Home sweet home

Final post!

Feels good to be back in a temperate climate again. I flew in Thursday evening, went out to Giordano's with Mom, Dad and Jared, and then waited 5 days for my luggage to arrive while running around to the doctor, Beloit, the doctor again (let me tell you, the tropics halfway around the world can really take a toll on a healthy immune system), the pharmacy, the boatyard, the harbor, etc etc, and then today was my first day back working at the Judd Goldman Adaptive Sailing Program for another (perhaps the final?) summer... So basically, I'm still pretty jet-lagged over here.

After ISP and sea turtles were over, we enjoyed a hasty few days of running around trying to get our write-ups finished and printed off and our presentations ready, a good-bye party with our homestay families that involved a really big cake, and another plane trip back up north, this time as a group. We traveled all around Diego, seeing Ankara National Park, the Tsingy rock formations, a couple bat caves, some Indri lemurs, and snorkeling in the Emerald Sea. The rainforests and waterfalls of Andasibe were breathtakingly beautiful - if you happened to read the article in Time Magazine in April sometime about Madagascar, that was where it was talking about. We saw the world's smallest chameleon, it fit on the tip of your pinky finger, quite adorable.

And hooray, putting pictures up is now about 100,000 times easier!!!

BABY SEA TURTLES.

Pirogue!

Nesting green sea turtle mama!

Walking over the suspension bridge at the Tsingy rock formations

Dancing into the village, after 5km

Tiny tiny baby puppy (one of many) at the Mahavoky Hotel in Fort Dauphin


With the homestay family at the good-bye party


LEMUR! A ringtail, in Berenty



Radiated tortoise eating some raqueta fruit (prickly pear)


Me with a lemur. It had to happen. (Search the background for long furry black-and-white-striped tail hanging down from the tree)


Sacred island called Nosy Lonjo ("Triangle Island") off the northern coast (Diego) - no one's been on it since the French colonization era.


Tiny tiny chameleon!!!


Frog on my pillow! (Nosy Sakatia)

Later gators.

Love Karen (in Chicago)