finally an update...

Well, I guess it’s about time for an update. Let’s see… last week, my brother and 2 of his kids and I went to the rain forest to check out the lemurs and other sights. We stayed at a motel that was a bit chilly, but the scenery was quite nice. They have beautiful poinsettia trees here. Well, we saw the lemurs – there are some that jump right on your shoulders and maybe even venture onto you head. That was fun. Also we went canoeing to another little island where we say some ring tailed lemurs – also very cool. After that we say crocodiles, a chameleon, and other assorted animals. The drive there (and naturally, back) was crazy – extremely windy with continuous hairpin turns. Great for motion sickness! We came back on Thursday and then on Friday all of us (brother, sister in law and 4 kids) left for Ampefy. They had never been there before so I was glad that they could have a new experience as well. It was a lot of fun. This was more a place where Malagasies would go for a vacation or to sight see. There’s a really nice waterfall to see and we walked out to it with a whole bunch of people from the area – probably school groups. So we saw the waterfalls, some small geysers, and drove up to this really nice look out and view of a lake. Oh, when we were walking out to see the geysers, we had to cross this bridge that seemed very high (not sure how high it actually was) over the croc infested water – a narrow bridge with nothing on the sides except those post things every so far. On the way back across, it seemed to move more and I was carrying a 3 year old. When we got across, some of us were shaking quite a bit… a good experience now that it’s over. The room I was staying in had a little flood problem which added an interesting element to the trip. All in all, it was a lot of fun. Well, what else… I was going to go with Matthew to the coast this week, but that trip got cancelled. So we’re hanging out here and having a relaxing time.