Up at the crack…well, 7.30ish…for our postponed snorkeling island tour. We’d chosen the five island option: in our experience the longer ones can start to become a bit of an ordeal at the end of a long day of off the boat, swim, on the boat, chug chug chug, off the boat, swim, rinse & repeat. And having recently returned, I think we got that about right.
Not that it wasn’t great. It was. All the islands we went to had their individual charms. One or two had really stunning fish – profusion, size, bright, beautiful colours; on had the first proper living coral we’ve seen, in blues and greens, pinks and lilacs; one, uniquely, since we’ve been hereabouts, had no sand at all, but instead mounds of beautiful stones…
I was fully minded to take one for our souvenirs mantelpiece at home, until I came across…
…at which point I changed my mind. 😳
It really was a lovely day though. The fish are genuinely stunning – way better than any I at least have seen before – and the water crystal clear, which helps see them to full effect.
Only two real downsides: first, it’s sad to see the coral in such poor shape. All but the one place we were taken to, presumably mainly on account of the at least half-alive coral, have it in a wonderful variety of shapes, from wide, flat ‘leaves’ to bulbous nodules to great forests of tree-like structures – but almost without exception the colours have died, and everything is a kind of camouflage browny-green. The one half decent site we went to gave at least an impression of what could and should have been, though even it, in truth, was nothing like the kind of thing you’ve been seeing on David Attenborough programmes all these years. And second, the water off a couple of the beaches was so thick with little jellyfish you found yourself peering through a sort of jellyfish soup to try to see anything, while being constantly stung. Not badly – we’re talking sub-nettle level irritation. But still, not what you’d choose, if you had a choice.
But it was as I say a lovely day, and we came back tired, well roasted, but very happy to have gone. Now we’re getting ready to head off to sunset beach, in the hopes that the whispy high clouds will deliver a full-on Kodachrome finale.
(Four hours on…) Well, that started out as a bit of a fiasco. I did the navigation, with directions from google, and all went well until we were, according to google, within four minutes, but it all felt wrong, and it was telling us to go down roads that didn’t exist, and then Virle checked her phone and….”It’s taking us to Sunrise Beach!” Goddamn! It must have heard me wrong. But no – there it was, in writing, in google’s own transcription: Sunset Beach. So Virle got directions, using the same app, and sure enough, Sunset Beach was 16 minutes away, on the other side of the island.
We decided to go anyway, which we did, though we’d probably end up just missing the sunset, which we did. But all in all, it didn’t work out too bad in the end…
