Trip to Aride Island

 Referring to my previous article ?Aride Island? – I got the chance to experience Aride, ?live and direct?.

Getting there was not a piece of cake- we firstly had to take a trip to go to Praslin Island and a dinghy ride to Aride which took approximately 30 minutes. The water seemed calm from Praslin but as we got to Aride it got rougher, due to the high currents and huge waves. The birds came to greet us as we got closer to island.

Aride is recognized for being a habitat and breeding ground for millions of birds, mostly sea birds but Aride is also very self-sufficient, they produce their own electricity through their solar panel instalments which was donated by UNEP and , they mostly use rain water for drinking (after boiling) and use water from a well, for bathing and tap water. They have 6 little buildings, equaling to twelve semi-detached rooms (including bathroom and kitchen) thus privacy is available.

The next day, we went on a short hike, feeding the Magpie Robins, which is one of the Seychelles Endangered Endemic Species, and stopped at ?Ros Gro Latet? which literally means Big Head Rock – as soon as we reached there, a huge amount of birds started flying above us and the chicks were basically running around – they seemed frightened – who would blame them? But it was amazing, I never saw such a huge amount of birds flying around like that.

During my weekend there, I got a new friend, it was a Brown Foody, and it was walking along the trails and seemed to have felt out of its nest. It was too small to fly and thus very vulnerable to the crabs walking around – I couldn?t bear to leave it there – knowing that it is all alone, so, we brought it back to our rooms to see if we could feed it or take care of it, but was useless. We were told that these types of birds enjoys fresh fish – but we didn?t have any with us and was impossible to go fishing with that type of current.

Even so, we couldn?t feed it but we gave it a lot of love and protection from the predators.

Sunday afternoon, we left Aride! Was painful to leave such a beautiful island, but we had too. We had a hard time to get the dinghy into the sea – in the end, we all got completely wet!

I wish to go back again!