Pic St. Louis and Berenty

School has absolutely been my focus and has been a great pleasure, but as the weather is getting cooler and more pleasant we've done a couple excursions.

Alison and I hiked up Pic St. Louis. Well, Alison did, I almost did. The very top was too steep and smooth and I do not like heights, but I made it most of the way.

My highest point was still pretty high.

We had a school break the first week of May and we took the kids to Berenty, which is a private nature reserve. It's a magical place, and we had a wonderful time. The road has just been improved so it's just under a two hour drive, but it's an entirely different ecosystem. Ft. Dauphin is in a tropical rain forest and Berenty is in a spiny forest.

This is a sisal plantation on the way down. We saw lemurs as soon as we arrived.

We got settled, had our picnic lunch, and got to take our first lemur walk that afternoon. Berenty has six species of lemurs. During the afternoon we saw ring tails, sifakas, collared browns and red-fronted browns. There is also a subspecies of mixed collared and red-fronted browns. The two brown species were imported from different other parts of Madagascar as rescues and mated.

Sean found a plant he recognized from the endemic garden they planted at school.

And we got to see a sifaka jump across the road.

Before dinner, we got to take a night walk to see the tiny gray mouse lemurs and white footed sportive lemurs. It's dark by 6:00 pm now because it's fall and we're fairly far south.

We also saw a huge spider.

The next morning we woke up to lemurs on our porch.

After breakfast we got to take another walk down to the Madrare river.

Berenty has huge, old, beautiful trees.

The river is pretty low, but people still can get water and do laundry there.

When we got back, we had guests supervising our packing.

It was a wonderful trip and one we will never forget. We had wanted to go in December when J and his sister were here, but they were closed for renovations. I realized, though, that it would have been really hot; it was hot enough in May. I'm hoping we can all come back another year in September or October to see babies, check on the school, and bring Jay with us. I'm not done with Madagascar.