Adventures

I snitched some photos from Sandy's camera! She snapped a couple while they were getting ready to scuba. Some guys from a dive group rented them the equipment and helped with transportation.

 Lava/coral rocks run all up the west side of the island. The scuba folks just pulled over on the side of the road, got their gear, and in they went! This is from right by the first dive site:

While they were diving, Dee and I were on tour with Mitchell. We saw the Island House (a museum of typical native home life on the island) and a few reggae bars. We met a rastafarian, and I photobombed a cute British couple's picture. I really couldn't have helped it. Our car had to stop right behind where they were and it was either look away with a boring face or shout "photobomb!" and make them look away from the camera. So I think I was the only one grinning in the photo. They were nice though, and Mitchell gave them directions for the places they wanted to go. Then we offered to race them: us in our van, and them in their golf cart. We won. Shortly after that we checked into our hotel and Dee and I played at the pool until lunchtime, while Collette went to a pharmacy in town. After lunch is siesta time around here, and some of you have met me, so some of you know that when i sleep, i SLEEP. So the siesta was almost 4 hours long.

After the scuba folks got back to the hotel, but before Collette, Dee, and I woke up from our naps (hey, it was siesta!) some policemen came up to the hotel on their horses. They let Lesley get on one of the horses, but got fairly unhappy when she and the horse started trotting around. I don't think they expected any of us to know how to ride!

 Those of us who were still napping (like me) were woken up in time to hit the town for some dinner fun. We went to a restaurant called La Regatta - the longest running restaurant on the island. Mitchell told me it's been there at least 50 years, and he remembered it from when he was a kid on the island. We could tell they'd been around for a while because the grounds were full of amazing art made with used wine bottles. That many bottles would have taken some time to drink, even for a busy restaurant! Behind the wind-chime bottles, you can see the restaurant itself, built up over the water. The whole dining area was surrounded by windows that could open in nice weather, and close during rain squalls (two of which happened while we were there).

We could see a few fancy yachts from the restaurant, including one that was all lit up for a party. We also saw a bunch of tiny fish in the water. I told them they couldn't come up to the restaurant for at least a couple more years. Then I felt bad for being mean, so I gave them a piece of cheese out of Dee's salad (my food was already gone by then, and she gave them some cheese too).
The most talked-about drink on the island is a Coco Loco, a rum/coconut/something pink mix. Several of our group tried them tonight, and nobody complained a bit!

 We took a few blurry group photos (Collette, Lesley, Suzanne, me, Dee, Stacy, Nicole, Sandy):

And then we enjoyed the heck out of our dinners. Most of the group chose a variety of seafoods, but when I told the waitress I was "vegetariano" she pointed to a rice dish on the menu. So I had that. There were toasted nuts and mushrooms in the rice. It was pretty fantastic. And then we had dessert. This restaurant takes pride in their coco pie, so try it we did! And a chocolate torte. And a panna cotta. There were no leftover desserts.
(Which reminds me about our lunch here at the hotel! Dee got an entire red snapper, face and all, with fried plantains and coconut rice. Our cook, Mercedes, scrambled me up some eggs instead of the fish, and they tasted pretty good with the plantains and coconut rice. Then there was dulce coco. cinnamon-y, coconutty, yumminess. With raisins. I could have eaten much more of that.)
While we were at dinner, the restaurant's speakers suddenly started playing the Wedding March. Then people started applauding. A few tables away, someone had just gotten engaged! So it's not quite as bad as when we crashed a Romanian wedding on accident...
After the long dinner, we went to another supermarket to pick up some drinking water. I have been keeping my eyes open for Colombian coffee this whole time, and so far the markets have sold almost exclusively instant coffee - half of which is Nescafe! Mitchell tells us there is some resentment among the natives towards the Colombian rule of the island, and that the natives are working on gaining independence. It seems that we're in a place where Colombians go on vacation, and they're not about to buy expensive fancy Colombian coffee as souvenirs... So no Colombian coffee yet, but I'm bound and determined to find some! So far, this is the first World Vets trip I've been on that didn't happen near an area with vendors, hawkers, and street sellers. Most of the goods for sale here are in stores, and I've only seen two guys selling shell necklaces on the beach. This island is a different sort of place than I've been before. A few hundred years ago, it was uninhabited. Then the British came along and brought slaves to run sugarcane plantations. The descendants of those slaves are the natives now, and the sugarcane fields have been long-since bought up for housing. There is very little farming done on the island, and now the main industry is tourism.
*Plug for Mitchell* He's been fantastic, full of stories and showing us interesting places that only locals would know about. He's lived on the island his whole life (it's only about 21 square miles) and it seems like he knows just about everyone. We met him because our first hotel asked him to pick us up at the airport, and he's been our favorite ever since!