Travelog for: Nami Geneveva

my travel plans:
a holiday in Seychelles
visiting Blurchen in Austria
seeing London with tea_rose


I have been sitting here at home for a while now and want to get out and see the world. I can't wait for my mentor to take me on holidays with her. We're going somewhere tropical so that I can finally see the ocean for the first time.
I want to learn about many different animals and if possible take steps to protect them and their natural habitats. I'll travel with a passport that weighs 103g.
My first 'rescue mission' isn't really one, but I still hope it'll do some good to send teddys to Threadbear. I wrapped them all up and hope they'll arrive soon.

A very nice tv is here to visit. His name is Sebastiaan. His mommy saw how well we get on together and now she wants little craphins! I read somewhere that that kind of behaviour is called 'granny lust'. Really, I just became a toyvoyager so I could be free and could travel the world. I want to see what it is all about and possibly improve it, before I consider reproducing.

Homburg isn't far from the border to France, so today we drove over the Northern slope of the Vosges and into France. (see the yellow-orange road on the map, we came from the north, a bit further than shown on the map but not much, then we passed through Zweibrücken and took the yellow road through Hornbach and yellow and then white to Volmunster)

The breed these white cows here for meat, but we only saw them from the car.

Our first stop was an old mill, the Moulin d'Eschviller.

We drove on to Bitche. It's a town in north-eastern France that's built around a citadel that's about 80m above the town.

When we walked toward the citadel we passed the city hall and were surprised to see real storchs nesting on top of it.


This is the view on Bitche from the citadel. A castle was built here in the 12th century by the dukes of Lorraine that passed to Eberhard I of Zweibrücken in 1297 as part of a marriage contract. When his line became extinct a few hundred years later it reverted to Lorraine and was captured by the French in the 17th century.

The citadel was first built in the 17th century by Vauban, but was rebuilt starting in 1740 by Cormontaigne.

It has a separate, deep well inside and a bombsafe ring of the local sandstone. That way it held against Bavarian troups for 230 days, until the end of the war in 1870. There are movies about that.
Two gates are devided by this draw-bridge. Can you see us?


These wheels pull up the bridge.

The citadel was held by a Prussian garrison until 1918 when it was returned to France. During WWII it was bombed by the allied troops and damaged so badly that it couldn't be used after 1945.

Now other species have found an ideal home here.




The citadel was part of the Ligne Maginot. The US Army broke through it around Bitche in March 1945.

I visited Zweibrücken and saw the Herzogschloss from the early 18th century. It's now the court house.

We went to eat some ice-cream in the pedestrian zone and then came upon the city hall.

The Landgestüt Rheinlandpfalz (state stud farm) is inside the town and nearly at it's center.

The name Zweibrücken (= two bridges) comes from the 12th century castle that had two moats and could only be accessed via two draw bridges.

Tonight we heard many sirens and screeching tires and saw blue, blinking lights outside the window. Hopefully nothing really bad happened there.

I am now in Essen and we're busy packing the suitcases and buying some small stuff we still need. I'll update again when we're back in Germany!

We first went to Düsseldorf airport and boarded the plane to Dubai. I had to do this part of the journey in the luggage but I got promised a window seat for the flights back.

In Dubai the others went shopping, while I was locked in with Josh and Aquila but the brought us postcards.

We finally arrived in Seychelles. The main island is Mahé, where we're to spend the first two weeks of our holidays. After a bit of trouble at immigrations were the people said we weren't living with an offcial host we got collected and drove the few minutes to our house:


It has a private beach:


I couldn't wait to go swimming.

We all explored the beach a bit today.


The tide is about about half way between high and low.
When it's high it come all the way up to the rocks we're sitting on, when it's low the other rocks aren't surrounded by water anymore.


There's this little inlet of water.




With Sebastiaan and Lucky Duck I took a walk along the beach.




The obligatory picture-perfect palm tree:



Here it got too deep for us to go on. These little walls are there so the sand isn't all swept away by the water.



Normal coconuts swim in the water and were spred over the world that way. The endemic coco d'mer doesn't usually swim, so only very rarely were they found on the beaches of India or Maledives and the kings or emperors  had laws in place that those had to be brought to them or payed very well for such finds.



The water was very clear with little seagrass.

We hung out a bit at the beach and I inspected some little crabs, a dead seastar and corals that we found.

part of our dinner: banana, fruit salad with peach/lime dressing, mango chutney

I saw a very strange animal today. What could that be?

We watched the fruit bats today. In German they are called 'Flughunde' (flying dogs) because they aren't actually closely related to bats. They live in all the tress here and make holes into the fruit to eat them and leave the rind/nut.... They are very loud and seem to fight among themselves for the best places to sleep. They are most active at dusk.