Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everybody!!!!!!!!!!!! I hope you had a really good time with friends and family. I had a great Christmas. Christmas is one thing that I REALLY miss about America. The spirit of it is really lacking here in Africa, compared to the US. But its still a great time of year.

For our vacation we went to the coast of Tanzania. It was really fun. We went to a place called Peponi, which is in between Tanga and Pangani. Peponi isn't quite as nice as some other places we like to stay on the coast, but it was fun. There were no waves, but the water was very shallow which made it unusualy warm. So even though we couldn't play in the waves the water was fun to lay in, it felt like soaking in a giant bath tub. We spent a lot of our time on a dhow going to a reef for snorkeling and also doing some fishing, although we didn't catch anything (maybe the fact that there was a cyclone warning that day, affected our chances of being successful). Also on the dhow, we got to go out to a sand island. It was amazing; just a spit of sand in the middle of ocean, with nothing on it at all, besides some crabs and birds. Zero vegetation.

The snorkeling was great (my favorite part of the trip). There wasn't quite as many numbers of fish as some other places we've gone, but I think it was one of the most varied amount of species that I have seen. I wish we had an underwater camera. The highlights were a zebra eel, tons of lion fish, and this one fish, I forget what its called, but it was about 3 Ft long, looked poisonous and scary, and it was laying flat on the ocean floor.

The dhow was so fun to be on, and the crew were really nice (and buff! haha! Their is this one guy named Ali, and he was insanely muscular!) Well it was really fun watching them sale the dhow. It was also fun climbing all over the dhow and hanging of the side and so forth. Since we spent 11 hours on the dhow, me and Skyler would feel that the room we were in was wobbling even up to a couple days after being back.

Another fun part of the trip was seeing some ruins of an ancient mosque. Now, I'm never really that interested in things like ruins. They're cool, just for the fact that they've been around for awhile, but I'm not very fascinated with them. The cool thing about these ruins was that they were from the 14 century and were made from coral, sand, and limestone (that was before cement). Skyler got some really cool photos of them.

So we had a good get-away before x-mas. Hope Everybody out there had a good time too!