Paradise on the Indian Ocean

We love to travel and we do it a lot as you can probably tell.  Most of our trips tend to be more city type of vacations but we try to make a point every year of doing at least one relaxing beach vacation.  And this year our trip to Tanzania is hands down one of our top beach trips ever.  Paxos, Menorca and Croatia are all up there but I'm not sure if they can compete with Tanzania when it comes to the beach.

While we had a lot of adventures on this trip, we also had a lot of downtime that we spent at the beach and in the pool.  With temps around 90 degrees during the day, those were the best places to cool down since air conditioning is hard to come by!  And it doesn't hurt that it was like bathwater!  The pictures are in no particular order, though I did try to put the ones of specific events together... I can tell I'm close to finishing these entries since I'm just tired of going thru the pictures (as fabulous as they are!).

My "companions" every morning during sunrise...

Enjoying a dip in the Indian Ocean

Local boats

It's been a tough day of swimming

Main lodge at the Tides

Aidan's "thing" this vacation was writing in the sand

Using whatever "tools" we can find to play games... like a coconut for a football!

Go long!

touchdown!!

And tackle!

And we loved the pool just as much as the ocean

Taking a little rest with daddy

Camp Wekeela in the house!

Every day we would hang out in the main lodge and play card games while we waited for our lunch... not a bad place to hang out...

View from our bungalow

Liam and I took a morning to explore the beach... in our pajamas!!

We were racing the waves coming up on the beach

And collecting shells... one shell mysteriously disappeared from the rest - we think there must have been a hermit crab in it that we didn't see.  Too bad because it was our favorite shell!

Wiggling his butt at me

Coconut in the sand

Fighting crabs

Gecko on our bungalow - hopefully eating all the mosquitos

Josh and the kids went reef fishing one morning... they only caught one fish but had a great time.  And it was nice to have some boy time all together!

The boat

Probably my favorite picture of the trip...

Getting ready to take off!

It's a fish!

Done with their fishing trip...

While they went fishing, I took an hour long walk along an endless beach...

Not sure what this is?  A turtle shell??

These local women were collecting something in these reeds but I'm not sure what....

A guy we met at the Tides was working on the building of this house... it looks pretty spectacular to me!

So these look like pineapple but they aren't (pineapples grow much lower, not on trees like this) so open to hear what everyone thinks they might be...

Closer up view

Local fishermen

So this is our "hot" water tank... notice the fire behind it that they would light every morning and every evening to ensure we had hot water.

One morning there was a VERY low tide - notice the stranded boats!

And the sandbar

Fishermen

 I have no idea why he rolled his shorts up like this - looks like a kid from the 70s!

Playing games in the pool

So the morning we were leaving, Aidan looked up in the main lodge and said, "you know mom, I think there are bats up there"... and yup there were.  Good thing we didn't realize that sooner as we always sat right below this area....

And so I think this is a sign that it's time to go...

All good things must come to an end... it's time to go back home.  Only it's not going to be easy getting there!!

Besos,
Julie