Indian Ocean With Simon Reeve (2012) s01e01 Episode Script
South Africa To Zanzibar
1 The Indian Ocean, home to the world's most exotic islands .
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and beautiful and rare wildlife.
I'm travelling through 16 countries around the edge of this vast ocean that stretches 6,000 miles from Africa to Australia.
Steeped in history, the Indian Ocean is vital to world trade.
It's a journey of extremes, from stunning islands across pirate-infested seas, to remote villages .
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and war-torn lands.
What was that? This is a journey about much more than just what's under the waves.
It's about the lives of the millions of people who live around this, one of our greatest oceans.
I start my journey at the tip of Africa, and travel up the east coast of the continent to the island of Zanzibar.
I discover what threatens the ocean's mightiest predator.
I think they've got something.
And I confront my own fears on my first ocean dive.
You got me to swim with sharks.
We're stuck in the sand.
On this first part of my journey, I travel by land, sea and air .
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through a country ravaged by civil war.
3,500 people live here now? And ending on the exotic island of Zanzibar, with its stunning coral beaches.
My goodness look at this! I'm at the bottom of Africa.
Somewhere out there, two of the world's mightiest oceans collide.
Over there is the Atlantic, but I'm heading this way.
This is the start of my journey around the glorious Indian Ocean.
It's a huge trip.
It's an enormous challenge, and it begins right here, right now, on the rugged coast of South Africa.
The Indian Ocean might be better known for tropical beaches and palm trees, but down here, near the Cape of Good Hope, the sea churns with life, and the coastline is dramatic.
There's no neat dividing line between two great seas.
And the water here is fed by currents from both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.
As a result, the water temperature can fluctuate wildly, and there's a huge diversity of marine life.
This area is a breeding ground for vast stocks of fish, sea birds and mammals.
Oh, dolphins, porpoises, just off to the left! Across the Indian Ocean, this spectacular wildlife is in desperate need of protection.
I hitched a ride on a South African fisheries patrol boat, whose job it is to police these waters.
This pearly beach area, there's a group of poachers that live out here, ok? And they actually swim from the shoreline all the way through to the island.
Keith Govender and his team are targeting poachers who are after a little known, but valuable, sea creature.
Part of what we're going to do today is basically looking and protecting a resource called abalone.
Abalone.
Abalone in layman's terms you could describe as a shellfish.
It's become a commodity now that is wanted in the Far East.
As a food? As a food, or as a delicacy.
Delicacy is the word, yeah.
And it's become so wanted that people in South Africa now are actually poaching it more and more to sell off to syndicates, basically.
What, crime gangs? Crime gangs itself.
And that stuff gets smuggled onto the black market into the Far East.
And people will poach from the shoreline, where divers would walk into the water and poach off a reef and you also have one where it's sea-based, where people use rubber ducks.
When you say a rubber duck, you mean something like this? Yeah, something like this.
This one's specially designed for enforcement.
And it's super fast.
It's super fast.
The patrol received a tip-off that poachers had been spotted.
They were hunting for rare abalone, which is protected in South African waters.
It was time to launch the rubber duck.
If we tell you to hang on, drop whatever you're doing and you hang on, OK? OK.
No matter what's happening, just hang on.
OK, let's go! Hold on! There's something there! Right hand side.
Right on the starboard bow, dead ahead! Coming very fast, so they won't be able to get away.
Keep this course.
It looked like we were going to catch a group of poachers red-handed.
Now you see there the divers are busy on the rock there at the moment, as you can see.
But just a few hundred feet from the coast, we ran into a floating natural barrier that could entangle the boat propeller.
I mean, and if you look at the kelp here, you can see how thick it is.
My god, look at it, it's like a tangle of knots! I can see, yeah, a guy he's just, sort of, crouching down, trying to stay out of sight.
There was a third guy.
He's just gone into the water.
So, there's poaching going on right here, right now.
It's very frustrating.
It's very frustrating.
You can see them.
You want to grab them.
You see now they're just getting equipment and walking away.
And run away.
Now this is Whiskey Bravo, over.
Keith alerted the local police, who tracked and caught the poachers.
The trade in abalone has become a multi-million pound business.
My goodness! This was abalone they'd confiscated from other poachers.
It's basically a shellfish.
It doesn't look like very much, let's be honest.
It's slimy and not particularly pleasant.
But a plate of abalone can sell for more than £100 in a restaurant in China.
There's abalone here worth, I would guess, tens of thousands of pounds.
Yep.
And, bizarrely, the black market trade in abalone is linked to serious organised crime.
But the problem is it opens up a whole lot of things, such as drugs, illegal weapons, those type of things.
It's connected with all these other it's connected, yeah.
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crime activities.
It's a spider's web, basically.
This is such a weird situation.
Weird story, but it gets even odder, because what we've been told is that while abalone's being smuggled out of the country by criminal gangs, the same people are then involved in smuggling back in a methamphetamine drug called tik, which is apparently causing all sorts of chaos here in South Africa.
This two-way trade is centred on nearby Cape Town, where use of the drug, tik, has reached epidemic proportions.
Abalone is smuggled out of the country to China, and the same gangs use the profits to trade in tik.
Police here have even found large quantities of abalone, together with tik, while carrying out drugs raids.
I headed to Manenberg, an area notorious for poverty, drugs and violent crime.
I met up with William Williams, who runs a local charity that works with people addicted to tik.
How has tik affected the community in recent years? It's almost like people has lost this whole thing of caring about other people and only caring about themselves, and that the biggest thing for them is getting the drug, so if they have to rob their neighbour, steal from the neighbour, do anything against their neighbour to be able to get this drug.
This was a side of South Africa few visitors get to see.
It was the poaching of an ocean mollusc that had brought me here, but almost everyone I met had a story about the damage the methamphetamine drug, tik, is now doing to the community.
It can hurt families, like just parents and children, like kids today when they've used drugs, then like mothers, fathers, kids, they use it together.
Almost like meals they use it.
I use it for eight years.
Eight years! I'm 24 years old now.
And what does it do to the mind? Make you end up like suicidal.
But some of my friends that use it, they are mad today.
Readily available and highly addictive, tik has become a massive problem in Cape Town.
William took me down the street to meet a local addict.
But as we walked into his house, it became clear it was the neighbourhood drug den, and the man wasn't alone.
Hello! Is it OK to come in? Thank you, gentlemen.
Can I sit down? Sit down.
Is that a real gun? Yeah.
Oh, dear! Ah, OK.
These weren't just users.
I'd stumbled into a drug gang.
My name is Juan.
Simon.
Simon.
Nice to meet you, Juan.
Man.
The man was smoking heroine, while waiting for a delivery of tik.
We use it to smoke.
It was upsetting to see that a teenage girl had got caught up with this group.
A lolly? Another gang member produced some tik.
Now we're going to show him now to use this.
They were almost proud to show me the drug that's ripping apart this community.
We call him Nongi.
Yeah.
Wow! For how long? Suddenly the mood changed.
The men started jostling us and demanding money.
It was time to make a quick exit.
OK, we need to go right now.
Just OK, I think we need to get in the car.
That last situation, that surprised me.
Suddenly you're into a situation which is so dark.
You're witnessing people who've fallen so far down, and I can't quite believe how far this situation develops from something that appears so simple as poaching abalone.
There is a desperation for the drugs.
People will go out and get the abalone, OK, to pay for the drugs.
It's desperate, eh? Absolutely desperate.
The weird connection between abalone poaching and the drug trade in Cape Town .
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was proof that even in big coastal cities life is still linked to the sea.
From the Cape, my journey around the Indian Ocean was now really beginning.
A commuter train, through the southern suburbs, showed me a more affluent side of South Africa.
But I wasn't travelling far, as I headed to meet some friendlier local residents.
I think this is our stop.
I was a bit surprised to find penguins in Africa, but there used to be millions living along the coast here.
I'd arrived during the moulting season, when the penguins were waiting patiently for their new set of clothes.
So this is quite a boring time for them.
They have to just wait by the coast for their new coat.
You can say it's a boring time, but I see it as time out.
I mean we also need that as humans, you know, you need to take time out at some point, and this is their time out.
Conservationist, Tributin Bueni, spent two years studying these penguins, living alone with them on a remote island.
Not surprisingly, her nickname is Birdie, and she feels that penguins have plenty to teach us.
We could learn quite a bit from them.
What would be the key lessons that we should learn? Both the male and the female take care of the chicks.
It's a teamwork, it's not just a woman's duty to take care of the chicks.
Oh, I see.
I see.
You think there's an equality in the penguin household.
Yeah, there is.
That we humans could learn perhaps we boys could learn from.
Mmm, I wonder.
But like many species that rely on the ocean, the African penguin is struggling to survive.
The birds are simply not getting enough to eat.
Scientists believe that fish stocks, which penguins rely on, are taking a hammering in this area because of the changing environment and humans overfishing.
So the day we're here is quite an important day for the colony here, because they're going to round up, or catch, and collect some of the really underweight young chicks.
And they're going to take them to a facility where they're going to feed them up, so that they actually have a chance of surviving when they're in the water.
In the last few decades, the penguin population along the coast has suffered a dramatic fall.
Penguin numbers have dropped by 80%.
They've got one! They've got a baby penguin just over here.
It's a little chick.
It's actually quite sad to think, ten years after this, are they still going to be there or not? You know, and it's quite sad just thinking about it, you know.
You're genuinely concerned these could be extinct in ten years? In ten years time.
Looking at how the numbers are going down now, it's totally possible.
Volunteers from SANCCOB, a sea bird rescue group, had set up a local centre to feed the underweight chicks.
Vanessa Strauss was running the operation.
At this age, they need to have a really round belly.
You can see that he's got a hollow belly, so he doesn't have any muscle round his chest.
He doesn't have any fat.
You can just see from him that he hasn't been fed in a while.
He's dehydrated.
He's not feeling strong.
So, you're becoming the mum and dad, basically.
Yep, absolutely.
Every penguin that we can save is essential for the survival of the species.
Look at the size of this! Little penguin paradise here! After six weeks of intensive care, here at SANCCOB headquarters, the chicks are given training in essential penguin skills.
Been given a towel.
OK.
What are we using this for? This is a little exercise programme.
We're sort penguin wrangling.
Yes.
It's a roundup really.
They need to get fit, ready to swim far out at sea to find their own food.
Come on! Come on! They're really not going to go in.
Oh, there we go! Yes! There you go! Vanessa has resorted to a more direct approach.
No, you can't come back! There are 18 penguin species in the world, and 11 are in serious population decline.
What a wonderful sight! When their swimming lessons are complete, these penguins will be ready to return to the ocean, hopefully strong enough to survive and to breed.
It was time for me to continue my Indian Ocean journey.
It was a drive of three hours along the coast towards the wild and windswept Cape Agulhas, which is actually even further south than the Cape Of Good Hope.
I've reached the most southerly tip of Africa.
Look, it's very rugged along here.
Look at the rocks! Ever since the late 1400s, when European explorers made it around the Cape, from the Atlantic round to the relative calm of the Indian Ocean, this coastline has always had a fearsome reputation.
And even now, with all our modern navigation aids, some ships don't make it.
Five hundred years ago, the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, left the southern Atlantic Ocean, sailed around the cape, and passed here on the first epic sea voyage from Europe to India.
Travellers and traders followed in his wake, and there are believed to be at least 200 shipwrecks along this coastline, known as the Graveyard Of Ships.
I followed their route along the coast to South Africa's third largest city, Durban.
The beaches around Durban are a holidaymaker's paradise.
Hundreds of thousands of people come here from across the world to surf and swim.
Money from tourism is crucial to many countries around the Indian Ocean, but often there are conflicts between the tourism industry and those who want to protect the ocean ecosystem, particularly in Durban, where the water just off the beaches can hide some very unwelcome visitors.
Now this is a sight.
It's basically a collection of jaws from the species which we commonly catch.
And what would this one on the end be? It looks like the biggest one.
Well, these are all white sharks, here, and they have, by far, the most impressive teeth.
This is a great white? Great white, yes.
Look at that in there! Serrated teeth, which is perfect for swiftly biting and chopping away at a lump of flesh.
Durban spends millions of pounds defending its tourists from shark attacks.
Jeremy Cliff, of the Natal Sharks Board, took me out to see his first line of defence, a system of shark nets introduced after a series of attacks in the 1950s, which killed seven people.
Many people think that the nets are a physical barrier, and we put them up and the sharks stay on the outside, and we quite happily swim on the inside.
Well, it's not like that at all.
The nets don't extend from the surface to the seabed, and the nets are only 300 metres long.
So it's not excluding a shark from the area? That's right.
That's right.
It's what? It's killing some of them? Yes.
It's designed to catch and kill the dangerous sharks.
Yes.
There are 15 miles of nets along Durban's beaches, but they don't just kill sharks.
If these nets are designed to catch sharks, presumably they're catching other creatures, as well.
Yes, unfortunately.
That's the major drawback of shark nets is that they don't just select or target the three dangerous species.
They take sharks which pose very little threat to humans.
We also catch rays and turtles and dolphins, unfortunately.
Far from being just a protective barrier, shark nets around the world actually kill thousands of marine creatures every year.
They also reinforce the idea that only a sea free of sharks is safe water.
Back at the Shark Board headquarters, there's a cold store room piled up with dead sharks and other animals they've caught.
It was a shocking sight, and Jeremy wasn't keen for us to film it.
But outside he showed me one shark the nets had caught, a juvenile great white, one of the world's rarest sharks.
Yeah, just under two metres in length.
Our measurements, we exclude the tail.
We measure up to there.
OK.
At up to six metres long, the great white shark is the largest predatory fish on the planet.
I sense there's a little bit of a conflict, really, perhaps, dare I say, even within you, as a marine biologist.
It must be tough to do this.
Oh, sure, most definitely.
I mean, the last thing we want to do is see dead white sharks like this, but unfortunately we've got a job to do, tourism is very important for this part of the world, and we've seen, historically, what a huge negative impact shark attack has had.
It does seem a little bit of a tragic end for such an incredible beast.
I don't know, but I feel my feelings slightly conflicted about it, cos I fear it and I really do respect it, as well.
I think that's the important thing, Simon, is to try and change this predominant attitude of fear, towards one of respect, rather than fear.
I could understand Jeremy's dilemma, shark attacks are actually incredibly rare, but such is the fear they inspire, tourist resorts will do almost anything to prevent them.
I travelled a few miles outside Durban to meet a woman who's on a mission to change our views on this most infamous creature of the deep.
People don't have empathy for sharks.
It is the most terrible, terrible sad thing, but they are to be revered.
Gail Addison is a big shark fan, so much so, she regularly takes her family along to swim with them.
Do you know that I take my little eight-year-old, and she comes swimming with us with the sharks? We've very specific about when we put her in the water, and how she goes in the water, and that's the same with divers.
Some people might think that's a bit mad, to put your eight-year-old in the water.
Do you know what? She's grown up with it.
She's grown up swimming since was one-year-old, when she learned to swim.
Gail thinks Durban's shark nets need to be removed, and that we need to change our view of sharks, because, far from being a menace, sharks are crucial to the health of our oceans.
Why are they the most important fish in the sea? Cos they're apex predators, and, unfortunately, that means that they're not used to being hunted.
They're not meant to have natural predators.
They are the top of the food chain, so they keep everything else underneath them balanced and healthy.
So, it controls the ecosystem really.
That's exactly what it does.
It keeps it balanced and, without that balance, everything starts crumbling.
It's not just her family that Gail takes swimming with sharks.
She also takes visitors out diving with the most feared of predators.
I'm a fairly new diver, and it has been suggested that I should get into the water with you and maybe meet one or two very small, tiddly, sharks that don't like chomping on humans.
What's the level of risk? It sounds quite a scary idea to me.
It's scary, because for all your life you've grown up thinking that if you got into shark-infested waters you're going to get eaten, and that's not the truth.
I want to go out there and show you the truth.
Let's go bust some myths.
So, it was time to face my fears, and get up close and personal with this apex predator.
I haven't dived very much, in truth, so that adds to my general nervousness.
Gail promised me she's never lost a customer.
Before I had a moment for second thoughts, it was time to take the plunge.
Go.
Two, three, go! This was actually my first scuba dive out in the open sea.
Immediately we plunged into another world.
Gail led me to a shallow cave, where she hoped we'd be able to close to sharks.
We got into position and waited.
And suddenly, there they were, ragged tooth sharks.
Two metres long and armed with a terrifying mouthful of teeth.
But, straightaway, it was obvious we weren't on the menu.
It was exhilarating to be so close to such magnificent creatures.
Gail, we saw sharks.
We did.
You got me to swim with sharks! I did.
And they weren't really that interested.
We were just a, sort of, an obstruction, a curious obstruction Yes.
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that they needed to get past.
But at no time did I feel, well, threatened by them, really.
OK.
They're looking at you.
They're trying to work out, what are you doing there? Yeah.
You're not competing for their food.
You're not trying to hurt them.
You're completely confusing to them.
It was an experience I'll never forget.
But, so long as we all keep thinking sharks are the villains of the ocean, Gail will have an uphill struggle encouraging people to protect them.
I like the sea.
I'm quite happy to be back here.
Terra firma.
Terra firma.
Less of the terra and more of the firma, I say.
I love it.
As well as a thriving tourist industry, Durban has one of the great ports of the Indian Ocean.
Every year, more than 4,000 ships from around the world carry 75 million tons of cargo in and out of this harbour.
I'd arranged to hitch a ride up the east African coast on a container ship bound for Mozambique.
Feel quite excited.
Never done this before.
Hello! Hello! How are you? Fine, thank you.
I was boarding the Italian-owned Jolly Bianco, 200 metres long and 27,000 tons.
Right, let's go and meet the captain.
Look at this! I'm not sure we're all going to fit in here.
The ship was huge, but it didn't seem designed to carry passengers.
OK, so this is how I'm going to travel to Mozambique.
I think I'm going to take a flight.
Goodness me! OK.
Let's get serious, we're meeting the captain.
I found captain Francesco Venicori up on the bridge, overseeing the loading of cargo.
Where did you come from before here? The voyage is starting in Genoa, it's our home port, Italy.
Right.
OK.
Then Marseilles, Naples, Aqaba, Jeddah, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Durban, then Maputo and then our way back to Italy.
Loading the Jolly Bianco took all night.
And then, early the next morning, we were ready to hit the high seas.
But to navigate the busy exit from Durban harbour, we needed a specialist pilot.
So, that's how to arrive.
There are so many ships plying the Indian Ocean and using this port that pilots are winched from ship to ship.
Steady, 039, please.
Steady.
So you can go to starboard.
It all looked a bit technical, so I kept well out of the way.
We were finally on our way to Maputo, Mozambique's capital, 300 miles up the east African coast.
There's been trade across the Indian Ocean for thousands of years, long before the world's other great oceans were navigated.
Merchants from China, Arabia, and India traded across these waters.
The Indian Ocean is once again becoming the most important seaway in the world.
One million ships a year, and more than half of all shipping container traffic, passes through it.
The sea lanes of the Indian Ocean are criss-crossed by oil tankers from the Middle East, and ships carrying consumer goods from China.
Wow! Whole canyon of containers.
There were 600 shipping containers on the Jolly Bianco, but what on Earth's in all these giant boxes? On this ship is the stuff of life.
Sugar, hides, paper, food stuff, tiles, paint, roof tiles, fruit juices, anthracite, mining equipment, milk powder, tinplate, ethyl alcohol, canned food, cotton lint, ceramics, lube oils, steel, seeds, tobacco, ingots, rubber, peptides, electrical accessories, and other large mining vehicles, et cetera.
It's basically anything and everything.
Ooh, a whole car park, as well.
The deck below was also packed.
There's should be about 270 cars and trucks.
Oh, my goodness, look at this! This is absolutely incredible.
This shipment of South African armoured personnel carriers was being taken up the coast to Sudan for the United Nations mission in Darfur.
It was a stark reminder we were about to enter a troubled region.
This is enough to equip an entire army, or a peacekeeping force.
But as trade across the Indian Ocean grows, ships face a deadly threat from the age-old enemy of merchants and sailors - pirates.
The captain's chart showed dozens of attacks by Somali pirates, around this stretch of the ocean, just in the previous two months.
The Jolly Bianco was heading for some of the most dangerous waters on Earth.
Practically all the Indian Ocean.
And you have to take your ship through those waters.
In the middle.
It must be frightening.
Of course, yes, it's a serious problem.
30 years ago, when I started to do this job, pirates are what you see in the movie and what you read in some books now, you know.
No ship is safe from attack.
Some of the tactics they use against the pirates are quite simple.
As you can see, they've got razor wire, here, and that's along both sides of the ship, and it's really meant to discourage anybody from getting onboard.
They also put cardboard over the windows, so that there's not light emitting at night.
And that means the pirates can't see them as they pass at night, the pirates don't come and attack.
Simple, but effective.
I was getting off the ship before they would enter the danger zone.
I would be facing the perils of Somalia, and the Horn Of Africa, later in my journey.
I had another night onboard before we reached Maputo.
The following day, we arrived in the Mozambican capital.
Maputo is home to almost two million people.
On the day we arrived, most of them seemed to be on the beach.
So busy today.
Yes, it is.
I'd be travelling through Mozambique with my guide, a conservationist called Carlos Mequaqua.
It's amazing the change you will see through the trip up north from here.
In what way? The beach will be more beautiful, less people, and very beautiful water.
We headed north along the Indian Ocean coast towards Inhambane, a long day's drive from the capital.
We've got a few more hours on the road though, haven't we? Maybe three more hours.
Three more hours.
OK.
Hopefully we're going to get there during daylight.
But Mozambique isn't famed for its roads.
Ah, we're stuck in the sand.
Best to let some air out.
It turned into a long night.
Shall we give it a try? But eventually we limped our way towards our beds for the night.
7.
35 on a Wednesday morning, standing on a remote beach in Mozambique, such a thing of beauty.
There's a Mozambican writer who said, 'Mozambique is like a veranda onto the Indian Ocean.
' It's absolutely stunning here.
Carlos had brought me to a village near where he grew up.
He wanted me to meet some fishermen who specialise in a very particular catch.
It's a tiny boat, eh? Yeah.
The leader of the group was a young man called Nelson.
They're going.
We followed Nelson and his crew to where they'd laid baited lines the previous night.
They're pulling now the line.
Yeah.
To see if they've got any catch.
Yeah, man! I think they've got something.
Yeah, you can see.
You can see it's massive.
Wow! Wow! Wow! Oh, my goodness! Oh, my good lord! This is big.
Wow! It's a massive shark, eh? It's huge, isn't it? Sharks have to keep moving in order to breath.
Trapped on their line for hours this adult female shark had drowned.
Rolling around in the surf, the magnificent shark became a pathetic and upsetting sight.
Wow! Look at that! But I realised I was witnessing one of the great catastrophes, of not just the Indian Ocean, but our global seas, as the men went to work on their catch.
Nelson and his men fish for sharks for one specific reason - to harvest one of the most valuable fish products on Earth.
They're not interested in the meat on this creature, they're just interested in fins.
Nelson, how much money will you get for the fins? Do you know who buys the shark fins? Do you know what's done with them eventually? In fact, the fins are usually shipped across the Indian Ocean and on to China, where the almost tasteless cartilage is put into soup.
What's particularly obscene about this situation is that the entire trade in sharks globally, which results in the deaths of millions of sharks every year, is to feed or provide fins for shark fin soup, a Chinese delicacy meant to show wealth, the wealth of the person who is consuming it.
Just like the abalone I saw being poached in South African waters, sharks have become victims of the economic growth of China, where delicacies that used to be available to just a few, are now in huge demand.
More than 100 million sharks are being killed each year, mostly for shark fin soup.
There are now thought to be just a few thousand great white sharks left on the planet.
Our oceans face a catastrophe.
My whole view on sharks has completely changed in the last couple of weeks.
I've gone from being fearful of them to fearful for them.
They're an apex predator, they keep a lid on all other marine life in our seas, in our oceans, and we're annihilating them.
We're wiping them out and, in doing so, we're threatening the entire marine ecosystem, because sharks are the most important fish in the sea.
Even with a small boat, a fisherman here can catch hundreds of sharks each year.
But the real damage to shark numbers is done further out to sea where industrial fishing fleets from Asia and Europe catch millions, slicing off the fins and often chucking the body back into the water, sometimes while the shark is still alive.
Villagers here are fishing to survive, but Carlos is still keen to educate them about the need to protect the Indian Ocean.
He runs a conservation and education programme among the fishing communities along the coast.
First step is to lay on a kick-about to attract youngsters to listen to his message.
Carlos is trying to persuade people not to make their livelihood by killing the spectacular marine life found in the Indian Ocean.
He wants them to find other ways of protecting and profiting from the sea.
Then at the end of his talk, Carlos makes sure the music gets pumped up loud.
These are just the people he needs to be talking to.
I'm standing here and I can actually smell fish.
These are fisher people.
If they're not fishermen, they're the fishermen of the future, and getting this message across to them now is absolutely vital.
Even if it is with the help of a dancing competition.
Mozambique is one of the poorest countries around the Indian Ocean, and its tourist industry is very underdeveloped.
It wasn't always like this.
Two hundred miles further up the coast, in Mozambique's second city, Beira, I'd heard I'd find a relic of tourism from another era.
Oh, my goodness! There it is.
Look! The Grand Hotel, Beira.
Beira's ocean side Grand Hotel was built in the 1950s when the country was still a Portuguese colony.
It had several hundred rooms, a huge swimming pool and a cinema, and it was billed as the grandest hotel in Africa.
So look at this! It's quite a sight.
This is how it was in the 1960s? It looks amazing.
But then Mozambique's brutal war for independence drove the rich tourists away, and the hotel fell into immediate decline.
So, this would have been the drive up to the hotel.
Yeah.
Mangori Felisberto offered to show me around.
Yeah, this was the main entrance.
Then the reception was somewhere here.
Wow! This is amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
Looking to the left and to the right, you have these grand staircases that sweep upwards.
And there's this amazing, sort of, atrium here.
Still has a very grand feel about it.
The hotel may have been abandoned by tourists, but it was clearly far from empty.
In fact, the rooms have become somewhat overcrowded.
How many people how many people live here? It's about 3,500.
3,500 people live here now? Yeah.
A long civil war followed independence from Portugal and the hotel became a refugee camp for thousands of Mozambicans.
Since then, poverty has driven many more to find shelter here.
This used to be the swimming pool? There's a man doing his washing, his laundry, in what's left of the swimming pool.
There's little in the way of sanitation and all the residents share one water pump.
Although the conditions within the hotel are pretty bad this is very much a community.
It's like a town within a town, really.
There are committees to organise various aspects of life here.
Oops! The hotel's residents have even set up a system of local government with elected leaders.
Simon.
Very nice to meet you, sir.
Joao.
'I met Joao Goncalo, who's the mayor of the hotel.
' How do you keep order and prevent fights breaking out in a community packed into such a relatively small building? TRANSLATION: If there are problems, the organisers have a meeting, and then we have a meeting with all the residents.
We sit down and resolve the issue.
We have a head of Social Affairs, who resolves social issues.
We have a group who looks after hygiene.
And we have a security group, who keep guard at night to keep out intruders.
Mozambique has suffered terribly in recent decades.
It's still desperately poor, but here people are doing what they do even in the face of adversity - they're getting on with life.
It was time for me to leave the African mainland.
From the Maldives to Mauritius, the Indian Ocean is home to the most famous holiday islands on earth.
My first taste of island paradise on this journey was to be exotic and mysterious Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania.
My goodness, look at this! This is what I think of when I imagine tropical beauty and the Indian Ocean.
For tourists seeking warm seas and white beaches, the island of Zanzibar is a huge draw.
For centuries, Zanzibar was a major centre of commerce in the Indian Ocean, connecting East Africa and the rest of the world.
Jambo! Merchants travelled here from far and wide to trade in spices and ivory.
Everywhere here you see the influence of the traders who've been drawn to Zanzibar over the centuries.
There's elements of Portugal, of the Phoenicians, of the Assyrians, of people from Oman and the Arabian Peninsula, and of course black Africa as well.
So it's really a melting pot for the entire Indian Ocean.
But Zanzibar has a darker past as well.
It was also the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade.
Dealers sent expeditions deep into eastern Africa to kidnap men, women and children, who they brought here to sell on to the countries of Arabia and India.
A church now stands on the site of the former slave market.
Oh, my goodness! Oh, my good god.
So, these are the cells where slaves were held.
So, apparently, in this room, it's not really much of a room, is it? But this is where women and children would have been kept.
So anything up to 70, would have been crammed in here.
It's quite difficult to breathe in here even now, and it's stiflingly hot.
What this must have been like with dozens of terrified human beings in, I just can't even begin to imagine.
It's an awful, awful place.
Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, but decades later the Sultan here in Zanzibar was still refusing to end the slave industry, so the Royal Navy threatened to bombard the city to force him to close the slave market.
Britain saw Zanzibar as crucial to its dominance of the Indian Ocean.
They threatened another bombardment in 1896, when the Sultan's nephew tried to seize power from their ally.
The Brits said to him, clear out, we don't want you here and gave him an ultimatum.
They said, if you're not out by 9am, we're going to turn up and start a war, basically.
The deadline passed and the bombardment began.
Within just a couple of minutes of the bombardment starting the palace here was ablaze and, within about 40 minutes, the Sultan's nephew had fled.
It's officially recorded as the shortest war in history.
The islands of the Indian Ocean have always been tempting targets for world powers, strategically placed to control the vital trade routes.
It was something I was looking forward to exploring on the next stages of my trip.
This is the end of the first leg of my journey.
It's been an amazing trip so far, and I feel I've learned a huge amount, particularly about sharks.
But I've got a lot further to go, and a lot more to discover about the Indian Ocean.
'Next time, I explore the extraordinary Indian Ocean islands 'of Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles.
' If you're going to try and imagine paradise, that's it.
'I meet the armed forces defending paradise from pirates.
' It's the 21st century and you're going after pirates in the Indian Ocean? Yep.
'And get a unique taste of the Indian Ocean.
' Bat? Yeah, bat.
Vampires are not the bat.
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and beautiful and rare wildlife.
I'm travelling through 16 countries around the edge of this vast ocean that stretches 6,000 miles from Africa to Australia.
Steeped in history, the Indian Ocean is vital to world trade.
It's a journey of extremes, from stunning islands across pirate-infested seas, to remote villages .
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and war-torn lands.
What was that? This is a journey about much more than just what's under the waves.
It's about the lives of the millions of people who live around this, one of our greatest oceans.
I start my journey at the tip of Africa, and travel up the east coast of the continent to the island of Zanzibar.
I discover what threatens the ocean's mightiest predator.
I think they've got something.
And I confront my own fears on my first ocean dive.
You got me to swim with sharks.
We're stuck in the sand.
On this first part of my journey, I travel by land, sea and air .
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through a country ravaged by civil war.
3,500 people live here now? And ending on the exotic island of Zanzibar, with its stunning coral beaches.
My goodness look at this! I'm at the bottom of Africa.
Somewhere out there, two of the world's mightiest oceans collide.
Over there is the Atlantic, but I'm heading this way.
This is the start of my journey around the glorious Indian Ocean.
It's a huge trip.
It's an enormous challenge, and it begins right here, right now, on the rugged coast of South Africa.
The Indian Ocean might be better known for tropical beaches and palm trees, but down here, near the Cape of Good Hope, the sea churns with life, and the coastline is dramatic.
There's no neat dividing line between two great seas.
And the water here is fed by currents from both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.
As a result, the water temperature can fluctuate wildly, and there's a huge diversity of marine life.
This area is a breeding ground for vast stocks of fish, sea birds and mammals.
Oh, dolphins, porpoises, just off to the left! Across the Indian Ocean, this spectacular wildlife is in desperate need of protection.
I hitched a ride on a South African fisheries patrol boat, whose job it is to police these waters.
This pearly beach area, there's a group of poachers that live out here, ok? And they actually swim from the shoreline all the way through to the island.
Keith Govender and his team are targeting poachers who are after a little known, but valuable, sea creature.
Part of what we're going to do today is basically looking and protecting a resource called abalone.
Abalone.
Abalone in layman's terms you could describe as a shellfish.
It's become a commodity now that is wanted in the Far East.
As a food? As a food, or as a delicacy.
Delicacy is the word, yeah.
And it's become so wanted that people in South Africa now are actually poaching it more and more to sell off to syndicates, basically.
What, crime gangs? Crime gangs itself.
And that stuff gets smuggled onto the black market into the Far East.
And people will poach from the shoreline, where divers would walk into the water and poach off a reef and you also have one where it's sea-based, where people use rubber ducks.
When you say a rubber duck, you mean something like this? Yeah, something like this.
This one's specially designed for enforcement.
And it's super fast.
It's super fast.
The patrol received a tip-off that poachers had been spotted.
They were hunting for rare abalone, which is protected in South African waters.
It was time to launch the rubber duck.
If we tell you to hang on, drop whatever you're doing and you hang on, OK? OK.
No matter what's happening, just hang on.
OK, let's go! Hold on! There's something there! Right hand side.
Right on the starboard bow, dead ahead! Coming very fast, so they won't be able to get away.
Keep this course.
It looked like we were going to catch a group of poachers red-handed.
Now you see there the divers are busy on the rock there at the moment, as you can see.
But just a few hundred feet from the coast, we ran into a floating natural barrier that could entangle the boat propeller.
I mean, and if you look at the kelp here, you can see how thick it is.
My god, look at it, it's like a tangle of knots! I can see, yeah, a guy he's just, sort of, crouching down, trying to stay out of sight.
There was a third guy.
He's just gone into the water.
So, there's poaching going on right here, right now.
It's very frustrating.
It's very frustrating.
You can see them.
You want to grab them.
You see now they're just getting equipment and walking away.
And run away.
Now this is Whiskey Bravo, over.
Keith alerted the local police, who tracked and caught the poachers.
The trade in abalone has become a multi-million pound business.
My goodness! This was abalone they'd confiscated from other poachers.
It's basically a shellfish.
It doesn't look like very much, let's be honest.
It's slimy and not particularly pleasant.
But a plate of abalone can sell for more than £100 in a restaurant in China.
There's abalone here worth, I would guess, tens of thousands of pounds.
Yep.
And, bizarrely, the black market trade in abalone is linked to serious organised crime.
But the problem is it opens up a whole lot of things, such as drugs, illegal weapons, those type of things.
It's connected with all these other it's connected, yeah.
.
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crime activities.
It's a spider's web, basically.
This is such a weird situation.
Weird story, but it gets even odder, because what we've been told is that while abalone's being smuggled out of the country by criminal gangs, the same people are then involved in smuggling back in a methamphetamine drug called tik, which is apparently causing all sorts of chaos here in South Africa.
This two-way trade is centred on nearby Cape Town, where use of the drug, tik, has reached epidemic proportions.
Abalone is smuggled out of the country to China, and the same gangs use the profits to trade in tik.
Police here have even found large quantities of abalone, together with tik, while carrying out drugs raids.
I headed to Manenberg, an area notorious for poverty, drugs and violent crime.
I met up with William Williams, who runs a local charity that works with people addicted to tik.
How has tik affected the community in recent years? It's almost like people has lost this whole thing of caring about other people and only caring about themselves, and that the biggest thing for them is getting the drug, so if they have to rob their neighbour, steal from the neighbour, do anything against their neighbour to be able to get this drug.
This was a side of South Africa few visitors get to see.
It was the poaching of an ocean mollusc that had brought me here, but almost everyone I met had a story about the damage the methamphetamine drug, tik, is now doing to the community.
It can hurt families, like just parents and children, like kids today when they've used drugs, then like mothers, fathers, kids, they use it together.
Almost like meals they use it.
I use it for eight years.
Eight years! I'm 24 years old now.
And what does it do to the mind? Make you end up like suicidal.
But some of my friends that use it, they are mad today.
Readily available and highly addictive, tik has become a massive problem in Cape Town.
William took me down the street to meet a local addict.
But as we walked into his house, it became clear it was the neighbourhood drug den, and the man wasn't alone.
Hello! Is it OK to come in? Thank you, gentlemen.
Can I sit down? Sit down.
Is that a real gun? Yeah.
Oh, dear! Ah, OK.
These weren't just users.
I'd stumbled into a drug gang.
My name is Juan.
Simon.
Simon.
Nice to meet you, Juan.
Man.
The man was smoking heroine, while waiting for a delivery of tik.
We use it to smoke.
It was upsetting to see that a teenage girl had got caught up with this group.
A lolly? Another gang member produced some tik.
Now we're going to show him now to use this.
They were almost proud to show me the drug that's ripping apart this community.
We call him Nongi.
Yeah.
Wow! For how long? Suddenly the mood changed.
The men started jostling us and demanding money.
It was time to make a quick exit.
OK, we need to go right now.
Just OK, I think we need to get in the car.
That last situation, that surprised me.
Suddenly you're into a situation which is so dark.
You're witnessing people who've fallen so far down, and I can't quite believe how far this situation develops from something that appears so simple as poaching abalone.
There is a desperation for the drugs.
People will go out and get the abalone, OK, to pay for the drugs.
It's desperate, eh? Absolutely desperate.
The weird connection between abalone poaching and the drug trade in Cape Town .
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was proof that even in big coastal cities life is still linked to the sea.
From the Cape, my journey around the Indian Ocean was now really beginning.
A commuter train, through the southern suburbs, showed me a more affluent side of South Africa.
But I wasn't travelling far, as I headed to meet some friendlier local residents.
I think this is our stop.
I was a bit surprised to find penguins in Africa, but there used to be millions living along the coast here.
I'd arrived during the moulting season, when the penguins were waiting patiently for their new set of clothes.
So this is quite a boring time for them.
They have to just wait by the coast for their new coat.
You can say it's a boring time, but I see it as time out.
I mean we also need that as humans, you know, you need to take time out at some point, and this is their time out.
Conservationist, Tributin Bueni, spent two years studying these penguins, living alone with them on a remote island.
Not surprisingly, her nickname is Birdie, and she feels that penguins have plenty to teach us.
We could learn quite a bit from them.
What would be the key lessons that we should learn? Both the male and the female take care of the chicks.
It's a teamwork, it's not just a woman's duty to take care of the chicks.
Oh, I see.
I see.
You think there's an equality in the penguin household.
Yeah, there is.
That we humans could learn perhaps we boys could learn from.
Mmm, I wonder.
But like many species that rely on the ocean, the African penguin is struggling to survive.
The birds are simply not getting enough to eat.
Scientists believe that fish stocks, which penguins rely on, are taking a hammering in this area because of the changing environment and humans overfishing.
So the day we're here is quite an important day for the colony here, because they're going to round up, or catch, and collect some of the really underweight young chicks.
And they're going to take them to a facility where they're going to feed them up, so that they actually have a chance of surviving when they're in the water.
In the last few decades, the penguin population along the coast has suffered a dramatic fall.
Penguin numbers have dropped by 80%.
They've got one! They've got a baby penguin just over here.
It's a little chick.
It's actually quite sad to think, ten years after this, are they still going to be there or not? You know, and it's quite sad just thinking about it, you know.
You're genuinely concerned these could be extinct in ten years? In ten years time.
Looking at how the numbers are going down now, it's totally possible.
Volunteers from SANCCOB, a sea bird rescue group, had set up a local centre to feed the underweight chicks.
Vanessa Strauss was running the operation.
At this age, they need to have a really round belly.
You can see that he's got a hollow belly, so he doesn't have any muscle round his chest.
He doesn't have any fat.
You can just see from him that he hasn't been fed in a while.
He's dehydrated.
He's not feeling strong.
So, you're becoming the mum and dad, basically.
Yep, absolutely.
Every penguin that we can save is essential for the survival of the species.
Look at the size of this! Little penguin paradise here! After six weeks of intensive care, here at SANCCOB headquarters, the chicks are given training in essential penguin skills.
Been given a towel.
OK.
What are we using this for? This is a little exercise programme.
We're sort penguin wrangling.
Yes.
It's a roundup really.
They need to get fit, ready to swim far out at sea to find their own food.
Come on! Come on! They're really not going to go in.
Oh, there we go! Yes! There you go! Vanessa has resorted to a more direct approach.
No, you can't come back! There are 18 penguin species in the world, and 11 are in serious population decline.
What a wonderful sight! When their swimming lessons are complete, these penguins will be ready to return to the ocean, hopefully strong enough to survive and to breed.
It was time for me to continue my Indian Ocean journey.
It was a drive of three hours along the coast towards the wild and windswept Cape Agulhas, which is actually even further south than the Cape Of Good Hope.
I've reached the most southerly tip of Africa.
Look, it's very rugged along here.
Look at the rocks! Ever since the late 1400s, when European explorers made it around the Cape, from the Atlantic round to the relative calm of the Indian Ocean, this coastline has always had a fearsome reputation.
And even now, with all our modern navigation aids, some ships don't make it.
Five hundred years ago, the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, left the southern Atlantic Ocean, sailed around the cape, and passed here on the first epic sea voyage from Europe to India.
Travellers and traders followed in his wake, and there are believed to be at least 200 shipwrecks along this coastline, known as the Graveyard Of Ships.
I followed their route along the coast to South Africa's third largest city, Durban.
The beaches around Durban are a holidaymaker's paradise.
Hundreds of thousands of people come here from across the world to surf and swim.
Money from tourism is crucial to many countries around the Indian Ocean, but often there are conflicts between the tourism industry and those who want to protect the ocean ecosystem, particularly in Durban, where the water just off the beaches can hide some very unwelcome visitors.
Now this is a sight.
It's basically a collection of jaws from the species which we commonly catch.
And what would this one on the end be? It looks like the biggest one.
Well, these are all white sharks, here, and they have, by far, the most impressive teeth.
This is a great white? Great white, yes.
Look at that in there! Serrated teeth, which is perfect for swiftly biting and chopping away at a lump of flesh.
Durban spends millions of pounds defending its tourists from shark attacks.
Jeremy Cliff, of the Natal Sharks Board, took me out to see his first line of defence, a system of shark nets introduced after a series of attacks in the 1950s, which killed seven people.
Many people think that the nets are a physical barrier, and we put them up and the sharks stay on the outside, and we quite happily swim on the inside.
Well, it's not like that at all.
The nets don't extend from the surface to the seabed, and the nets are only 300 metres long.
So it's not excluding a shark from the area? That's right.
That's right.
It's what? It's killing some of them? Yes.
It's designed to catch and kill the dangerous sharks.
Yes.
There are 15 miles of nets along Durban's beaches, but they don't just kill sharks.
If these nets are designed to catch sharks, presumably they're catching other creatures, as well.
Yes, unfortunately.
That's the major drawback of shark nets is that they don't just select or target the three dangerous species.
They take sharks which pose very little threat to humans.
We also catch rays and turtles and dolphins, unfortunately.
Far from being just a protective barrier, shark nets around the world actually kill thousands of marine creatures every year.
They also reinforce the idea that only a sea free of sharks is safe water.
Back at the Shark Board headquarters, there's a cold store room piled up with dead sharks and other animals they've caught.
It was a shocking sight, and Jeremy wasn't keen for us to film it.
But outside he showed me one shark the nets had caught, a juvenile great white, one of the world's rarest sharks.
Yeah, just under two metres in length.
Our measurements, we exclude the tail.
We measure up to there.
OK.
At up to six metres long, the great white shark is the largest predatory fish on the planet.
I sense there's a little bit of a conflict, really, perhaps, dare I say, even within you, as a marine biologist.
It must be tough to do this.
Oh, sure, most definitely.
I mean, the last thing we want to do is see dead white sharks like this, but unfortunately we've got a job to do, tourism is very important for this part of the world, and we've seen, historically, what a huge negative impact shark attack has had.
It does seem a little bit of a tragic end for such an incredible beast.
I don't know, but I feel my feelings slightly conflicted about it, cos I fear it and I really do respect it, as well.
I think that's the important thing, Simon, is to try and change this predominant attitude of fear, towards one of respect, rather than fear.
I could understand Jeremy's dilemma, shark attacks are actually incredibly rare, but such is the fear they inspire, tourist resorts will do almost anything to prevent them.
I travelled a few miles outside Durban to meet a woman who's on a mission to change our views on this most infamous creature of the deep.
People don't have empathy for sharks.
It is the most terrible, terrible sad thing, but they are to be revered.
Gail Addison is a big shark fan, so much so, she regularly takes her family along to swim with them.
Do you know that I take my little eight-year-old, and she comes swimming with us with the sharks? We've very specific about when we put her in the water, and how she goes in the water, and that's the same with divers.
Some people might think that's a bit mad, to put your eight-year-old in the water.
Do you know what? She's grown up with it.
She's grown up swimming since was one-year-old, when she learned to swim.
Gail thinks Durban's shark nets need to be removed, and that we need to change our view of sharks, because, far from being a menace, sharks are crucial to the health of our oceans.
Why are they the most important fish in the sea? Cos they're apex predators, and, unfortunately, that means that they're not used to being hunted.
They're not meant to have natural predators.
They are the top of the food chain, so they keep everything else underneath them balanced and healthy.
So, it controls the ecosystem really.
That's exactly what it does.
It keeps it balanced and, without that balance, everything starts crumbling.
It's not just her family that Gail takes swimming with sharks.
She also takes visitors out diving with the most feared of predators.
I'm a fairly new diver, and it has been suggested that I should get into the water with you and maybe meet one or two very small, tiddly, sharks that don't like chomping on humans.
What's the level of risk? It sounds quite a scary idea to me.
It's scary, because for all your life you've grown up thinking that if you got into shark-infested waters you're going to get eaten, and that's not the truth.
I want to go out there and show you the truth.
Let's go bust some myths.
So, it was time to face my fears, and get up close and personal with this apex predator.
I haven't dived very much, in truth, so that adds to my general nervousness.
Gail promised me she's never lost a customer.
Before I had a moment for second thoughts, it was time to take the plunge.
Go.
Two, three, go! This was actually my first scuba dive out in the open sea.
Immediately we plunged into another world.
Gail led me to a shallow cave, where she hoped we'd be able to close to sharks.
We got into position and waited.
And suddenly, there they were, ragged tooth sharks.
Two metres long and armed with a terrifying mouthful of teeth.
But, straightaway, it was obvious we weren't on the menu.
It was exhilarating to be so close to such magnificent creatures.
Gail, we saw sharks.
We did.
You got me to swim with sharks! I did.
And they weren't really that interested.
We were just a, sort of, an obstruction, a curious obstruction Yes.
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that they needed to get past.
But at no time did I feel, well, threatened by them, really.
OK.
They're looking at you.
They're trying to work out, what are you doing there? Yeah.
You're not competing for their food.
You're not trying to hurt them.
You're completely confusing to them.
It was an experience I'll never forget.
But, so long as we all keep thinking sharks are the villains of the ocean, Gail will have an uphill struggle encouraging people to protect them.
I like the sea.
I'm quite happy to be back here.
Terra firma.
Terra firma.
Less of the terra and more of the firma, I say.
I love it.
As well as a thriving tourist industry, Durban has one of the great ports of the Indian Ocean.
Every year, more than 4,000 ships from around the world carry 75 million tons of cargo in and out of this harbour.
I'd arranged to hitch a ride up the east African coast on a container ship bound for Mozambique.
Feel quite excited.
Never done this before.
Hello! Hello! How are you? Fine, thank you.
I was boarding the Italian-owned Jolly Bianco, 200 metres long and 27,000 tons.
Right, let's go and meet the captain.
Look at this! I'm not sure we're all going to fit in here.
The ship was huge, but it didn't seem designed to carry passengers.
OK, so this is how I'm going to travel to Mozambique.
I think I'm going to take a flight.
Goodness me! OK.
Let's get serious, we're meeting the captain.
I found captain Francesco Venicori up on the bridge, overseeing the loading of cargo.
Where did you come from before here? The voyage is starting in Genoa, it's our home port, Italy.
Right.
OK.
Then Marseilles, Naples, Aqaba, Jeddah, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Durban, then Maputo and then our way back to Italy.
Loading the Jolly Bianco took all night.
And then, early the next morning, we were ready to hit the high seas.
But to navigate the busy exit from Durban harbour, we needed a specialist pilot.
So, that's how to arrive.
There are so many ships plying the Indian Ocean and using this port that pilots are winched from ship to ship.
Steady, 039, please.
Steady.
So you can go to starboard.
It all looked a bit technical, so I kept well out of the way.
We were finally on our way to Maputo, Mozambique's capital, 300 miles up the east African coast.
There's been trade across the Indian Ocean for thousands of years, long before the world's other great oceans were navigated.
Merchants from China, Arabia, and India traded across these waters.
The Indian Ocean is once again becoming the most important seaway in the world.
One million ships a year, and more than half of all shipping container traffic, passes through it.
The sea lanes of the Indian Ocean are criss-crossed by oil tankers from the Middle East, and ships carrying consumer goods from China.
Wow! Whole canyon of containers.
There were 600 shipping containers on the Jolly Bianco, but what on Earth's in all these giant boxes? On this ship is the stuff of life.
Sugar, hides, paper, food stuff, tiles, paint, roof tiles, fruit juices, anthracite, mining equipment, milk powder, tinplate, ethyl alcohol, canned food, cotton lint, ceramics, lube oils, steel, seeds, tobacco, ingots, rubber, peptides, electrical accessories, and other large mining vehicles, et cetera.
It's basically anything and everything.
Ooh, a whole car park, as well.
The deck below was also packed.
There's should be about 270 cars and trucks.
Oh, my goodness, look at this! This is absolutely incredible.
This shipment of South African armoured personnel carriers was being taken up the coast to Sudan for the United Nations mission in Darfur.
It was a stark reminder we were about to enter a troubled region.
This is enough to equip an entire army, or a peacekeeping force.
But as trade across the Indian Ocean grows, ships face a deadly threat from the age-old enemy of merchants and sailors - pirates.
The captain's chart showed dozens of attacks by Somali pirates, around this stretch of the ocean, just in the previous two months.
The Jolly Bianco was heading for some of the most dangerous waters on Earth.
Practically all the Indian Ocean.
And you have to take your ship through those waters.
In the middle.
It must be frightening.
Of course, yes, it's a serious problem.
30 years ago, when I started to do this job, pirates are what you see in the movie and what you read in some books now, you know.
No ship is safe from attack.
Some of the tactics they use against the pirates are quite simple.
As you can see, they've got razor wire, here, and that's along both sides of the ship, and it's really meant to discourage anybody from getting onboard.
They also put cardboard over the windows, so that there's not light emitting at night.
And that means the pirates can't see them as they pass at night, the pirates don't come and attack.
Simple, but effective.
I was getting off the ship before they would enter the danger zone.
I would be facing the perils of Somalia, and the Horn Of Africa, later in my journey.
I had another night onboard before we reached Maputo.
The following day, we arrived in the Mozambican capital.
Maputo is home to almost two million people.
On the day we arrived, most of them seemed to be on the beach.
So busy today.
Yes, it is.
I'd be travelling through Mozambique with my guide, a conservationist called Carlos Mequaqua.
It's amazing the change you will see through the trip up north from here.
In what way? The beach will be more beautiful, less people, and very beautiful water.
We headed north along the Indian Ocean coast towards Inhambane, a long day's drive from the capital.
We've got a few more hours on the road though, haven't we? Maybe three more hours.
Three more hours.
OK.
Hopefully we're going to get there during daylight.
But Mozambique isn't famed for its roads.
Ah, we're stuck in the sand.
Best to let some air out.
It turned into a long night.
Shall we give it a try? But eventually we limped our way towards our beds for the night.
7.
35 on a Wednesday morning, standing on a remote beach in Mozambique, such a thing of beauty.
There's a Mozambican writer who said, 'Mozambique is like a veranda onto the Indian Ocean.
' It's absolutely stunning here.
Carlos had brought me to a village near where he grew up.
He wanted me to meet some fishermen who specialise in a very particular catch.
It's a tiny boat, eh? Yeah.
The leader of the group was a young man called Nelson.
They're going.
We followed Nelson and his crew to where they'd laid baited lines the previous night.
They're pulling now the line.
Yeah.
To see if they've got any catch.
Yeah, man! I think they've got something.
Yeah, you can see.
You can see it's massive.
Wow! Wow! Wow! Oh, my goodness! Oh, my good lord! This is big.
Wow! It's a massive shark, eh? It's huge, isn't it? Sharks have to keep moving in order to breath.
Trapped on their line for hours this adult female shark had drowned.
Rolling around in the surf, the magnificent shark became a pathetic and upsetting sight.
Wow! Look at that! But I realised I was witnessing one of the great catastrophes, of not just the Indian Ocean, but our global seas, as the men went to work on their catch.
Nelson and his men fish for sharks for one specific reason - to harvest one of the most valuable fish products on Earth.
They're not interested in the meat on this creature, they're just interested in fins.
Nelson, how much money will you get for the fins? Do you know who buys the shark fins? Do you know what's done with them eventually? In fact, the fins are usually shipped across the Indian Ocean and on to China, where the almost tasteless cartilage is put into soup.
What's particularly obscene about this situation is that the entire trade in sharks globally, which results in the deaths of millions of sharks every year, is to feed or provide fins for shark fin soup, a Chinese delicacy meant to show wealth, the wealth of the person who is consuming it.
Just like the abalone I saw being poached in South African waters, sharks have become victims of the economic growth of China, where delicacies that used to be available to just a few, are now in huge demand.
More than 100 million sharks are being killed each year, mostly for shark fin soup.
There are now thought to be just a few thousand great white sharks left on the planet.
Our oceans face a catastrophe.
My whole view on sharks has completely changed in the last couple of weeks.
I've gone from being fearful of them to fearful for them.
They're an apex predator, they keep a lid on all other marine life in our seas, in our oceans, and we're annihilating them.
We're wiping them out and, in doing so, we're threatening the entire marine ecosystem, because sharks are the most important fish in the sea.
Even with a small boat, a fisherman here can catch hundreds of sharks each year.
But the real damage to shark numbers is done further out to sea where industrial fishing fleets from Asia and Europe catch millions, slicing off the fins and often chucking the body back into the water, sometimes while the shark is still alive.
Villagers here are fishing to survive, but Carlos is still keen to educate them about the need to protect the Indian Ocean.
He runs a conservation and education programme among the fishing communities along the coast.
First step is to lay on a kick-about to attract youngsters to listen to his message.
Carlos is trying to persuade people not to make their livelihood by killing the spectacular marine life found in the Indian Ocean.
He wants them to find other ways of protecting and profiting from the sea.
Then at the end of his talk, Carlos makes sure the music gets pumped up loud.
These are just the people he needs to be talking to.
I'm standing here and I can actually smell fish.
These are fisher people.
If they're not fishermen, they're the fishermen of the future, and getting this message across to them now is absolutely vital.
Even if it is with the help of a dancing competition.
Mozambique is one of the poorest countries around the Indian Ocean, and its tourist industry is very underdeveloped.
It wasn't always like this.
Two hundred miles further up the coast, in Mozambique's second city, Beira, I'd heard I'd find a relic of tourism from another era.
Oh, my goodness! There it is.
Look! The Grand Hotel, Beira.
Beira's ocean side Grand Hotel was built in the 1950s when the country was still a Portuguese colony.
It had several hundred rooms, a huge swimming pool and a cinema, and it was billed as the grandest hotel in Africa.
So look at this! It's quite a sight.
This is how it was in the 1960s? It looks amazing.
But then Mozambique's brutal war for independence drove the rich tourists away, and the hotel fell into immediate decline.
So, this would have been the drive up to the hotel.
Yeah.
Mangori Felisberto offered to show me around.
Yeah, this was the main entrance.
Then the reception was somewhere here.
Wow! This is amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
Looking to the left and to the right, you have these grand staircases that sweep upwards.
And there's this amazing, sort of, atrium here.
Still has a very grand feel about it.
The hotel may have been abandoned by tourists, but it was clearly far from empty.
In fact, the rooms have become somewhat overcrowded.
How many people how many people live here? It's about 3,500.
3,500 people live here now? Yeah.
A long civil war followed independence from Portugal and the hotel became a refugee camp for thousands of Mozambicans.
Since then, poverty has driven many more to find shelter here.
This used to be the swimming pool? There's a man doing his washing, his laundry, in what's left of the swimming pool.
There's little in the way of sanitation and all the residents share one water pump.
Although the conditions within the hotel are pretty bad this is very much a community.
It's like a town within a town, really.
There are committees to organise various aspects of life here.
Oops! The hotel's residents have even set up a system of local government with elected leaders.
Simon.
Very nice to meet you, sir.
Joao.
'I met Joao Goncalo, who's the mayor of the hotel.
' How do you keep order and prevent fights breaking out in a community packed into such a relatively small building? TRANSLATION: If there are problems, the organisers have a meeting, and then we have a meeting with all the residents.
We sit down and resolve the issue.
We have a head of Social Affairs, who resolves social issues.
We have a group who looks after hygiene.
And we have a security group, who keep guard at night to keep out intruders.
Mozambique has suffered terribly in recent decades.
It's still desperately poor, but here people are doing what they do even in the face of adversity - they're getting on with life.
It was time for me to leave the African mainland.
From the Maldives to Mauritius, the Indian Ocean is home to the most famous holiday islands on earth.
My first taste of island paradise on this journey was to be exotic and mysterious Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania.
My goodness, look at this! This is what I think of when I imagine tropical beauty and the Indian Ocean.
For tourists seeking warm seas and white beaches, the island of Zanzibar is a huge draw.
For centuries, Zanzibar was a major centre of commerce in the Indian Ocean, connecting East Africa and the rest of the world.
Jambo! Merchants travelled here from far and wide to trade in spices and ivory.
Everywhere here you see the influence of the traders who've been drawn to Zanzibar over the centuries.
There's elements of Portugal, of the Phoenicians, of the Assyrians, of people from Oman and the Arabian Peninsula, and of course black Africa as well.
So it's really a melting pot for the entire Indian Ocean.
But Zanzibar has a darker past as well.
It was also the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade.
Dealers sent expeditions deep into eastern Africa to kidnap men, women and children, who they brought here to sell on to the countries of Arabia and India.
A church now stands on the site of the former slave market.
Oh, my goodness! Oh, my good god.
So, these are the cells where slaves were held.
So, apparently, in this room, it's not really much of a room, is it? But this is where women and children would have been kept.
So anything up to 70, would have been crammed in here.
It's quite difficult to breathe in here even now, and it's stiflingly hot.
What this must have been like with dozens of terrified human beings in, I just can't even begin to imagine.
It's an awful, awful place.
Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, but decades later the Sultan here in Zanzibar was still refusing to end the slave industry, so the Royal Navy threatened to bombard the city to force him to close the slave market.
Britain saw Zanzibar as crucial to its dominance of the Indian Ocean.
They threatened another bombardment in 1896, when the Sultan's nephew tried to seize power from their ally.
The Brits said to him, clear out, we don't want you here and gave him an ultimatum.
They said, if you're not out by 9am, we're going to turn up and start a war, basically.
The deadline passed and the bombardment began.
Within just a couple of minutes of the bombardment starting the palace here was ablaze and, within about 40 minutes, the Sultan's nephew had fled.
It's officially recorded as the shortest war in history.
The islands of the Indian Ocean have always been tempting targets for world powers, strategically placed to control the vital trade routes.
It was something I was looking forward to exploring on the next stages of my trip.
This is the end of the first leg of my journey.
It's been an amazing trip so far, and I feel I've learned a huge amount, particularly about sharks.
But I've got a lot further to go, and a lot more to discover about the Indian Ocean.
'Next time, I explore the extraordinary Indian Ocean islands 'of Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles.
' If you're going to try and imagine paradise, that's it.
'I meet the armed forces defending paradise from pirates.
' It's the 21st century and you're going after pirates in the Indian Ocean? Yep.
'And get a unique taste of the Indian Ocean.
' Bat? Yeah, bat.
Vampires are not the bat.