Brains!

Probably one of my favorite things is discovering places I've never heard of, and looking them up to find out more. A recent example is the country Azerbaijan, which is ginormous and lies along the west coast of the Caspian sea in the mid-east. I was actually really embarrassed I had never heard of it! Another place is the French Island of Réunion, which is in the Indian Ocean kind of to the north east of Madagascar. This place apparently has a similar climate to Hawaii, a really active Volcano, some spectacular and rarely noticed scenary, and in 2005 a Mosquito spread disease called Chikungunya spread like crazy through the 800,000 people living there and killed 200. Africans, French, and Chinese cultures mix and according to tourism websites, mix peacefully. But I'm skeptical of what peaceful means after reading all my travel books about Colonial Islands.

How did I hear about this place? Jordan is selling an amplifier through ebay to someone there, after sitting around trying to figure out how a package could cost $135 to send to France, we discovered this little Island was in fact a lot farther then European waters. We reflected on how we should ask this mysterious French ebay person what it was like there, go there, and even live there. Jordan stating, "I could so live some place like that, give me internet and I'm set". He went on, "I could totally do Tech Support". I didn't want to say how I wasn't sure if this little Island had enough computers to preform Tech Support on, but I didn't feel like it. His enthusiasm for saying something like that on his own made me giddy.

All of the pictures of the Island show extremely different scenes like snow capped mountains, deserty brown hills, lush V shaped valleys, aquamarine beaches and coral reefs, and lots and lots of lava. I can only attribute the vast differences in vegetation to elevation changes, because if its in near the equator and affected by the ITCZ then it should follow a pretty standard climate and only allow for certain vegetation. But as any physical geographer should know, as you go up in elevation climate changes dramatically, thus vegetation does too. Thanks Professor Haynes.

Anyways trips to Réunion cost quite a bit. In fact the currency there is the Euro, and in 2006 the GDP per capita income was about 20k(US), meaning this island is probably more stable after its colonization compared to lets say Fiji, because it is still controlled by France.

My new mission is to discover if anyones written an accessible outsides view/travel book thingy about it!