Day 318, Year 5 Lots of Good News
Date: Thursday, September 9, 2010
Weather: Sunny Day; Winds Not Cooperating
Latitude: 13 24.474 S
Longitude: 048 17.064 E
Location: Hell-ville, Nosy Be, NW Madagascar
Mark’s brother Steve is a grandpa again. We received an email from Steve today saying that we should already know about the birth, so somehow we missed the earlier message. But the happy news is that Steve’s daughter Kristi gave birth to Caleb Stephen on August 23rd. Congratulations to Grandpa Steve and to Kristi, Nathan, and first born Hayden. We are very happy for all of you.
And while on the subject of babies, I will mention that we went to Nosy Komba today to see if the Black Lemurs had any babies yet. We were told in August that the babies would be born in September. Only one has been born and we were so lucky to see the mother with her little baby girl. Female Black Lemurs are brown with an off-white ruff around the face and the males are black. We were told today that both male and female babies are dark brown when born. The baby female lemur we saw today was definitely dark brown and looked more like a newborn kitten than the baby Cockerel Safika lemurs we saw in Moramba Bay. The Black Lemur babies are not as cute as he Safikas, but it was VERY special to have the mother with her baby holding onto to her tummy hop on our shoulders and heads. We thought the mother would not come near us with the baby, but not so. Our guide today was a good one. We could tell, and the animals could tell that he loved them. In addition to having the mother and baby lemur hop on our heads and shoulders, we were able to wrap the Madagascar boas around our necks and we had chameleons crawling on our heads. It was a fun trip through the lemur park. We bought some pieces of recelet (Komba embroidery) and went to Chez Yolanda’s for lunch. We had first heard about this little restaurant in the Lonely Planet and then we heard more about it from John Sheppard at Sakatia Towers. Yolanda and her husband are sailors and when she is in Komba, the seafood served at her restaurant is the best. When we arrived today her two daughters who speak absolutely no English were the only ones there. They went to find a young man who could translate for us and he explained that Yolanda was in Hell-ville. He said he could prepare the food, but that we must understand that the food would not be prepared by Yolanda. That was fine by us and as reported, the crevettes (shrimps) were absolutely delicious. We ordered crevettes l’ail which is shrimp sautéed in butter and garlic and crevettes en sauce (tomato). The shrimp were huge. And just as we were finishing, Yolanda appeared. She wanted to make sure all was okay and it was.
We returned to Windbird and motored against wind and current to Hell-ville. We were hoping to get the English up-dates on Mark’s computer and to get fuel. We will be able to get the computer updates tomorrow morning and we did get six jerry jugs of fuel late this afternoon. We will get another six jugs tomorrow morning and that should just about fill us up. I had hoped to be out of here in time to snorkel at Tani Keli tomorrow at low tide, but I don’t think we will make that. So once again, I’m not sure where we will go tomorrow after the computer up-dates are completed. If it is too late, we will just stay here and go to Tani Keli the next day.
Now for the other really good news . . . our son emailed this afternoon to let us know that Jo learned late yesterday that her paperwork has been received and is being processed so that she can return to the United States. It will take up to a year for her to hear the final decision on whether she will be granted a ten-year unconditional Visa so she can stay in the US, but at least for now Justin, Jo, and Ziggy can get on with their lives.
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| 100909 Day 318 Nosy Komba, Madgascar– Nosy Komba Wildlife Park |
