Tom Hickey
The Indian Ocean – From Penguins to Pirates
My wife (Nelda Strahm, East ’61) and I love expedition travel. We have completed our bucket list of visiting all seven continents and numerous islands. We have usually traveled in small groups, often with Lindblad/National Geographic. The expedition that I want to share with you is one that contained several surprises. (Right, Tom Hickey, 1960)
The Indian Ocean is the earth’s third largest ocean. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by the Southern Ocean or Antarctica. – Wikipedia
We started our Indian Ocean journey in Capetown, South Africa. That is where we experienced our first surprise. Capetown is one of the windiest cities in the world. While we were there, the winds often reached over 80 mph. Of course, having been raised in Wichita, we were able to shrug that off. We did finally get to take a cable car up to the top of Table Mountain.
Shortly after that, we went to a beach area where we saw thousands of African penguins. That was quite a surprise because we did not expect to see penguins in Africa like we did in Patagonia and Antarctica.
Our next surprise came when we took a safari into the Hluhluwe Game Reserve. We saw many of the same species of animals that we had seen on previous safaris in Africa. But the surprise came when we saw an African wild dog 
running ahead of our safari vehicle. It is unusual to see them (They are on the endangered list). All of a sudden, four more wild dogs joined in and we watched them chase down and attack a Nyala antelope. They began to devour it as we watched just a few feet away. The growls and crunches and other sounds were unforgettable.
We were surprised again when officials aboard the National Geographic Explorer announced that we would not be going to Madagascar. Apparently there was a riot situation in the capitol and the country was considered unstable.
So, we headed north along the east coast of Africa to Mozambique Island. When we landed there, we were surprised to see that most residents of the town had turned out to greet us. They rarely see visitors there and we were quite a big deal.
From there, we made our way across the Indian Ocean to the Comoros Islands. We piled onto our Zodiacs and landed on the small island of Mbouzi. Our surprise there was to see hundreds of lemurs in the trees and shrubs. It is a protected area and the lemurs showed no fear of us. In fact, they sometimes jumped down onto our shoulders. (Left, Nelda with lemurs)
Next, we headed to the Seychelles, a small nation made up of 115 islands. We landed our Zodiacs on Assumption Island where we enjoyed swimming along a beautiful white sand beach. There was a small ship anchored close by. It was a diving expedition vessel called Indian Ocean Explorer. There will be more about this at the end of the story.
From Assumption we made our way to Aldabra Atoll. When we jumped in the water from the Zodiac we were very surprised to see sharks all around us. They were black-tipped reef sharks and they swam very close to us but did not really bother us. As we got farther up onto land we began to see many giant tortoises. It is estimated that there are over 100,000 of these magnificent creatures living there. Since it is a protected area, they don’t fear humans and we could go right up and touch them. (Right, black-tipped reef shark)
The National Geographic Explorer then headed west toward Zanzibar. We entered the Jozani forest which was full of jungle and swamps. We were surprised to see a lot of the rare endemic Zanzibar red colobus monkeys in the trees all around us. They were leaping from branch to branch and put on quite a show.
It was not until we got back home that we got the final surprise of the expedition. We learned that the Indian Ocean Explorer that we had seen at Assumption Island was hijacked from that spot by Somalian pirates. This happened just a few days after we had seen it. The ship and crew were taken to Somalia. The crew was eventually ransomed but the ship was torched and sunk. If the pirates had known that we were there earlier, we would have been a much more lucrative target.
What an amazing expedition! I don’t think that I could have daydreamed something better as I sat gazing at the wall in Mr. Yeoman’s English class at East High.
