Last Full Day in Africa

On Thursday morning, Monica and I left early to go snorkling at one of
the neighboring atolls. After much discussion with hotel management
and staff and some hand-wringing, we decided to leave the kids on
their own at the hotel for the morning.

Our boat departed from Blue Bay. We were accompanied by a dozen or so
other tourists (most of them European), several dive and snorkel
guides, and three boat crew. As it turns out, most on the boat would
be diving.

The water was choppy and there was some rain during the day, but it
was warm and we had a nice time nonetheless. We saw lots of fish, very
interesting varieties of starfish, eels, and even two different pods
of dolphins. I also became well acquainted with a small variety of
almost-invisible stinging jellyfish.

We returned back to the hotel around 1:30 to find, of course, that all
was well with the kids. They had spent the day swiming, at the beach,
and eating two meals at the restaurant. As it turns out, there was
very little supervision from the hotel staff. If you would have told
me before this trip that we would leave the kids on their own I would
have doubted it. But that was before we understood what friendly
people Tanzanians are and before we knew how comfortable we would
become in this country.

There was some excitement in the afternoon when Ben discovered a "big
spider" in the first floor toilet room. Grant went to look and when I
grabbed a flip-flop from the back steps, he said "you're gonna need
more than that." Indeed, he was right. When I sprayed bug killer
behind the toilet it came out looking for a fight. It had the body of
a spider and I'm pretty sure it had 8 legs, although the second-back
set were much longer than the rest, spanning 8 or 10 inches. In
addition to the aforementioned legs, this guy had two long arms with
tiny pichers on the end which he was waving around and snapping. A
spider? Some sort of scorpion? We took pictures with the intent of
researching the matter further when we get home. Although now that I
think about it, maybe we're better off forgetting the whole incident.

After another family walk on the beach, Ben suggested that we go to
the roof of our castle for our last African sundowner. We ordered
some French fries from the kitchen and enjoyed the view and a drink
together, recapping our favorite parts of the trip (and intermittently
listening to Eminem on Grant's iPod). A nice way to spend our last
night in Africa.