French Beach Liberty Trip

   On Sunday, 28 November, I went out on Liberty with a couple of guys.  We left base and went into downtown Djibouti to Menelik Square, which is the small tourist/shopping district.  After circling for a bit, we found a parking space and walked back to the square.  We ran into some other people we knew from base, and they had a guy that spoke French, plus some Arabic, with them.  We hung out with them, first going to a small café and having some coffee and crepes. 
    We wandered the tourist shops and I bought some more ‘Africrap’.  I can’t say what, because it was sent home as a present to my wife.  Bartering with the vendors was fun and I got some good stuff.  We then wandered down to the French market, but wasn’t that impressed.  We then turned back west and headed toward the French Beach.  Some people have asked for some idea of where these places are that I am going, so from now on I will provide the Google Maps GPS coordinates for them.  You should be able to copy the numbers and paste it directly into the search window of Google Maps and pull up the location. 

   The GPS numbers for French Beach are:  11.592956 43.020229

  The beach was very nice, but had a somewhat difficult offroad trail to get there.  I never had to put the Land Cruiser into 4x4 mode, it plowed through just fine.  My riders were not as confident, and were gripping the handles with white knuckles.  This trail was nowhere near as bad as stuff I hit in the Sierras or Monterey.  Once we were at the beach, it was quiet nice.

Here is a shot of a camel on the road down there, it had to be the oldest one I have seen so far.  It was old enough to have lost the majority of it hair.

This is a shot of the covered seating areas that are available.  It costs about $2.50 per person to sit under them for the afternoon, plus a Djiboutian ‘watches’ your vehicle…. I didn’t sweat the money.  I put my stuff down, assembled my underwater camera, unpacked my snorkel gear, and headed for the water.  My cohorts just sat back in the breeze and enjoyed the view. 

I went snorkeling off the beach, which stayed shallow and full of a type of seagrass I had never seen before.  I finally started hitting some corals, and then the reef formed up and dropped off into deep water.  This is one of the many pieces of health coral that were down there. 

Unfortunately the visibility wasn’t as good as I had hoped, and doing underwater photography while snorkeling is much harder than when I am actually diving.  Here is a shot of an Indian Ocean relative to the Rock Beauty, a type of angelfish. 

I was enjoying diving is something other than the Atlantic or cold Pacific, allowing me to see my first Lionfish.

The juvenile fish here were even more brightly colored than I am used to in the FL Keys.  Here is a young angelfish next to a sponge. 

Though I took MANY other shots, the cloudiness of the water meant that the strobe just lit up a particle in front of the lens and not my main subject.  I hope to have better luck when the water isn’t like soup.