guys onboard, and I’m sure they’re gonna love the service they get from Sly, as he is just really good at what he does!
Back at the lagoon side lunch was awesome. It was a buffet that had everything. Freshly grilled fish, carpaccio, braai’ed chops, stews, chicken, prawns, salads, pasta, chips, schnitzel, and loads more. Absolutely fantastic. I had 2 helpings and then was stuffed! Rachel was given a cooling off care of 3 buckets of ice and water from the ice buckets for the wine.
Cooling off and Mucking about on the Swan!
Afterwards Bradley and Neal gave the Swan horns. “Watch out for the rough waters lads!” Bradley proceeded to dump his phone in the water, not a good idea, but luckily for him it was already off, so no worry of electrical damage, just water at this stage.
The boat journey back almost became quite entertaining when some German, who was pissed and giving everyone horns and being obnoxious, got on out boat, but we set Paul the Mad Scotsman on him, and we got rid of him. The car journey back to Chicala took another hour or so. This is definitely going to take getting used to. At first you think you have gone miles, as typically when you spend a long time in a car moving, you do travel a fair distance, but here, no way man, literally 3 kms can take you 30 mins or so. It’s seriously unbelievable.
Once back home we decided not to venture out as we were all really tired and knackered after the day. I think it was the sun and all the day’s activity. Dinner was leftovers and that was fine by everyone.
Right now, I am knackered and am heading to bed!
Click.
Nunnsby
Easy Going Guy 😉