Bahamas Picspam
It's snowing up a storm in sunny Maryland, so now is the perfect time to post my much-delayed study abroad picspam. Two weeks ago today (wow, time moves fast in the frozen part of the world) I got back from two weeks on San Salvador and Andros in the Bahamas. Graphics-intensive, jealousy-inducing pics after the cut.
The obligatory shot out the window of the plane. Even from forty thousand feet, the water is ridiculously blue.
Sunset at the field station on San Sal. It's not exactly the Marriot, but with views like that it'll do.
My classmates doing what they do best ;)
But . . . they're okay at this too. Hiking around an inland lake on San Salvador.
Our chariot awaits. A lucky minority of students got to ride in the broken-down van. The rest discovered just how hard the benches on that flatbed truck are when you hit a pothole at 55 mph.
Okay, this was pretty awesome. It's a natural shore formation known as a blow hole. Why a 'blow hole' you ask?
That's why.
A mangrove lake on San Salvador.
One of the most sobering things we saw: the ruins of a cotton plantation on San Salvador. The Bahamians experienced emancipation in the 1830's, decades before the American Civil War. Though the islands still have a thriving population of African descent, it was too late for the original Bahamians; native tribes like the Lucayans of San Sal had died out centuries before.
The ruins of the plantation kitchen.
Another day, and why does my advisor look so happy? Because he's about to send us all down a deep, dark hole, of course!
To meet his little friends. Actually, these guys were pretty cute. Still, did not enjoy crawing through their guano to get to them.
Andros had puppies!!!!! Lots of puppies, actually; doggie birth control isn't going well. Wish I had better pictures of these guys, but five week old puppies refuse to pose for pictures. This one was trying to chew my shorts off, actually.
A truly awesome flower on Andros.
More where that came from.
That's Otis. He's a sponge farmer in Red Bays, a subsistence community on Andros. He knows everything you could ever want to know about harvesting sponges and hunting wild boar. In his free time, he works on those paintings in the foreground. He's just all-around awesome.
Red Bays takes "free-range poultry" seriously;)
A field on Andros where the docs had us spend *hours* looking for lizards.
Found some, too.
Along with the cutest little python you'll ever meet. The girl holding the snake, btw, was voted "most likely to win in a fight with a wooly mammoth."
Here she is at Sunset Blue Hole, a fresh-water swimming hole about as long across as a football field. Pay no attention to the skinny-dipping in the distance.
A cave frequented by pirate captain Henry Morgan (like the rum).
Snorkelling in an inlet on San Sal. We did quite a bit of this, but I don't have many pictures, as salt water doesn't tend to agree with my camera.
A picture of a Diadema (giant sea urchin) taken with an underwater camera. This thing was easily two feet from spine-tip to spine-tip.
A Cushings Sea Star, at least a foot across.
In which I can't get over the water . . .
. . . It's so *blue.*