La Digue

This research is getting more and more interesting, the hotels that we are interviewing are being very honest, more and more things are being brought up and they are giving us a lot of information about sustainability. We have now done 5 interviews and we are transcribing every day at this stage. The first recorded 30 minute interview we did took us 4 hours to transcribe…now it´s getting better, and we are a bit faster, are facing a long session today as one lady yesterday morning spoke for 1h and 15 min…we´ll see how much we can cut out of that to minimize the amount of material, basically it was all relevant and interesting to our research questions and we are although looking forward to analyzing this.

Last weekend we went to one of the smallest, but very popular islands here – La Digue. Extremely different from Mahé. No cars. Bicycles, oxcart and some golf carts (within the hotel areas). In La Digue, everybody know each other, people knew things about us even before arriving haha! It´s about 2000 inhabitants, lots of hotels, felt too touristic in one way. When we got off the beautiful Cat Coco Catamaran and people are offering us stuff, pulling our arms, trying to get our attention and buy tours in different ways. Renting bikes or whatever u know what I mean. Exhausting.

Charming, relaxed place, beautiful beaches and one of the most photographed ones in the world of Seychelles, the amazing Source D´Argent. The 2 interviews where done already on Friday so then we had the rest of the weekend free to enjoy ourselves. We stayed at one of Cathrins friends guesthouses, Etoile Labrine (that was also the guy who organized our house in Mahé) great to meet him and thank him for that! It was great to enjoy a fancy creole breakfast and yes, to spoil ourselves even more mohahaha. Lucky enough to get a last minute island hopping and snorkeling tour on Saturday, the boat took us for an extra 1,5h tour around the whole island. And obviously we got burned again. This time, on our bums, from snorkeling too much… butt (haha!) it was worth it because the water and the fishes, the corals, were amazing. Anyways, we went to Coco island and Felicite, and on Sunday we went to see famous Grand Anse, where I was to be able to surf, but it turned out to be only boogie boards, but nice waves, strong currents. 

Oh I almost forgot..not! Saturday we met up with more friends of Cathrin, they invited us to a massive family barbeque, ending up dancing creole, laughing our heads off by the g-string dancing father of the family...culture!

By midnight, the group of us, about 20 people went together to the big local bar/hang out and had a blast to a well known band from Mahé (everyone knew the lyrics except for us) Rastafari dudes, lots of dancing and clubbing. A great night with a local touch! Photos to come J

Puss och kram!