Sunrise over Mauritius

Hello world!  And what a gorgeous day it is on the island of Mauritius!  It seems that we have lucked out on the internet front for the time being and so we’ll take a brief moment to update our travels.  That said, we’re not really sure how the following is divided into days, as with time zone adjustments, breakfasts at dinner time (and vice versa), long flights and layovers, it’s all sort of melted in to one (very long) day that started at about 3:30 p.m. on Sunday in Guelph.

Our flight to Paris was delayed about two hours due to increased ash compliments of the Iceland volcano.  And we took an extra two in the air as well due to an altered flight path, so our layover in Paris was only four hours (down from the original eight).  We therefore stayed in Charles de Gaulle and enjoyed some gourmet macarons (vanille, pistache, praliné, caramel au beurre salé and cédrat) from a Ladurée stand in the airport.  Sam found them quite tasty (but really sweet) and they brought back some great memories for Renne from her time spent in France last summer.  A very gourmet way to spend our few hours in France!

The trip to Mauritius took about 11 hours, although we each managed to get some rest and also enjoy some of the movies and surprisingly good food.  We arrived at about 6:00 a.m., which was perfect timing for the sunrise!  It was really beautiful to watch as we waited to get our boarding passes for our flight to Antananarivo.  Since passing through security, we’ve enjoyed breakfast/lunch/ dinner (depending on which time zone we’re currently referring) of chicken baguette and fruit.  We’ve made friends with a pair of sparrows which joined us for our meal and managed to sort through an already large amount of mail in both our inboxes.  Our flight doesn’t leave for another few hours though, although Renne hasn’t minded catching up on all the latest happenings with the Canucks either.

Anyway, we’re off to explore the layover lounge here and try and get some walking in before another couple hours cramped on a plane!  So far we’ve been in transit for about 30 hours so we’re looking forward to reaching our destination in another few.

All the best from the land of the dodo,

S & L

Good-bye Guelph, salama sunshine!

Yes, today is the day!  We are off on our three month trip to the wilds of Madagascar!  And so far all we know in Malagasy is “salama”, or “hi”!  (It also can be used for “good morning/ day/ afternoon”, “hello”, and “greetings!”).  We have much to learn.  But at least the fish practice paid off!  We’re both pretty confident with most of the species and will no doubt improve significantly once we’re actually in the water!

As many of you know, contact with the outside world will be quite limited, but we will do our very best to keep in touch with everyone back home! This blog may or may not get anything posted on it while we’re away, it’s pretty tough to judge right now.

Thanks to all our friends and family for your help and kind thoughts over the last few months!  We’ve really appreciated all your support and we’re looking forward to sharing our adventure with you once we’re back!

Have a great summer everyone,

S & L

T-56 hours

Alright so it’s been a while since we put anything on here, but don’t worry we haven’t died.  Nor have we left for our trip yet.  We were just super busy studying for exams, and then we were visiting Sam’s family in Saskatchewan, and then we were packing and organizing!  But we thought a little catch-up for everyone who’s been following our blog would be nice.

We’re pretty much all packed, with the exception of our wetsuits and electronics.  Amazingly, Renne seems to have managed to fit everything into two bags, although this comes only after reducing her reading list from 19 books to three.  We also managed to fit in our underwater camera case (which arrived a couple weeks ago) amongst some of Sam’s carry-on goods.

We’ve been doing our best to fatten up and eat lots of good food that we won’t be able to enjoy for the next three and a half months.  Our current outlook is that if we gain five pounds ahead of time, it’ll probably be worth it given the diet of rice and beans that we’ll be living off for the summer.  We will be taking multi-vitamins whilst in Madagascar.

Fish practice is going alright, although it has become harder now that we are using multiple pictures of the same species.  This new approach has shown us angles and features which were less obvious in the past, as well as more variation between individuals.  That said, this method is probably very beneficial as it’s not likely that the fish will look exactly the same in the water as they do on our computer screens.  And it really makes us focus on identifying features.  If you’re interested in seeing what we’re practicing with, or testing your tropical fish identification skills, check out our fish tests!

So there you go!  That pretty much sums up what’s been happening with us.  There will probably be a couple more posts before we leave, but we have no idea if we’ll be able to share anything once we’re actually there.  Sad, but there internet is pretty much zip.  We will do our best, even if we have to get someone back home to post it for us!

Oh yeah, and WE’RE REALLY, REALLY EXCITED!!!

Revenge of the Bananas

This morning I decided that I would make use of the five ripe bananas that had taken up residence on top of our fridge earlier this week.  Just when they probably felt like they were settling in and getting comfortable with their new home, I squashed the daylight out of their poor little brown-speckled, half-moon souls.  Well, three of them anyway.  The other two have disappeared into hiding.

The sacrificed fruits found their way into a really nice sounding peanut butter banana bread recipe which I (surprisingly) followed to a T.  Well, except I used crunchy peanut butter because that’s what we had.  But I didn’t think that would make a big difference.  Unfortunately however, about 1/3 of the way into the baking process, Sam and I looked up from doing the dishes only to see clouds of smoke billowing out of our oven.  Amazingly, I was not immediately alarmed by this sight.  Rather, I was confused.  And I was even more confused when he opened the oven door to find large chunks of my majestic banana loaf on the oven floor smoldering.  My beautiful culinary creation was rising like the Bay of Fundy and overflowing the baking tin!  The bits that had fallen off had caught fire and were the cause of the smoke scare.  Luckily, Sam quickly grabbed the oven mitts and saved the fallen pieces from certain death.  The nice consolation was that the parts that weren’t black tasted quite nice.  We then decided to place a baking sheet under the tin to catch any more would-be escapees. This plan was successful (as demonstrated in the picture below!).

Eventually the bread was done, although (much to my dismay) pretty burnt on the top, sides and bottom.  That said, it tasted absolutely fantastic on the inside and I’ll be trying it again in the future!  In case anyone reading this wants to try it, I would adamantly recommend the following:

1) Instead of cooking at 350 °F, cook at 325, and place on lowest rack height possible.

2) Use a bigger loaf tin or reduce recipe by 1/4.

That’s about all I’ve got on this one because like I say, aside from the rather troublesome and crispy exterior, the inside was perfectly moist and flavourful.  And I wouldn’t normally post a recipe with such terrible cooking malfunctions, but I feel like it was a personal error, not a recipe error.

Anyway, just thought I’d share my cooking experience from today.  Hopefully the last two bananas have found their fairytale ending in a display fruit basket somewhere!

L.

In case you missed it

Well, this will probably be short, but we thought we’d make a slightly anti-climactic post about our payment to Blue Ventures for our trip! For those of you who haven’t seen our facebook statuses over the last week, this is to say that we have officially paid off our accommodation and program fees, to the tune of £4142.01 each (that’s about $13 000 CDN for the two of us).  But that includes pretty much everything we’re gonna need while on site (including dive gear, food, beds, experience of a lifetime, &c.) for our 3+ months.

And we’re so unbelievably excited!  The only downside of this is that we have two weeks of exams to get through first.  What a downer.  But knowing that we have this amazing adventure ahead of us will probably fill the “light at the end of the tunnel” role quite nicely.

Oh!  And we bit the bullet and bought an Ikelite underwater camera case for Renne’s Canon.  Since we picked up a little extra (relative term) money from PDAing to some groups at our university, we thought it would be a good investment.  So if we don’t come home with thousands of coral reef and fish pictures, we should be sent back!

So that’s pretty much where we’re at on this sunny Saturday morning!  Not sure what the day has in store (well, most of it will be spent studying) but hopefully we’re able to enjoy the nice weather at some point too.

Good Friday gnocchi

Yesterday was such a gorgeous day here in Guelph (23° C) that would spent the whole afternoon outside, walking along the Speed River.  We definitely weren’t the only ones out, and it was nice to see people enjoying the day and getting exercise with their friends and family.  About halfway into the walk we decided to try and find at least one representative from each of the main vertebrate classes. Here’s what we came up with:

Reptiles: 1 very tiny (~10 cm) garter snake

Amphibians: none

Birds: 2 crows, several Canadian geese, 2 cardinals, a few sparrows, a pair of mallard ducks

Mammals: 1 very adorable chipmunk, 3 squirrels, several humans, a dozen dogs of various breeds

Bony fish: none

So it was an alright day on the animal front, but hopefully there will be more next time we’re out!

We got back around 4:30 and decided to try and new dinner idea: homemade gnocchi!  We had been wanting to make this for a while, but we finally felt like we had the time to do it.  (Friday was a no homework/ school allowed day).  A discount recipe book that we picked up at Chapters earlier this semester provided the guidance for this two-toned dinner, but (naturally) we made amendments along the way!  Unfortunately we didn’t know the weight of our spuds, so instead of halving the recipe like we had wanted, we ended up making enough gnocchi to serve about five people.  (The leftovers were super!)

Here’s what we used:

2 medium sized baking potatoes

1 medium sized sweet potato

1 3/4 cups flour

a pinch of salt

a pot of water

Here’s how we did it:

1) Peel and chop the potatoes and sweet potato and bring both types to a boil in separate pots.

2) Mash them both separately as well.

3) Start boiling the pot of water (doesn’t matter how much, but about 2 cups is probably good) on the stove.

4) Once the potatoes are mashed, gradually add about a cup of flour and stir it in until you have a dough.

5) Add the pinch of salt and remaining flour to the sweet potatoes and stir to create a dough as well.

*The flour measurements are just a guideline referring to about how much we used.  Depending on how “medium” your potatoes are, you may need more or less!  Make sure both are doughy though and not sticky as that could make things difficult for the next steps.

6) When you have two doughs, gently fold them together to create one single blended dough.

7) Divide this dough into pieces (we did four, but six would probably be easier) and roll each piece into a log of about 2 1/2 cm thick.

8 ) Cut off 2 cm sections of the log and round them with your hands.

9) For aesthetics, imprint each piece with the grooves of a fork.

10) Drop about a dozen gnocchi at a time into the boiling pot of water and let them cook for around 2 minutes.  They are done when they pop to the surface and remain floating.

(Since it’s hard to keep the done ones warm while the undone ones are being boiled, we just tossed the done ones on a plate and put them in the oven {on low} to keep them hot.)

11) Enjoy with your favourite pasta sauce and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese!

A sweet potato, chickpea, peanut sauce concoction

For whatever reason, inspiration for dinner the other night was nowhere to be found.  Our walk home from school churned up some interesting homemade suggestions: quesadillas, calzones, stew and biscuits, &c.  Ultimately we decided on sweet potato/ tomato chickpea curry until we realized (much later) we had had curry for lunch and neither of us actually wanted to have it again in such close proximity.  So with the onions, chickpeas and sweet potatoes all happily sizzling away in the pan, it was back to the drawing board.  Luckily for us, a few easy alterations resulted in a pretty tasty meal!  Instead of going with Indian, we took a more Thai approach and ended up with a sweet potato and chickpea blend in spicy peanut sauce (which we served over basmati rice).

I’d highly recommend this dish as it’s super easy to make.  We’ll be trying it again sometime no doubt and perhaps throwing in another ingredient or two to make it a little more flavourful.  This recipe serves two generously with a bit of leftovers.

When indecision is not an option:

1 medium sweet potato, chopped into 1″ cubes

1 small white onion, diced

1 1/4 cups canned chickpeas

2 large handfuls fresh spinach

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1-2 drops hot sauce (we used some tongue-flaming, orangeish one called “Nupak’s Barbados Hot Sauce”)

3 tablespoons peanut butter (we used crunchy, but smooth is probably just as good)

water, added as necessary

2 cups cooked rice (we used basmati because we were thinking curry when we started, but once again, any rice should taste good with this topping)

So simple, so good!:

1) Peel, then chop the sweet potato into 1/2 ” cubes.  Cook it in whichever manner you want (ie. boil, bake, micro, &c) until the pieces are forkable¹ but not mushy.

2) While the sweet potato is cooking (about 20 minutes in), slice up the onion and sauté until tender (we added a little water to the pan to prevent sticking).

3) Drain and rinse the chickpeas (if from a can) and add them to the pan.

4) Add the cooked sweet potato pieces to the pan as well, followed by the spinach.

5) While the spinach is wilting, add the soy sauce.  Begin adding the peanut butter by seperate tablespoons.  Stir in each tablespoon until well mixed, then add another.  Depending on consistency of the mixture, add teaspoons of water to ensure that it still has sauce-like properties.

6) Once all the peanut butter has been added and you are happy with its consistency, stir in the hot sauce.

7) Serve immediately over the rice and bon apetit!

________

¹forkable (adj.)- capable of being penetrated by a fork without resistance or falling apart; soft

Haha also, in case you’re curious, the reason we have a green Quran on our home (in the background of the food) is because they were giving away free books and DVDs in the University Centre the other day and Sam decided to humour them with an interest in Islam.  And now it’s apparently found its way to our table, and into our blog.  Oh boy…

Something about passports and visas and some embassy in Ottawa, and oh yeah…WE’RE GOING TO MADAGASCAR!

We’re not gonna lie, we were pretty damn excited to get our passports back from the Madagascar Embassy in Ottawa yesterday and we ended up enjoying some celebratory snackies while watching a show on marine conservation and before we knew it, it was after midnight!  Thus this post got delayed by about 12 hours.  But here it is now!

Given that we just sent out passports and visa applications off on Monday and got them back signed and approved yesterday, we are pretty impressed by the service of the Madagascar Embassy.  We were expecting it to take longer given some horror stories of traveller’s past (although not Madagascar travellers) and sending one’s passport away can be slightly stressful, so we’re really glad they were so efficient!  And now that we’ve been approved by the Embassy, we’re completely legally welcome to travel throughout Madagascar for three months this summer!  And we also received permission to renew our three month visa and be awarded an extended visa for the extra 10 days or so that we’ll be in the country before coming back in August.  We have to do that in Antananarivo once we arrive though.

So now we just need to send off the money, pick up a few more travel accessories and start getting even more excited because we’re thinking this is gonna be one amazing trip of a lifetime!  Oh, and we still need to learn a large proportion of our fish species.  We’ve been slacking on that lately with all our actual schoolwork.  But once we hit exam time and the weeks after before we leave, it’s likely we’ll pick up the ball on those!

And, as of today, only 45 days until we leave.  Wow, that’s hard to believe!  So on that note, time to get ready for school.  At least it’s Friday and at least we have our visas now.  It’s been a killer week for both of us!

Malaria pills and the world’s tastiest bean dalsa

Well school has been giving us a good run for our money (well, sanity) these last couple weeks but we figured that a brief update and recipe today would be good for the soul (a.k.a procrastination).

We mailed our passports and visa applications off to the Madagascar Embassy in Ottawa yesterday so the last big step before we’re completely ready to go has been completed!  (Aside from actually paying Blue Ventures, but that’s ready to do once we get cleared by the Embassy!)

We also picked up our malaria meds and lovely traveller’s diarrhea tablets for when we’re in the middle of nowhere.  To combat the virus-carrying mosquitoes, we’re each going to be taking different stuff.  Sam will be using Doxycycline ($120 for the 3 months) and Laurenne will be on Malerone (a scary $560 for the trip).   We’ll give updates on how we found these respective products when we’re back!

So that’s where we’re at with all our travel happenings!  We also have a little presentation tomorrow afternoon to a Guelph volunteer club which may give us a couple bucks for our trip!  Fingers= crossed.

And now for the food.  We’ve made this dalsa (= dip + salsa) twice now and it’s been a pretty big hit both times.  It was originally served to us at a house party a couple months ago and we figured we had to add it to our recipe bank!  This recipe makes enough to serve a pretty big group (10+) as an appy with tortilla chips.  There is a little chopping involved so it takes about 20 minutes to make, but it’s super simple and well worth it in the end!  Also, if you’re going to make it for a party or something, it helps to make it in the morning and let the flavours mingle throughout the day.  And leftovers (if there are any) will last for a few days after too, which makes it nice to add as a side to a normal meal.

Anyway, enough hype, here’s the recipe:

The stuff:

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup virgin olive oil

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar

1 tablespoon water

1 large can lentils

1 large can black beans

1 small can niblets corn

1 cup chopped celary

1 cup chopped red pepper

1 cup chopped green onion

1 small jar pimento (not entirely necessary)

How to mix ‘er up:

1) In a large bowl, dissolve the sugar in the water, apple cider vinegar and olive oil.

2) Drain and rinse the black beans and lentils and add them to the bowl.

3) Add the chopped veggies and pimento to the mixture and stir it all together!

4) No, that’s it.  We said it was simple!

It’s (not) criminal

Hooray, we finally have our background checks back from the Guelph Police!  So now all we have to do is send off our passports with another bunch of forms to the Madagascar embassy to get our visas approved.  This is pretty much the last step before we’re entirely cleared to go on our adventure.  And we’re pretty darn excited!  It only took a week longer than they told us it would (which isn’t bad) and we’re relieved that they didn’t come across anything that would hook us up on this end.  Not that either of us even have a speeding ticket to our name, but still…

YYYAAAAAYYYYY!!!!!!!