Barbados

Barbados was cool, but honestly it was hard to top Dominica. Our tour guide took us all over the island. We went to a Flower Forest, a Wildlife Reserve and we snorkeled with turtles.

The Barbados coastline in the background

Beautiful!

The flower forest was nice. It was cool to see all the different kinds of flowers and vegetation growing on the island. I finally learned how to use the macro lens on my camera so here are a few of my favorite flower pictures from the forest.

I loved this tree's roots.

One of my favorite parts was getting to feed a green-tailed monkey. Not a caged one, but a real-life wild monkey. The reserve was open air, meaning any of the monkeys hanging out there (no pun intended) could leave when they wanted. They would sleep there overnight and then leave in the morning to do their thing. They'd come back late afternoon to eat and then they'd leave again until night fall. We walked through the reserve when zero monkeys were there and I was thoroughly disappointed. I really wanted an interaction with them. I heart monkeys. We got to see a lot of other animals though - deer, peacocks, HUGE turtles and iguanas. There was a snake section and a ton of birds, but no monkeys. Then, just when we were about to leave, we were led to another end of the reserve and there were about 6-8 monkeys being fed sunflower seeds by one of the employees. We all just watched them but then I asked if I could feed one and he gave me some seeds and told me to squat down, open my hand and be really still. A brave male monkey approached me and took the seeds right out of my hand! So amazing! They were all so cute!

Old man monkey

See look! I'm doing it!

His little hand was so cute. So those suckers are quick!

Our last stop was snorkeling with turtles. Our guide took us a little way's from shore and showed us some sights on the beach, the most interesting being where Tiger Woods got married (this was before his drama, so we all cared more than we would have had it been after) and Simon Cowell's GINORMOUS mansion right on the water! Oh my gosh this thing was huge!

Swimming with the turtles was really neat. I dove down deeper to touch a baby one and was really proud of myself. No pictures from this as we didn't want our camera to get wet. Oh well. Mikey got some good ones. Maybe I'll post them later once I get them from him.