C’mon Apple- I’m on vacation

Anjajavy

This place is amazing.

Birding with Billy

I’m not sure how Madagascar travel works, but we had a chartered plane that was supposed to leave at 7 am.  Our guide asked us if we wanted to delay the flight until 9 and bird for an hour first. We agreed, and with one phone call and 5 minutes everything was arranged.  We got to see several new species and saw a leucistic white-faced whistling duck.

White-faced whistling duck.

Leucistic white-faced duck (sort of like an albino)

Black Heron

Knob-billed duck

Malagasy Kingfisher 

Melter’s Duck

Red-billed Duck

Happy Lemur Day

After a delay by Kenya Airways (the pride of Africa), and an unplanned stay at the modern bug-free and lizard-free Crown Plaza at Nairobi Airport. We are finally in Madagascar at a spartan airport hotel.  We met our guide, Billie, for the capital area and he will take us birding for a few hours in the morning before we take a private plane to Western Madagascar to see lemurs.

Come along and see what's new
Were doing the things that animals do
New animal friends to see
Animal junction's the place to be
Elephants charging baboons are leaping
Wild dogs are running and nobody's sleeping

H

Make an animal friend today

Yesterday, we tried to feed a tortoise, but it hissed at us.  Today, Mike slowly enticed a tortoise who soon became our best friend and almost climbed into our laps. He ate two pears, an orange, and two small bananas.

We will call our new friend Kratt after the Kratt brothers and their Zaboomofoo program which also inspired us to head to Madagascar for lemurs. Hope they are friendly as well. 🐢🐢🐢🐒

Another resort, Another Anniversary Celebration

Mike informed the resort that we were celebrating our anniversary. They had an interesting ceremony for us in which each of us took a handful of sand from a bowl and combined it in another bowl so that they could never be separated.  After the combination, the new bowl of sand is poured into the ocean.  

The ceremony was at Sunset. Robin, the waiter from West Beach brought us a bottle of champagne. You’ll notice that the island next to us was getting a rainstorm and we were not. Mike calls this Darren Stevens Island.




The next morning we had a breakfast on the beach in what became our favorite spot.  Mike tried to do something artsy and take a photo of our reflections. 

We brought our uneaten fruit back to the villa with us for our tortoise Kratt, but sadly he has moved on already and we miss him so much! He was the friendliest one we encountered. We thought they moved so slowly that he/she would still be here.

You can’t determine the sex of a tortoise until age 10, and even if this one is 10, we surely can’t determine it.

Birds and More from North Island

Early in the morning, we spotted a baby moorhen.  Later that day we saw one swimming in our plunge pool. He even completely submerged and swam like a cormorant for a second or two. We didn’t know they could swim at all.

We spotted two tortoises on the villa lawn/garden.  We were told they loved apples, so we cut up some apple and brought it over to each.  They both hissed at us and went back in the bush. Chris wishes the reptiles would be so quick to run away from us. Some of the brown lizards here just look at us with attitude instead of scurrying away quickly like the green ones do.

Mike got to practice taking photographs of birds flying, and you might as well take a fruit bat photo while you’re out there…