Seychelles

After a “much-needed” beach break in the Seychelles, we head towards Japan. It will be close to a 48-hour transit, which we’ve half-completed as I write this post. Passing through the Middle East has already been a bit of a shock as we move from forests, plains, and wildlife back to the steel and glass that we’re surrounded by at home.

While the last three weeks in Africa have felt particularly transformative, I wondered whether that feeling is just an obvious and totally expected product of us spending time in a particularly foreign landscape and culture (“our trip to Africa was life-changing,” said two cartoon New Yorkers); and whether we’ll get as different a perspective on things during our five weeks in Japan, which feels, at least sitting here in the Doha airport, much more like home than Africa did. I guess we’ll find out soon enough!

An emerging metropolis

The view from our hotel balcony during a quick overnight stopover in Addis Ababa on the way to the Seychelles. Maybe it was the haze in the distance, or the elevated highway stretching out from the city, but something about the scene felt like it could’ve just as easily been a picture of somewhere in China we might visit on a trip to see our grandparents; another reminder of how we all aren’t so different.

What did you do on your sabbatical?

We took our first ever helicopter ride in the late afternoon to Felicité Island, where we’d stay for the next four nights. Our pilot was a woman from Austria, who had taken a year-long sabbatical from her publishing job of her own to learn how to fly. How’s that for making use of a year?

Beach vacationing

This was Alice’s first beach vacation, and she was awfully excited about it. I don’t think she quite understands the concept though; she couldn’t believe that the other guests just lounged around all day, and must have been the only person on the island to have stand-up paddleboarded, kayaked, snorkeled, and inquired about waterskiing over the course of our stay.

Making it

We visited a turtle conservation center in the Cayman Islands with James and Jesse a few years ago. There, we learned about how only about one in a thousand baby sea turtles that are born make it to adulthood; James, being James, particularly loved this fact and in his usual way, kept talking about how we were the sea turtles that made it. In fact, five years later, as I predicted he said exactly that when I sent him this picture. And while we make fun of him for it, he’s not wrong; in many ways, and especially recently, I’ve felt even more lucky than a sea turtle, even more grateful for what’s to come.

Noticing

It’s pretty amazing how many things you can notice when your day isn’t filled with work. You notice the phases of the moon (how it was pitch black, blacker than anything we’ve ever experienced, when we woke up, jet-lagged, in the middle of the night in Samburu; and how it was bright enough to navigate under the full moon two weeks later here in the Seychelles), the soreness of your body after a day of swimming, stretching, and snorkeling, and the way the sunlight falls on the forests and granite rising above the ocean.

Sunset from the jetbridge

It’s not quite the Serengeti, but even from the jetbridge as we touched down in Doha, the sunset somehow seemed more vibrant, more meaningful than it did back home.