I found a message in a bottle on the beach at Dar es Salaam. For 54 years I have been hoping to find a message in a bottle. Every summer of my childhood was spent with my Great Grandmother in Pembrokeshire and every time we were on the beach, we would keep an eye out for a message in a bottle. We even did a few ourselves and lobbed them into the sea.
So you can imagine the excitement when I was working my around the rocks at high tide, trousers rolled out to my knees, sandals in hand, I saw a small brown bottle lying on the sand. The only people around were three men I had just photographed mending their nets. No-one to see the momentous occasion of my having actually found a message in a bottle.
It was small so I put it in my back pocket. I decided that I should wait until 6pm when all the family I am staying with, was home from work and school and open it together. We went through the garden gate onto the beach, set down a make-shift table and placed the bottle on it. Where had it come from? How old was it? Who had sent it and what was the message? Was it a cry for help, a love letter, an admission of a crime?
We all had a guess, some thinking it had come from a nearby island, others (me actually) that it had come from the Middle East. I had strained to see the writing through the brown glass and thought it looked a bit Arabic.
I set my mobile phone up to capture the moment and to see for the first time, this historic document, this mystery would soon be over. The plastic top came off easily and after the water had been tipped out, the document made its soggy way through the neck of the bottle. The family crowded around, straining to see what was written on it. It was very wet so I carefully opened it up to find, as I had suspected, Arabic writing.
I took it back to my house and got the hairdryer on it. Soon it was dry enough to read. I photographed it and sent it to two Egyptian men I had met the day before. We waited for the response and it came quickly. They had translated it and it turn out to be…..
OK, so it was just a child’s homework, someone practicing their Arabic writing. 54 years of waiting and all I get is some bloody writing homework. You have to give it to them though, it’s pretty funny to put some homework in a bottle, to get the finder excited, only for them to find out it’s your homework. It’s the sort of thing I would have done.
I’d like to think it came from the Middle East, but it could more easily have come from Zanzibar or other island near Dar es Salaam.
There are many disappointments in life and this was one of many I’ve had. Sometimes you find treasure and sometimes all you get is a kid’s writing homework.
Watch the grand opening here https://youtu.be/dyx4ad-nOeI