After breakfast of fried egg on toast at the Lemon Grass restaurant, we’re heading out for six hours of snorkeling. We have six people from France and four people from Australia on the boat with us. No one seems particularly friendly. I’ll strike up a conversation but it becomes very one-sided and seems to be an interrogation. I give up. We lather up with sunscreen with the hope I won’t get more sun. Even with a tee-shirt and shorts, my legs get too much sun and with the malaria medicine I’m taking the pain is much more intense. Traveler Tip: Read carefully your prescription side effects. I’m taking antimalarial tablets and the instruction reads to say out of the sun. Are you kidding me? Realize the majority of malaria cases occur in tropical and subtropical areas of the world.
Sun or not we are snorkeling today with sea turtles. That’s right those majestic sea turtles. We swam with two sea turtles. One turtle from head to tail was from Andy’s head to his knees. That’s over 4.5 feet. Andy looked at him eye to eye. We spot them laying on the bottom of the ocean, then it starts swimming and as it’s swimming, we’re swimming too. Pretty soon they surface and we swim side by side. Up close and personal but do not touch. Sometimes they have suckerfish attached to them. One had a stump fin and a barnacle the size of a fifty-cent piece attached to its shell. They are brown, pale yellow with black markings. I would have been happy staying in this area all day long but off we go.
Our next location has sharks. Andy saw and counted 20 baby Black Tipped Sharks. I don’t know where I was but I didn’t see any. The water is crystal clear so spotting fish, turtles, shark is great fun. This trip too was a perfect snorkeling experience. We continue to snorkel again when we get back. Long island is the name of our beach and its jam-packed with underwater wildlife and beauty. This afternoon we spotted a fish the size of our two backpacks together, huge and truthfully, he was kind of ugly.
After showers and aloe vera, the sun is going down when we have dinner of shark and blue marlin. Take a walk and eat peanuts on the beach. Peaceful, even blissful.
B.E.A.C.H. ~ Best Escape Anyone Can Have.
Unknown
It was a disturbing sound that woke me up at 1:30 am. It’s a familiar sound but I can’t put my finger on it. Oh, I know, it’s a crunching sound like someone chewing Grapenuts cereal. No, it sounds more like me chewing Grapenuts. Whatever, it’s troubling. I turn on my flashlight and the sound stops. I can’t see anything beyond the mosquito netting but it stopped. I turn off my flashlight, try to go back to sleep and the sound starts again. I wake up Andy and ask him, “Do you hear that?” “No.” He is not concerned. I turn on the flashlight again and again the sound stops. I’m resigned to think that this sound is coming from outside and it must happen every night at 1:30 am. Good night, I need to sleep. It’s not until morning do I find out that the sound was not outside. It was inside our room and the crunching sound was our beefy, 10-inch gecko eating my backpack. There is now a two-inch hole on the top of my bag. Just on the other side of that hole were our snacks. He started eating our bread. Yuck! Did he crawl into my bag and search around too? I hope he has a stomach ache.
