MANGROVE REHABILITATION IN A FORMER AQUACULTURE POND

Conference on Mangrove Ecology, Function and Management, Sri Lanka, July 2012

Thank you thank you, Mark, my super. Unable to get an abstract to a conference committee in Sri Lanka in time he kindly allowed me to use his budget from a project to attend. Though focusing on crabs and beasties in mangroves there were plenty of other topics being presented, and possibly two of my ‘names’ whose papers I’ve read, attending. There was also a reasonably stellar list of general mangrove people penned in to talk, so well worth rocking up.

Better advertising than most, but apparently a massage shop only for mermaids

Having been a habitual traveller to southeast Asia, which flies out of LHR T3 (southeast Asian madness starts in T3 – there’s no need to fly anywhere), the smartness and efficiency and cleanness of T4 (Qatar Airways), came of something of a shock. Carpet tiles were not curling up at the edges like exhausted sandwiches. Escalators escalated. Connecting tunnels from the underground to the airport weren’t hospice grey. Unfortunately I was flying with a pair of cargo pants that had lost their main button (Delli, we need to talk), so had to shuffle through security, belt in the scanner, clutching my trousers like I was about to be vigorously ill. The mother in front of me, with three small’uns, was not impressed.

Wide-bodied London / Doha was easy, with a HUGE choice of films and similar service to EVA, my normal carrier to Thailand. Amazingly both my bag and I made the 45 minute transfer to the narrow-bodied Doha-Sri Lanka jet, despite the inbound jet not stopping at a stand but at a bus stop. However this second flight, starting at 3am my time, with no sleep, for another techy 4.5 hours, crammed full of screaming kids and Italians, was trying.

The point of travelling overnight was to ensure that I arrived in Colombo in the morning, as the way to the conference, in Galle, in the bottom left hand corner of Sri Lanka, was by bus. My hotel was in the middle of not much and might need to be eyeballed if the bus chappies didn’t know where it was. So, a first bus into a nearby town, another into Colombo-proper, a third to Galle town in the southeast of the country, and then a more tricky fourth to my hotel. When I say ‘bus’, these were more like an ultra-low tech fast-jet simulators, driven at the same speed and incurring the same g-forces, but built for small Asians without luggage, without the need for any leg room but plenty of sharp points and edges from the kneecaps down. The ubiquitous horn was pointless – if you’re fast and big, other vehicles got out the way, especially if the bus had just lurched into the middle of the road, over the double solid white lines, overtaking on a blind corner. The hotel was somewhere along the coast road, not in any town, so was a little tricky to find. However, I met someone who knew all the hotels along the coast, of which there were thousands, and finally got there, 5pm their time after ten hours of continuous buses. Splitting dehydration headache and exhaustion was cured by diving into bed and staying there until the next morning.

Establishing shot of Hotel

South Beach Hotel at breakfast

The conference venue had been moved with three weeks to go, from a local uni to Long Beach hotel, Kaggala. Instinct suggested to keep it simple and stay in this hotel. However at $140 a night, some complexity was needed. Plan B, South Beach hotel was a fraction of the price and 1km away. Kushtie! Surprisingly I was the only conference goer in this hotel. So the week was spent commuting up the coast to listen to the great and the fabulous about the day jobs and dining preferences of crabs, relative sea level change (finally I understand why it’s complicated and site-specific), mangrove/salt marsh interaction, mangrove dispersal modelling (way over my head), carbon fluxes, Ni pollution, the life’s work of Philippine National Treasure Dr Primavera, seed dispersal testing, and lots of geographic updates. Not quite my bag, but all really interesting and some truly lovely people. It also has to be said that there were some dire presentations; long screeds of methodological detail mumbled inaudibly, screaming for the only question that ever counts – SO WHAT?

Middle Wednesday was a field trip. The roads in Sri Lanka are like writhing B roads in the UK, trying to get through a farming town during market day set up. Moving round the island is slow and we had to start Really Early. Three hours after meeting up, 10km north of my hotel, we drove back past my hotel on the way to a blow hole, a developing sand-dune ecosystem with entirely inappropriate intervention from a well-meaning NGO, a temple with an amazing view, a driving break as the bus screeched to a halt so the busboy could stuff a few rupees into a giant concrete chicken, two lagoon systems, lunch at the Sri Lankan Small Fisheries Foundation and saw much of southern SL. Particularly along the south coast there were terrible reminders of the tsunami. Concrete floors of the base of houses, with only the squat toilet left and everything else scoured away. Lots of gravestones. And of course frenetic building in the same spots. Big learning for me: the bottom third of SL is very dry and sandy. Surprised as the WHOLE of Thailand is wet and tropical, and given 15 minutes of someone not trying to build on it, junglely. When it rains it rains everywhere. But SL had quite different zones. So there was a lot of thorny scrub, sand and empty space.

Thursday evening included a SL cultural evening, with traditional dancing.

On Friday evening, at the end of the conference, saying goodbye to new friends and the splendid Dr Balaji (he who we helped, Loire Valley Loungers) from India, who deservedly won the IUCN’s young environmentalist award, many people headed a little way up the coast from Kaggala where the conference was, to Unawatuna. Central along this bay was the very nice Unawatuna Beach Resort. Arriving there late of Friday, for the last mass drink, I asked if they had a room at the same time spotting a big Jag in the car park. Thankfully they said, get lost little boy, and so I found the charming Mr Sarnath running ‘Sunny Mood’ guest-house right behind it. No pool but perhaps 10% of the cost of UBR (only tuktuks in his car park, and a sweet if skinny Alsatian). Spent a very pleasant weekend recovering from the conference and taking some pictures. New experience for me; seeing a turtle in the wild. The beast came close to the beach, saw the swarms of full-sized tourists flat out on loungers and thought better of it. But a turtle all the same.

Monday meant heading north to just under Colombo to see Abey, the boss of EMACE, an excellent little NGO doing childcare/orphan, women’s rights, housing, mangrove rehab and other stuff. Changing buses in Galle bus terminal, I asked the driver for Katubadda, Abey’s town. Wobble of the head. Then I asked to be dropped outside a specific craft shop called Laksala in Kutabudda. Another wobble. And good as his wobble, three freezing cold hours later we lurched into the pavement right outside this shop, cutting across the umpteenth tuktuk (whose lights ALL work! Anyone who has been to Jakarta or India will appreciate what a novelty this is. On all the tuktuks, ALL the lights worked. Stunning.) Abey came to pick me up and we had a very pleasant lunch at his house.

Abey is a part time property developer, which pays for a lot of the NGO activity. We met in Thailand in March as he attended the mangrove training I delivered there with Jim of MAP. The new project that had paid for the training was encouraging mangrove restoration in the participant countries. So I offered to help Abey, as well as see what his NGO was up to. Their work centres around Bolgoda Lake, 20k south of Colombo. Additional to the usual problems inland lakes suffer from, this one has a huge furniture making community on its slopes. Tonnes of sawdust is washed down into the lake when it rains, which is also chock full of water hyacinth. EMACE had built an eco community centre/guest house on the lake shore, with a couple of big Sonneratia mangrove trees right in front of the house, and I was to stay here for a few days. The view from the balcony is beautiful, and we were 10 plots down from the oldest sailing and rowing club in Sri Lanka. As I type part of this blog, various fours and sculls are slipping backwards across the lake. But the sound track is of a terrifying amount of wood being cut up to make furniture, all of which is uncomfortable. And these guys get their bandsaws moving at 5am.

Just imagine a favella hillside, with narrow lanes, covered in yards like this

The next day we drove round the lake to see their old office, two mangrove nurseries and their proposed restoration site. Interestingly, rather than being the usual trashed and cleared area, this is full of fresh water grasses and huge invasives. Green, but not very productive and no good for the fishermen. The next day I edited a document about this project for Abey, and finished with an amazing boat trip round part of the lake, with Saman who is the caretaker of this building. Skinny as a jockey, Saman used to be… a jockey and has travelled the world working the horses and riding, including a long time in Doncaster (!). Saman is an excellent cook, does all the running repairs to the house, and looked after me royally. Sitting on the balcony of the building, and while taking a little boat trip round part of the lake system, I’ve taken some slightly fuzzy pictures of loads of birds (yes I know, Benjol, tripod…), seen a pelican, sea eagles, watch two mongoose chase each other like squirrels, witnessed two 7 feet non-poisonous snakes dance for 15 minutes while personally feeding the hungry appetites of possibly hundreds of thirsty mosquitoes.

Abey and EMACE done, the third week was supposed to include a meeting with a mangrove guy in the Environment Dept and a familiarisation with Colombo. Sadly this meeting was canned, and as SL is a bit more expensive than I hoped, rather than heading south for a holiday, I changed the return flight and headed home early. There’s still plenty to see. The northeast has had no development work for 30 years (just watch your step!). Kandy and the central highlands are another place that should be seen. However, as a non-earning, self-funded student,… The return was easier, apart from having to start the first leg at 4.25am. Thankfully, this flight was only two-thirds full and on time, so the transfer onto the similarly 2/3rds full flight from Doha to London was easy, and the pre-Olympics LHR very efficient.

The flying time gave an opportunity to reflect on SL: the strange feature of constant sea spray mist in the air along the west coast corroding everything in its path; the Sri Lankans themselves who were very friendly; the technical difficulties of restoring a EMACE’s mangrove site with a very low tidal range of perhaps 50cm; the still-palpable relief at the ending of the war with the resulting apathy about the post-Soviet-style asset grab by the president and his family who control 75% of the economy; the mixed feeling about Colombo and what it might be like to live there; those bloody mozzies and that despite the marvellous George (brother-in-law) being back in Crete, I’m glad to be home.