Mauritius

Sorry for the long delay in postings.

We left Cape Town around October 1 on our marathon journey to Mauritius via Amsterdam and Paris. Of course, this would not go smoothly as we only had a couple of hours for each layover and upon arrival at the airport in Cape Town we were informed that our flight from AMS to CDG had been cancelled. Not too big of a deal, we were put on the next flight to Paris which left us with a short one hour layover at one of the world's most absurd airports, Charles du Gaulle. Long story short, we missed our flight to Mauritius and spent several hours working with Air France to get us there on the next flight which was operated by Air Mauritius. Luckily, we got seats on that flight and were on our way to the Indian Ocean with only a 5 hour delay. We found the service onboard Air Mauritius to be superior to that of Air France.

After arrival, very little time was wasted with Stefan jumping into his open water scuba certification course. He did the entire course in three days (including reading several hundred pages of text) and his german instructor Larissa did a great job even though she was suffering from a cold. After Stefan finished his class we rented a car and drove around the island a little, visiting the central highlands and a Hindu holy lake with a gigantic statue of the god Shiva the destroyer.

We later went on a dive together (Bernie's first dive in nearly 10 years) and saw lots of beautiful coral and sponges.

We said goodbye to Mauritius after one short week on the beautiful island and flew back to Paris where we would spend the night before flying the next morning to Mumbai. As our 747 was about 150 meters above the runway at CDG, our jumbo jet aborted the landing in what was the most knucklebiting flying experience of our lives. For several seconds we weren't sure if our jet was going to be ripped in two or not. Apparently these are called "go-arounds" and are relatively common at large, busy airports when the runway hasn't been cleared fast enough of the prior aircraft. In my mind, that is a near-miss.