Tropical beaches are amazing.

Someone needs to install one in mid Missouri.

I got up early to take some pictures of the sun rising over the Indian Ocean. It was cloudy so I did not get the pictures I wanted, but it was still quite beautiful.

For four days I spent most of my waking hours in the water. Swimming, kayaking, sailing, windsurfing...

Windsurfing is somewhat difficult to get the hang of; I was just getting it figured out by the day we left.

Aram and I went out to the reef were the waves were breaking and surfed in the kayak. If we could catch the wave just right we would fly, skimming along just in front of the wave.

If we caught it just wrong it would flip the kayak and we would be tossed into the water, trying not to crack our heads on the coral or step on a sea urchin.

I don't think Priska and Shadrach have ever been so happy, they would play in the waves and sand for hours and still cry when it was time to go in for lunch.

At first Shadrach called the white sand "snow". He dug a big hole and then stood at the edge and called down into it, "Are you okay Mike Mulligan?"

(If you have never read Mike Mulligan by Virginia Lee Burton, you need to)

There were little crabs everywhere; on the beach they are sand colored....

And not very noticeable..

But on the coral all of the crabs are, well, coral colored...

At night the crabs come out of their holes in hordes, thousands of the little buggers, and scuttle about at the edge of the waves...

And in the kitchen.

I walked out onto a point and took some pictures. I was barefoot (of course) and I discovered coral is extremely sharp.

There are holes through the coral that open into caves that the waves have cut into the coral cliffs. This picture is too small to see it, but the smudges in the sand are footprints.

The view.