La Réunion

This is my last set of photos from my ten days on La Réunion! These are various odds and ends that didn't fit into the other sets.

I hid under this beach umbrella all day and still got sunburned! I was sitting facing the ocean all afternoon, with the sun to my right, and the sunlight reflected off of the sand and burned the side of my face. Two days later I was in Philadelphia with the right half of my face still red, with a wide white space where the earpiece of my sunglasses had been.

Cloudy day at the beach.

Sunny day at the beach! We went to the beach a lot.

I photographed these horrors of the (not-so) deep while standing at the water's edge. M said they were called "chenilles de mer" — sea caterpillars — but then I did a little research and found this site that tells it a little differently; it says these guys are "cordons moresques", and the chenilles de mer are something else we also saw, which I'm pretty sure are what we call sea cucumbers in English. Anyway, whatever these things are in this photo, they were creepy as heck; you'd expect something like that to move very slowly or not at all, and these guys were mostly lying still but would occasionally stretch out and open up their flower-shaped mouthful of tentacle-things. Ugh.

Rainbow! There's actually a secondary outer rainbow too, if you look closely. We pulled over to the side of the road and I got out of the car to take this pic and the next.

The other half of the same rainbow!

P's awesome barbecue. I mostly took this picture for , because he is a man who cares deeply about barbecuing, and we talked about him a bit whilst barbecuing.

Scuba diving, while a huge highlight of my trip, is criminally underrepresented in my photos, mostly because I don't have a waterproof camera. I really wish I could've shared with you the amazing stuff I saw down there on the reef. (I have a partial solution to this problem coming up shortly.) This was taken from the boat on the way to where we went diving.

M is going to kill me for posting a photo of her without makeup, but at least I'm not including the pictures of us in our wetsuits. This is right before we geared up and jumped in.

Haha, this picture isn't great, but now you know what I look like when my hair is wet. Those are the scuba tanks on the rope; instead of putting the tanks on in the boat and doing the falling-backward-over-the-side thing, we were fitted with the tanks by the crew members while in the water. Which is great because I was nervous about a few things, the falling-backward thing being one of them. I've spent very little of my life in the water (unlike M, who grew up on a tropical island) and I was pretty stressed out during the whole scuba experience, really up until about ten minutes into being under the water. The experience of jumping into choppy waters and floating on big waves kind of stressed me out, and the initial moments of going underwater were a little scary too; my brain knew the tank and mask would let me breathe and see, but my body was like, "Dude, you can NOT be alive under water! You know this!" I had such an adrenaline rush that I basically wasn't seeing or experiencing anything during the first five to ten minutes of the dive; I just held onto the instructor's arm (as we were told to do) and let him guide me around the reef. I vaguely remember him pointing out things, but I couldn't even summon the concentration to look at what he was showing me; I was completely overwhelmed by the noise of the tank and the pressure in my ears and the water seeping into my mask and the general strangeness and wetness and et cetera. Fortunately, after those few minutes I was able to totally calm down and focus and be blown away by how beautiful everything was. I quickly became comfortable enough to let go of the guy's arm and follow him around the reef, looking at stuff with him and P, whom, I should mention, was in the French navy and worked on a submarine for fifteen years, so he was completely at home down there. I'm really proud of myself for overcoming how freaked out I was about the dive, both before and during.

This is not from my dive! This is from the aquarium! The day after scuba diving, P and I went to the aquarium to enjoy the fish and air conditioning while M and D laid around on the beach all day. I noticed that the lighting and colors and even the types of fish we were seeing looked exactly like the scenes I saw during my dive, so I decided to take a few pictures to share with the folks back home. So, this is what my dive looked like, but this is not my dive.

While I was scuba diving the day before, my instructor pointed out a giant clam just like the one in this picture, about a foot across from end to end of its smile. I thought he'd put his finger out just to point at the thing, but then he tapped it on the edge of its shell and it slammed shut! That was amazing! I mean, it shouldn't be amazing; I know they do that, but it was somehow kind of incredible to see that with my own eyeballs.

P and I passed by this beach where the surfers hang out while we were wandering around the area of the aquarium.

P and I had lunch at this little cafe by the marina.

I like to think my touristy tropical gear made me look like a young, hip version of what Hannibal Lecter looked like in that last scene in Silence of the Lambs.

I ordered a hamburger, which turned out to acually be two smooshed hamburger patties shoved into a baguette. P ordered a hot dog, which got similar treatment, and he insisted I take a picture. And there's the ubiquitous dodo again.

Did you honestly think I'd go ten whole days without wearing anything black? Also, those are one of my two pairs of linen pants I bought for the trip, which worked out splendidly. That's Chine the dog (her name means China), and P is probably on an important conference call; that's how he rolls.

Chine is sad because M and I are no longer on La Réunion! I'm pretty sad about it too, but we'll be back soon and often, I hope. It really was the best and most action-packed vacation of my ridiculous life so far. I can't thank M and her parents enough for letting me tag along with them. Nartrouve! That's Creole for see ya later.

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