This is the tale of how I have been waking up before 6AM almost every day of this trip:
Hotel staff: The sunsets are beautiful, but the sunrises here are even better.
Me: Pfff like I will be up at 5:30 for this event, this is vacation. *Wakes up at 5:30 despite lack of alarm, sees sunrise. It is amazing but is too stupid at 5:30 to figure out how to capture it accurately, fails to go back to sleep*
Our room here is bright, and at precisely 5:45, the sun carves a brilliant orange beam across the second floor bedroom. And lo, I was awake for the rest of the day.
Today was our beach day! I have actually never been swimming in the ocean before. The last time we were here, all the beaches had strong riptides and we couldn’t swim. Other places I’ve gone with oceans and beaches nearby, we never made time for the beach.
We went to two nearby beaches, got sunburned, and did nothing else. In lieu of actual adventure, you will get my list of things I learned about swimming in the ocean and some pictures:
- Salt water tastes bad in your mouth, but is even worse if it gets up your nose.
- If the beach has rocks on it and you wade in, the rocks attack you when the waves recede. They are large rocks. They will cut you, and you cannot cut them back because they flee like cowards. The ocean then proceeds to literally rub salt in your wounds.
- The lining of my swimsuit bottom is apparently designed like a pouch and trapped sand and many tiny rocks. It was like I had a poop that never wanted to leave, no matter how hard I tried to be rid of it. I couldn’t try that hard because there were people around.
- Tiny children are better at swimming in the ocean than me. I am a being of 90% clumsiness and fall over at the slightest provocation.
We felt ourselves burning to a crisp in the 95 degree sun and retreated to the hotel lawn for the remainder of the afternoon.
We got snacks with monkeys at our nearby new favorite cafe. We sipped our batidos and watched a nearby film crew strap up and get ready to film something while strapped to the back of a very janky rental ATV. Maybe monkeys, possibly tourists. The guy at the restaurant guessed they were filming scenery. They drank all of our special cold coffee so we held a tiny grudge against them.
We debated wandering to nearby (haunted!) Isla de Cabuya, but after discovering our level of sunburned-ness, we kept to playing cards in the shade and reading at the hotel. A guy from the hotel was working on freeing some coconuts from a nearby palm tree. He hacked at individual coconuts with a machete, and then disappeared and reappeared with a chainsaw. He texas chainsaw massacred those nuts off the tree and they fell to the ground with a loud thump. In true serial killer style, he sampled some coconut milk once the work was complete, and then toted them back up to the hotel.
I presume we will eat them tomorrow.
Tonight, the entire town lost power periodically. This is not common in the dry season, and the hotel security guard told us it was likely due to work they were doing on the line somewhere. We saw the line: there is literally one line along cheese grater road. The break could be anywhere, and one interruption would be enough to cause lights out for lots of towns!
The entire town was plunged into blackness for ten minutes, lit only by tourist flashlights and intermittent headlights from cars. Please stop doing work, utility company, as it is definitely not working. The power flickered several times for the rest of the evening.
It was easy to appreciate the stars, at least! We eventually got our sushi dinner and spent the rest of the evening being very sunburned. This trip’s forgotten sunscreen body part award goes to my feet. They are slightly swollen from the heat and are an evenly roasted red burn. This is very confusing and somewhat painful. Hopefully they will revert to tan status tomorrow.