Beach Bumming It

This last week in Mombasa was my first experience with the Indian Ocean and also my first experience with a shore that is protected by a coral reef. (the picture is of a piece of live coral that had washed up on the beach one morning)


It was stinking gorgeous. The tide would go out in the morning and leave all of these island things in the water that you could walk on to get out to the reef, so we would go out there and play with creatures in the tide pools -- there was little tiny, bright blue jellyfish one morning, a bunch of sea cucumbers another, and a billion little hairy star fish another. (There were also urchins and anemones -- don't touch those. They sting!)

We would go swimming in the afternoons, when the tide came in, and the water was SUPER salty -- like, sinus irrigation water kind of salty. There was tons of sea weed that would get worse and worse as it got later, and sometimes stinging things hid in it, which tended to cut things rather short. :P