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Archive for the ‘Seychelles’ Category

There goes the neighborhood …

Posted in Celebs, Island life, Seychelles on July 15, 2007| 8 Comments »

Bill Gates is moving into my neighborhood.

Yep, the quiet, sleepy confines of the part of this island I call home is undergoing some huge, noisy and ugly changes, and there are billionaires’ fingerprints all over it.

Hardly a day passes without me being jolted out of contemplative blog-writing revelry by a blast of dynamite shattering granite boulders behind my house to smithereens … the dogs and kids are really fond of these terrifying booms, as I’m sure you’ll understand … and like the cannons in the William Tell Overture, the explosions merely add emphasis to the buzz of chain saws, the roar of dump trucks, the shouts of 850 imported Indian workers, and the pounding thrum of dozens of machines designed to move mountains and turn forests into roads and hillsides into villas.

It’s a Four Seasons Hotel project that’s going in … a hotel, plus a slew of multi-million dollar holiday homes … a company Mr. Gates recently moved into major shareholder-ship in.

Not featured yet on the web site, we will nonetheless be surrounded by extremely rich people within a relatively short period of mega-construction time.

How these people are to integrate with the local population, or how they’ll avoid doing just that, are topics of most conversations around here, as you can well imagine. Somehow, folks don’t see these newbies shopping at the local SMB franchise and being philosophical about a temporary dearth of onions or butter or toilet paper or milk or yogurt or salt or sugar or … well, you get the idea: we often live without stuff some could get used to always having on hand.

Then there’s the issue of beaches.

MY beach … meaning the one at the end of the road where I’ve been splashing around at least once a week for the past eleven years, and Mark has enjoyed since childhood … is soon to be surrounded by $6 million private homes. Any guesses as to how the owners of said homes will react to Gay and I tromping through their gardens with our snorkel gear and the kids’ pails and shovels? Of course, to do that we will have had to scale walls and avoid snazzy security equipment, I’m sure.

And what about the pickup-loads of Sunday picnic people; those festive folks who descend on mass ladened with boom boxes and barbecues for a fun-filled day of drinking and dancing and volleyball? Will they be welcomed with open arms by the super-rich Saudis and Russians who are already putting deposits down on these properties?

Um. I don’t think that’s likely.

Of course, maybe I’m jumping ahead to a scenario that won’t play out. Perhaps everyone will chip in with necessities when the shops run out of stuff and be happy as happy clams to share the beaches as we have always done… and maybe Bill and Melinda will invite Mark and the kids and me over for sundowners on his veranda.

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How to be a girl … in England: Yikes!

Posted in England, Entitled to opinions, Expat Living on July 8, 2007| 13 Comments »

As regular readers know, my adored husband is a half-Brit, which is not the same as a half-wit, but not totally unrelated.

Yes, that’s extremely unkind and so veddy-veddy not PC, but Hey!, some things just must be said.

Mark was born in England and passed some of his childhood there, but most of his growing was done on this small, tropical island instead of that large chilly one … a factor that factors in greatly in the fact that he and I ended up together.

I lived in England for a couple of years, and as Mark so Britishly puts it, life there “didn’t suit me.” It may have been an easier adjustment if we’d lived in London … truly one of my favorite cities, and as much a city as a city must be to be interestingly livable … but we were in Bournemouth, which isn’t.

One good thing, however, about having lived in the UK for a spell is that it prepared me for life on a tiny rock in the middle of nowhere better than anything could have. I learned what education and medical care look like in developing nations, how poor service is no matter to anyone, how to cope with small mindedness as the order of the day, and what the world looks like from a vantage point that relies on shoulder chips and wannabes.

By comparison, Seychelles seemed progressive, lavish and open-minded … but there’s not all that we-used-to-be-an-Empire thing going on here.

Lest anyone think I went into English life prepared to rebel — until I moved there I was as Anglophilic as most Americans. All my impressions had come from encounters with the original Potter (Beatrix), Beatlemania, and London vacations that had me shopping at Harrods and hanging at Stringfellow’s.

I was convinced that life there was bound to be a combination of quaint and literary, with overtones of historic significance … and no little romance, of course, since I’d relocated to be with the love of my life.

Well, the romance was certainly no letdown, but the rest of it … ?

What I encountered was a rude population of cold fish with thought patterns I assumed had been left far behind in Western cultures. Racism, homophobia, religious intolerance, sexism, were all alive and well in Southern England in 1994.

One need only look at television programs like “Father Ted” to get an idea of how easily the British ‘take the mickey’ out of their Irish neighbors, and although the show cracked me up I was always aware of how offensive it must have been to Catholics.

If you’re wondering why I’m on this jag this morning, I’ll point you toward an article from the Telegraph that reminds me today of the backwardness of the UK that drove me up a wall while I was there. (This, in conjunction with summer day after summer day that saw the weather in Moscow 20 degrees warmer than the drizzly, damp and dreary days in Bournemouth.)

“How to … be a girl: 10 Things Every Girl Should Know” is the title of the piece that begs the question, “What year is this?”

Apparently a review for “The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls”, it’s all sugar and spice and everything vomit-inducing.

Some of the ten things?
1. How To Deal With Boys
2. How To Have A Best Friend
3. How To Cope When Your Best Friend Gets A New Best Friend
6. How To Keep A Secret
7. How To Tell If An Egg Is Fresh
8. How To Sulk

And some of the advice?

The main difference between boys and girls is that boys like doing things – driving cars, playing football, throwing stuff, eating, farting – and girls like feeling things, such as love, friendship, happiness and excitement.

Boys are very physical; girls are very emotional.

Boys are often spoilt by their mothers, so they have a tendency to think girls should do all the boring things in life, such as cleaning, cooking and ironing their T-shirts, while they do all the exciting things: jet-skiing, playing in rock bands, being spies.

The best approach is to put on a smiling public face. Be charming, be polite. Soon the horrible feelings of rejection will pass and you will be able to look back with gratitude that you behaved with dignity.

Excellent elements of sulking are the Black Look, the Deep Sigh and the No One Ever Understands a Single Thing I’m Going Through Shrug.

A sulk should be short and intense.

Thankfully, I’m raising my daughter on this island, not that one.

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A little slice of island life

Posted in Expat Living, Family, Island life, Seychelles on June 28, 2007| 2 Comments »

Tomorrow is the last of the June holidays in Seychelles … June being THE month for them with a total of three days dedicated to the celebration of political events and one religious day off … the 29th of June, Independence Day.

On the day in 1976 the British lowered their flag, folded it up, and went home, as Seychelles became a nation in its own right with no colonial overlords to placate.

Two hundred years after the USA became states united in America under the Stars and Stripes, and without nearly the fanfare, the event was nonetheless momentous and will be celebrated in island fashion with beach picnics, barbecues and no small amount of driving aimlessly around the island with frequent beer stops and the equally frequent pit stops for peeing alongside the road.

Here at our place we’ll be livin’ it up in our usual devil-may-care way … by working. I’ll be blogging from the veranda and getting stuck in to a couple of speeches, while Mark clears land and makes hooch … a licensed, legal venture that brings in needed extra cash … a yummy concoction called baka consisting of fermented sugar cane juice that is aged in the finest of blue plastic barrels and provided to discerning clientele in expertly crafted 50 liter jerry cans and is deemed most desirable to the local palate.

We have a special building on our property … the baka barn … for this sideline, a jaunty little pied a terre down the road from our house that’s locked up tighter than the back string on an Italian tourist’s thong bikini any time Mark isn’t in there doing his impression of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice … without the brooms, of course.

The weather isn’t the best in June, so some of the festivities organized for any of the holidays are always rained out. Thankfully, rain here doesn’t mean anything but wet, as cold doesn’t really happen, so most folks just get on with whatever they had planned and pay little attention to drizzle.

June is also the slowest month for tourists, so some small hotels and many restaurants are closed for the month. In my neighborhood, this means the beach at Grandma’s is like it was when I first came to Seychelles … no one but family day after day. Lovely.

If it’s a nice day tomorrow, we’ll certainly make time for a swim and to enjoy a run-around without having to dodge those aforementioned Italians in thongs.

Because it’s a holiday, however, that will have to wait until after Mark delivers the celebratory baka to all the local establishments that will see a roaring trade.

Santé! Bon zour Lindependenz!

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Trainers for tots?

Posted in Family, Island life, Seychelles, The USA from the outside in on June 25, 2007| 1 Comment »

A weekend just came and went, and although I spent far too much time in front of the computer, the rest of my family was out and about in big ways.

Mark is clearing the lower bit of our land, so was up and down the hill like so many monkeys jumping on a bed, toting chainsaw and grand kuto … Sam on his heals, then running back up to be well out of the way if and when the call comes, “Timber!”, making the most of our acre-plus and the surrounding jungle. Cj, too small for a Tarzan impression, kept herself busy jogging up and down our road, scolding the dogs as she went along and stopping occasionally to examine whatever pretty rock or fancy bug that happend to cross her meandering path.

A few more hours outside saw buckets being filled and dumped, resulting mud puddles targeted for hops, skips and jumps, sticks tossed for dogs that have no inclination to fetch, flowers picked for mom, and assorted other vigorous activities of the fun kind.

A couple of hours on the beach had both kids running and jumping, chasing crabs and practicing cartwheels while loading their hair and ears up with sand as the days wound down, and some living room dancing had the whole bunch of us movin’ and a groovin’ before settling in for pre-bed quiet time.

A story in this morning’s news had me wondering, though, how parents in the rest of world manage to get kids to pass weekends in any sort of healthy fashion.

This in the Huff Post, reporting that nearly a million American kids have personal trainers, about had me gagging on my guava.

What kind of life is it when children no longer walk to school, play outside or ride their bikes, but instead need parents to fork out $60 an hour for someone to put them through paces in a gym?

it seems the whole concept of being a kid has changed drastically, and I can’t help but worry about this generation. Things do run in cycles, however, and this may just be a phase that will have its own backlash someday.

Maybe by the time today’s pampered kids hit their stride, a rousing game of Ring-around-the-Rosie will serve as an icebreaker at cocktail parties and tag will be an Olympic sport.

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Politics near and far

Posted in Adoption, Seychelles, The USA from the outside in on June 20, 2007| Leave a Comment »

A victim of my own success, I’ve now got the new blog gig over on the pro blog site I work for, Adoption.com, and am a bit busier than I like to be.

Don’t get me wrong; I like the work and enjoy having such a huge platform from which I can point out the idiocy of idiots and add up the moron quotient in spewed drivel. It does this old heart good to know that I’m doing my bit toward keeping the world somewhat livable … or at least managing to cause some irritating rashes to break out on those who attempt the opposite. It’s not a pleasant thing to pull off scabs and get pus oozing, but that’s often what it takes to eradicate dangerous rot.

But the point of this post has bifurcated prematurely; it’s politics I set out to write about today.

Monday was National Day here in Seychelles, a big deal of an event that marks not much of anything but is celebrated with hoopla nonetheless. It’s one of three public holidays in June and falls between Liberation Day … the day of the coups d’etat that toppled the government of the first president … and Independence Day.

The President’s National Day speech is always eagerly anticipated, as it often gives clues to what’s ahead for the Seychellois. This year we learned there are changes in the wind for tourist-related business, which sounds good, and if they figure out how to get the site right, you can read the whole thing in English here in the Seychelles Nation newspaper. (Don’t count on it, though.)

My editor on the Adoption News blog wants me to gather info on presidential candidates in the US race for 2008 … an assignment that has me realizing how far removed I am and how long I’ve been away from the States.

I mean, really! Who are these people?

Of course, I know about Hillary and Rudy, and Edwards, Biden and McCain have familiar faces even to me, but although I know him now Obama did seem to pop up like a genie from a lamp. And Kucinich? Brownback? Mitt Romney?

Have we ever had a candidate called Mitt before?

That reminds me of the repeated process of learning to live with a new name in the White House. Anyone remember how odd the combination of the words ‘President’ and ‘Clinton’ sounded before Bill moved in?

I clearly recall people saying that ‘Reagan’ could never seriously be attached to the title, and ‘Bush’ just sounding silly.

So a G.W. was no leap, as a Hillary wouldn’t be … we’re all accustomed to the rhythm and cadence of their last names tacked on to leader of the free world … but we’ll get used to making easy reference to whoever ends up in the job.

Well, there are a few names that should never be conjoined with the title … I’m thinking Limbaugh, Liddy and Hilton, off the top of my head.

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The re-inventor

Posted in Expat Living, Island life, Seychelles on June 7, 2007| 1 Comment »

A little slice of island life you don’t see unless you live on one …

There’s an interesting sort of person one encounters when one moves from the real world to a small tropical island, the sort I call: ‘the re-inventor’.

Like an cartoon I recall from a 1964-ish copy of Playboy that made its way around Longfellow Junior High featuring an obvious Tart looking more than a little ‘rode hard and put away wet’ explaining to a girlfriend, “It’s okay. I’ll just move to a new town and start all over as a virgin …”, some people actually figure that an entry visa to paradise entitles them to create an entirely new life story for themselves, then pass it around like a tray full of canapes at a beach-side cocktail party.

Sure, this is common enough, and relatively harmless, on holiday. I recall a friend in California some years ago who bought herself a Club Med vacation in Mexico thinking that she’d meet some ‘nice men’, only to find that every single (and the single bit is iffy) one of them was a rich doctor with a Porsche parked in the garage of their swinging, pricey condo back home.

Yeah. Right.

All part of the fun and fantasy of holidays, perhaps, but it’s damned hard to keep up the game of “Let’s pretend” when it must go on past the usual yearly break. That takes some very good self-convincing … or sociopathic tendencies.

We’ve had a re-inventor here lately, and being way out of this loopy woman’s loop, I’m slightly amused. Others are less so, as she’s created rifts between friends and thrown around some mighty accusations designed to cast herself in some light no one quite understands the point of.

From stem to stern, she’s as phony as they come. Heck! She’s even made up a new name for herself … along with a load of BS about being dubbed the four-syllable, pseudo-exotic tongue-twister she prefers over her dirt-common real name by an African king who fell in love with her as she taught him to Tango.

Yeah, she’s an Argentine tango dancer.

OR a German psychotherapist with a ‘salon’ full of analysts running itself back in Berlin, making a fortune for her as she crashes out in people’s guest rooms after claiming a need for company or protection, or offering to put the function back in dysfunctional families for the price of bed and breakfast. (This apparently involves having sex with most family members, of course.)

Her story seemed to change with her audience … always a fatal error for re-inventors in small countries, as the rest of us love to compare notes — there’s not a lot else to do, you see — and inconsistencies glare very quickly.

Memories are long, as well, and apparently this is a return try for this fake tango shrink, so just before getting the hell out of Dodge last week her past was beginning to repeat on her.

She wasn’t exactly run out of town on a rail, but it’s assumed that she was feeling the tide turn. That can cause perilously shifting sands on a small island.

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Seychelles Liberation Day

Posted in American thoughts, Seychelles, Uncategorized on June 4, 2007| 7 Comments »

Tomorrow is the 5th of June, Senk Zen in Creole, the Seychelles version of the 4th of July. It’s not called Independence Day, however, because that holiday comes later in the month, on the 29th of June, and marks the hand-over from British rule on the day in 1976, almost 200 years after the US wrestled away their right to self-rule from the same bunch.

The 5th of June is Liberation Day … this year the 30th anniversary of Liberation Day … the occasion on which in 1977 the country was “liberated” from the government installed by the Brits not quite one year before.

Count on history to settle the spin into a proper orbit — one man’s coup becomes a country’s deliverance, revolutions morph into struggles for liberty, and radical insurgents grow to become legions of brave freedom fighters.

Yes, perspective is everything, and water under the bridge provides a POV that favors what floats.

The phrase coup d’etat will not be uttered much around here, even though that is pretty much what occurred thirty years ago tomorrow. The sitting President left the country for a short visit to the UK, the Prime Minister took over without permission to do so, and then ran the country as a one-party communist state for seventeen years. It wasn’t a particularly violent overthrow … the Seychellois are not a particularly violent people … but it wasn’t without incident.

Thirty years down the pike, there are still grudges held and forgiveness is a long way off for some people, but for the most part the official ‘take’ on the events of three decades ago stands with little challenge.

Days like today tend to bring out the Red in the rhetoric, as today’s Seychelles Nation Newspaper illustrates.

The majority of Seychellois will tomorrow celebrate a very memorable date that is very dear to our hearts: the 30th anniversary of June 5, 1977 when a group of fearless Seychellois changed the course of this country for the better, forever.

This group of Seychellois made the dreams of the people their pre-occupation when they lit the flame of the country’s liberation which led to extraordinary development and progress.

Yeah … I know … some fancy fingerwork (like footwork, but on a keyboard) often takes over where proper English would do a better job, but that’s what happens when so many people had all of their higher education provided in universities in Russia, Cuba or the PRC.

Although lines like, “The strife continues for our better future and respect of our true Creole identity, without consideration of religion, origin, political belief or social status.” sound straight out of Mao’s machine and tend to muck up the meaning considerably, the point they are trying to make is that the country is better off because of the events of the 5th of June 1977.

So, is it?

I can say with little doubt that if the coup had not happened I would not be living in Seychelles now.

The first president, the guy who blinked, was very big on developing the country for tourism and playboys. Well, something like that. He had ideas of turning the place into a Heffner-esque archipelago that would have quickly put hotels on every beach … all with the grooviest of 70’s architecture, you can bet … a tragic turn of circumstance that would have had the 1993 version of the country I first encountered more like Acapulco than the incredible corner of paradise that welcomed me with virgin beaches and a citizenry that had not learned, or needed, to view tourists as begging targets.

Although the idea was to have ‘no building taller than a coconut tree’, the free-for-all developing that was likely to have taken place would have crowded out much of what made Seychelles so special in my eyes by the time I arrived.

Seventeen years of a one-party communist state may sound like a sentence of suffering to some, but for the great majority of Seychellois that time settled over them like a cosy, yet lightweight, quilt. Life was peaceful. Life was easy. Nothing much happened.

With the USSR turning inward as it broke up, support for faithful little communist countries dried up, and as the world changed … as it always does … Seychelles needed to change with it.

The first multi-party elections took place in 1993, and the man who’d orchestrated the coup and had been running the show ever since won by a huge margin. More elections have followed, and his party keeps winning.

Thirty years post-‘liberation’, and the country still has no beggars. No one here is hungry or homeless. Education and medical care have been free for so long that the literacy rate is well over 90% for the total population, and over 98% when the pre-liberation old folks are removed from the calculation … higher than that in Spain … and healthcare is better than all of Africa, much of Asia and parts of Europe.

The down-side reflects the ease of life, with work ethics and entrepreneurial spirit taking hits when the beach beckons and island fever inspires naps. It is hard to get things done and mediocrity is frequently taken for brilliance … one only needs to be barely good enough to excel, and this isn’t good for a country in the long run.

From where I sit .. .that would be on my veranda overlooking Anse Soleil with a view of the Indian Ocean toward Silhouette … history has served Liberation Day up nicely, and although development is now eating the islands faster than I’d like, those seventeen years following the coup were like a factor 40,000 sunblock that protected Seychelles from the ugliness of 1970’s building styles, 1980’s greed, and kept folks here too busy afterward for 1990’s divisive religious issues or 2000’s wars.

Yes, I’ll be celebrating the 5th of June.

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Family photos

Posted in Family, International Adoption, Island life, Seychelles on May 28, 2007| 13 Comments »

While hopping around other blogs this morning, I realized that I’d not yet posted photos of my lovely family. I’ll take care of that right now.

In case we’ve not yet met, I’m Sandra, aka Mom, the adult male is Mark, often called Dad. The kids are Sam and Cj. At the moment, I’m 55, Mark is 40, Sam is 4.5 years old and Cj is 25 months. We live on Mahé, the biggest island in Seychelles … big being 4 miles wide and 17 miles long … near the village of Baie Lazare.

Beach familyBox o’ kids
Happy Cj
Sam makes cookies

Now that that’s done, I’ll get back to writing.

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Bill Maher is hot, is he not?

Posted in Celebs, I wanna, Island life, The USA from the outside in on May 26, 2007| 29 Comments »

Am I the only liberal, snotty, angst-ridden, happily married, over-fifty woman in the world who gets the screaming steaming thigh sweats over Bill Maher, or just one of a legion of middle-aged malcontents getting all hot and bothered to the strains of common sense wrapped in a manly, no bullshit package that seems as much a gift as a heart-shaped box of chocolates?

Since I don’t live on a part of the planet that get Maher-ified often … the occasional appearance on Larry King Live when that’s timed to air in our tiny CNN window in Seychelles is all I ever have available … it’s impossible for me to guess how his cute little pinched look, receding hairline and flat East Coast accent goes over in the US. I know he’s been around a while and is a hit, but do millions of American women there lie back, close their eyes and think of Comedy Central when their fire needs a stoking? I’m curious.

I don’t usually have ‘things’ for comics … musicians historically having the greatest likelihood of weakening my knees … since brash and edgy most often come across as cold and distant, and that just doesn’t wind my bathtub toy. I thought Dave Letterman was cute for a while, but then I met him.

(An aside … My mom was on Letterman’s show once when one of the other guests was Marilyn Manson. She thought he was ‘a very nice young man’. When I asked if he appeared to her as at all odd, she said, “No odder than some of the friends you used to bring home.”

Like I said, there are musicians in my past … sigh … )

But the Bill Maher tingles … what are those about?

Could it be I find him Electra-fying? He does have a nose very much like my darling father’s … stately, pominent and occupying a lot of face space … and in fact Bill (Do I dare call him Bill?) grows to more resemble my dad with every sporatic viewing I’m allowed.

Whoa! If this is some version of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” I’d better start hunting for a towel to throw in, because I’ll be done with having sexual fantasies FOREVER.

Stepping back from the brink of Freudian slippery slopes, I’ll get to why Bill Maher has me thinking today that jumping his bones would be a pursuit worth getting lathered up for … this from the Huff Post — a blog from Bill on South Carolina’s plan to allow concealed weapons on school campuses, and a sexy piece of writing it is.

Linking sex to violence is so hot.

In South Carolina you need to be 21 to get a concealed weapon permit. So the undergrads wouldn’t be armed. Just the teachers and grad students. So it wouldn’t actually stop anyone like the Virginia Tech shooter, until he worked his way up from the sophomores and stopped to re-load, but here I am applying practical logic to an argument made by guys who come in their pants when they hear the words “muzzle velocity.”

Sharp witted, brilliant, caustic … and, yes, brash and edgy, but with such a hefty dose of musth in his take down that instead of cold and distant he seems hot and close enough to be breathing on the back of my neck.

Whew.

Anyone have a cigarette?

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A giant crap caldera

Posted in Island life, Seychelles on May 22, 2007| 1 Comment »

Some days my life seems like one big pile of poop.

I’m not speaking metaphorically here, by the way. No, it’s real poop that sometimes surrounds me on every front … like I’m sitting in a giant crap caldera. Take today, for example …

It began with me hurrying into the shower with an eye toward starting off fresh rather than spending the entire day in my jammies, only to discover a hefty deposit of cat excrement in the corner. Oh, joy! The smell, the smell!. Even after dousing the tiles with bleach and scrubbing away, the pong still pinged, creating a pungent undertone my sweet orange and cedar body scrub couldn’t begin to mask.

Moving right along, Cj managed two … count ’em, two … huge diaper-fulls (diapers-full?) within about an hour this morning, the second happening sometime after I’d put her down for her nap. She naps in my office, the only room in the house with air conditioning, which means it’s cool and quiet, and shut up tighter than a drum. Sound cozy? Well, it is, and it hangs on to odors for ever. A drop of rose oil can keep the room invitingly fragrant for days … unfortunately, a half-pound of poop lasts even longer.

It’s now eight hours later and my eyes still water when I walk in. Phew! The lingering aroma of Cj’s nap time pooh may, just may, dissipate by tomorrow morning if I keep the door open all night. (That, unfortunately, has previously proved to appear an invitation for a cat to evacuate bowels in a new and exciting atmosphere … a potential eventuality that would defeat the purpose entirely.)

And, of course, we have puppy. Not our puppy. Well, she’s not meant to be ours for long. She was born to our dog, Dinah, and will soon find a new home with my dear friend, Gay.

But Gay is in France right now, driving around Province with her mother and sister, eating great food and enjoying the printemps du France rather than housebreaking her puppy.

Hence … and I do love ‘hence’ … her dog is shitting in my house — a lot!

I’ve picked up at least five piles of puppy poop today alone, and I have no doubt there will be more before the day is done.

A gecko shat on my shoulder while I blogged away on the veranda … Cj had my office, you see.

An Indian Mynah … a noisy and obnoxious pest of an introduced species of bird … buzz-bombed me and missed plopping on me and my computer by inches.

Darn good thing that our Aldabra Giant Tortoise doesn’t come in the house very often.

And that has been my day.

Ever find yourself praying for constipation?

Aldabra Giant Tortoise WikiPhoto

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