Whale!

We were there at the beginning of the annual migration of the humpback whales, which congregate in the little strait between our island and the mainland.

Since they're there to mate, the humpbacks do a lot of stuff. We didn't see any of them leap out of the water, but we saw some of them flip their tails out of the water. It was really hard to get good photos, because you only had a second when they would flip up.

Closer shot of a tail flipper.

Here's a pair of them running side by side. They would surface, blow a lot of water out their blowhole, flip their tails up and dive, and then they'd resurface a couple of minutes later.

On a side note, our boat was smaller than the whales and didn't have life jackets. I was kind of hoping that the whales could see well enough to not surface under the boat.

This guy was doing barrel rolls. It's a little blurry, but that's his front fin and his back fin as he starts to roll onto his back.

An interesting bit of trivia: whales leave tracks.

When they surface and then dive, their tails somehow takes the waves out of the water, leaving a big flat area of water that has no movement. As they dive and surface, they leave a trail of circles of this amazingly flat water, big circles standing out against the waves at relatively regular distances. This is one of them up close.

On our fifth day, we discovered a footprint, meaning that there were other people on the island. I named the native Friday.

Our hotel had lots of organic bug zappers.

Closeup of bug zapper.

The wifey relaxes in the hut before dinner. At night, mosquito netting was de rigueur, so we had to climb in and seal it every night.

90 percent of everything in Madagascar exists only in Madagascar. They have eight times more species of palm trees in Madagascar than there are on the entire continent of Africa.

The rest of these animal pictures are from a zoo-type place that we went to. It was a bit different than an American zoo, because you got a guide, and they let you in the enclosures with the animals.

Here's a gecko that's unique to Madagascar.

How many geckoes do you see in this picture?

Check out the camouflage on this guy. It was absolutely amazing. This picture shows it pretty well, but in real life, it took us several minutes to notice it.

The zoo guy dude is all like, "Hey, come on into this enclosure", and I was all like, "I don't think I want to." I did, though, and the nine-foot boa constrictors didn't mess with me.

Sergeant, you're to ride back to Natal. When you see the Bishop tell him, that is, tell his daughter, that I was obliged to remain here with my infantry. Now go. God go with you.