The Sealife of Tsarabanjina

Kati and Me Snorkeling 

October 11 -- Our first day on Tsarabanjina was incredible.  In the morning, we stopped in to look at the island's turtle hatchery.  Every year, several different kinds of sea turtles come to Tsarabanjina to lay their eggs.  Each female lays approximately 400 eggs and only about one out of every 1,000 will make it through the perilous journey down the beach and into the open ocean.  Because the survival rate is so low, the island staff does their best to save a few turtles that aren't going to make it and care for them until they can be released into the wild.  They currently have two hawksbill turtles and two loggerhead turtles in the hatchery, but will probably release them in the next month or two.

Later in the day, we went snorkeling at a reef around the island.  It was Kati's first time snorkeling and she was a bit concerned at first, but by the end, she didn't want to get out of the water!  Even though it was a bit overcast, the colors were still amazing and we saw just about every local reef fish possible.  Our guide is Milanese and spent the last two years working at the sister resort in the Maldives (tough life!).  She was great with helping acclimate Kati to breathing through her mouth.  She even took my camera to do some deep dives to the base of the reef and take pictures for us.

We spent our afternoon relaxing on the beach before walking over for dinner and drinks.  They were having a Malagasy party, so we all donned lambas (i.e., sarongs) to learn how to wear them and how to dance.  The party started with cocktails on a viewpoint where we had some fantastic kebabs and watched the sunset.  Afterwards, we went into the bar for a quick lesson on Malagasy history.  They used Kati and me as models for the various ways you can wear a lamba and then had a few of the locals, dressed in traditional garb, show us some Malagasy dancing (and force us into doing some ourselves).  It was a lot of fun.

During the ordeal, we befriended a couple from Scotland - Matt and Rachel.  He is a psychiatrist and she is a children's psychologist.  They were a very interesting pair and had also done a fair amount of traveling on mainland Madagasacar.  We ended up getting dinner with them, swapping travel stories, and then spent the evening together at the bar.  In the spirit of the evening, there was a traditional Malagasy dinner -- a pumpkin soup to start, followed by a cooked octopus mixture and some sort of local cake-like dessert.  The soup was very good.  Kati liked the rest of it, but I certainly did not.  The octopus just seemed too chewy and fishy.  I've had octopus cooked well, and this just did not meet my particular tastes.

Kati and Rachel were intrigued by the various infused rums that they make on the island and set out

Kati, Erica, and Jean-Michelle

to try all of them (I'm pretty sure they succeeded).  Some of them -- the ginger-cinnamon and vanilla -- were very good.  Others, like the banana-infused rum didn't do it for me.  Then there was the weird one: Citronella-infused rum.  It smelled like deet and it didn't taste much better.  Even the locals were laughing when Kati and Rachel were asking about it.  They had hoped that, even if it tasted bad, it would help keep the mosquitos away.  Henri, however, was quick to point out that it would probably keep the mosquitos out of their stomachs, but little else.  

The four of us closed the bar out around midnight and walked home over the "secret" rock path between the bar and the south beach.  Kati not only spotted, but caught a pretty large crab by doing what, by all accounts, was a very distracting dance that confused the crab so she could sneak behind it and grab it from the back!  All-in-all, it was a wonderful day.