There were two major sets of advice I took from Phil Carta, our travel agent: spending the seven nights in praslin and staying at a hotel with a pretty beach. Acajou hotel was well taken care of, was on one of the most beautiful beaches in the island and my favorite was the balconies in each room. We ended up visiting all the other hotels we'd considered staying in and decided we were really lucky to have chosen Acajou.

Since we were quite jetlagged, Jake and I woke up at 4am after having slept pretty much all of Tuesday. (Though we did take a swim in the pool after dinner on Tuesday since we'd just returned from spending the 500 rupees given to us.) We were told the sun came up quite early so we decided to walk on over to the beach and watch the sun come up. Our hotel lay in the middle of Anse Volbert, full of incredibly smooth sand and turquoise and emerald waters. On the way to the beach we worked hard not to step on the million of snails that had emerged from the previous night's rain. The beach chairs were full of tiny ants but no real creepy crawlies. The hotel's black and white cat followed us to the beach and hung out with us as we read, chitchatted, watched the ghost crabs run around the beach, digging up their little holes and waited for the sky to light up.

Our local agent, Herve, had handed us a sheet with all the tours for the week and informed us that Thursday was a local holiday so there would be no tours on that day. We signed up for the three-island visit on Friday and figured we'd see how that one went before we signed up for more.

We took the 3-rupee/person local bus to one of the two main attractions of the island: Vallee de Mai. the valley was full of huge Coco de Mer trees and skinks and dragon flies. We walked among the trees for several hours and saw a large group of Italians at the top of the hill.

Since we're already been up over 16 hours, we crashed right after dinner, praying our bag would actually show up the next morning.

Amazingly, it did.

Overjoyed that the bag showed up, I unpacked each one of our clothes and sang "our bag came" at the same time. Jake had given it a 60% chance that the bag would actually show.

Now that we were in a better mood and much cleaner clothes, we decided to checkout the most famous beach on the island: Anse Lazio. The trip to the beach was quite involved. We took the bus as far as it would go and then hiked for the next few miles up and downhill. I was huffing and puffing by the time we made it to the famous beach. But, of course, it was quite a sight and we ran right into the water. The untertow was quite strong but we couldn't take our eyes off the color of the water.

Thursday night came and the bed welcomed us quite early once more.

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