Exploring the Beach outside Rebec's house!

Since Su and W's post both mentioned how I insisted on getting everyone out trooping to the beach to look for STAR FISH! Here's the post on sea side exploration just outside Rebec's house.

This was one of my favourite moments in the trip! How cool is it to have a beach full of cool corals, sand crabs, sea urchins, sea cucumbers and STARFISH just outside your house!!
Ok.. So here goes.

23rd September
During breakfast at around 9.50 am, Rebec commented that it was low tide and asked if I'd like to go out and explore. I jumped at the chance. If we missed the low tide, we'd have to wait 12 hours later and wouldn't be able to see anything at night. QH, TY and I put on the booties and went out.
I was eager to go as far out to the sea as possible before the tide went up started moving ahead of TY and QH. When I looked back, the 2 were deeply engrossed in poking something among the sand and were not moving at all. They looked like two little children!

(Clockwise from top left: QH,TY poking around in the sand; Worm shit; black sea urchin, red sea urchin; some flower coral?; sandcrab)

I amused myself, taking some pictures of the crabs, sea urchins, sea weed etc, but my camera battery died on me! And it wasn't fun along with no camera, so I decided to join the two adventurers. However, we did not find any starfish and the tide was coming in. We did not want to get stuck on an island off shore, so we quickly returned to the house! We HAD to go out again!

25th September

This was the last day of our Tanzania adventures and I felt like there was still something we had to do! We had to find a starfish! Even though we slept at 4 am the night before, I set the alarm for 8.30 am and forced myself out of the bed. The plan was to prepare everything, so that Mama Rebec would let me out of the house to explore the seashore before we had to leave for the airport at 10.45 am! However, due to my dismay, the low tide of 25th was much later at 11.15 am and I was afraid that we wouldn't be able to explore! I sat patiently at the breakfast table and checked the tide at short intervals.

Slowly, others started waking up and having their breakfast and somehow everyone was interested in visiting the seaside one last time and Rebec had Nick join us. "He's very good at finding starfishes", R said, before Nick and I stepped out of the house before the others. So I was very hopeful of finding a starfish! When Nick said that he may or may not find a starfish, I misheard it as "Is that a Starfish?" and I was like "Where???"

The summary is that the short 30 minutes outside on the beach was very eventful, because Nick found us a superb STARFISH which was big, fancy, colourful and PERFECTO!

Yey! Thank you R for sending your trusty husband out to find the Starfish! Sigh! I think we gave R a certain amount of stress with our demands throughout the trip. "We have to see a LION!" " I want to see a STARFISH!" "I have never been in a Cloud!" Check Check Check!!!

(Clockwise from top left: STARFISH from the back; small starfish; STARFISH from the front; 6 of us as seashore explorers; Nick, the STARFISH discoverer, Thank you!; 6 of us posing with STARFISH and sea cucumber)