louiseinlimbo

Just completing three weeks of 'down time' in this up-and-down life I lead!  That is, time to edit and back-up the photos from my last trip, to catch up with emails, as well as some serious admin related to the next few months.  So now I have my visas for Nigeria and for Equatorial Guinea (with accommodation and airport transfers) and a one-year multi-entry visa for India.  All of these things take quite a lot of work - filling in forms, uploading photos and screenshots of flights and accommodation bookings, visiting cyber cafes to print copies of visas and flight tickets (needed for Nigeria) ... but that also helps me to 'balance the budget', spending very little following my expensive trip around the Indian Ocean.  My bed in the hostel dorm here in Nairobi is not as cheap as in some countries (around US$10 a night), but that does include a  fairly good breakfast, and of course there are no other bills to pay as there would be if I were at home living a regular...

  Without understanding how much money would be added on for inter-island flights (and for a single supplement as no-one else wanted to share), I booked a slot onto a birdwatching tour of some of the Indian Ocean islands: the Seychelles (Mahe, Praslin, La Digue and Cousin), Mauritius and Rodriques, Reunion and Mayotte, and the Comoros.   As seems to have become the norm on birding trips these days, the other tour participants were not only older than me, but also hard-core birders, holding endless conversations about different bird guides, bird books and their authors, and getting very concerned as to whether or not we might see various endemic sub-species of bird species we’d already seen on a different island. But I still enjoyed the trip, getting to see the beautiful scenery of the islands and the wildlife – giant tortoises, blue-tailed geckos, enormous palm spiders, and flying foxes (bats) as well as the birds – and learning snippets of information about the history and cu...