Team Horn and Team Vallentine went separate ways in the morning and met up again in the afternoon. Pictures from that afternoon's activities (drinking cocktails and playing a card game) will be included in the later post, so we only cover the morning here.
If I remember correctly, that was the morning that Mom and Dad had their first "detox" session with Zee, so they were on the ship for most of the morning. I think Dad went on shore briefly at one point, and I think this photo is from that jaunt. Would you like to add anything, Dad?:
Mark and I headed off to find our way to one of the beaches I had read about, in order to maybe do some snorkeling, or at least laze around a bit. So we went in search of a taxi to take us to the beach, which wasn't within walking distance, especially in the short time available to us. We wandered around a bit looking for a place to rent snorkeling equipment, which we hadn't brought with us. We were hounded by a few taxi drivers, but none quite caught our fancy, and we still hadn't found any equipment. So we wandered around some more and then eventually gave up on finding any.
We then went to the "official" taxi rank and stood there for around 10 or 15 minutes while all kinds of chaos happened around us. We didn't want a tour of the whole island, so the guy running the show was having a hard time finding someone to take us, especially since the drivers tended to wait until they had a full car to set off. I later worked out that I think we were actually at the island's "bus station" rather than an actual taxi rank, so they weren't taxis at all, but informal buses going to various destinations.
We had been trying to get someone to drive us to where we knew a dive shop was, and then take us to the beach we wanted to try, all of which was very close to each other, and not that far from where we were, if you were driving. We eventually realized that asking for this was equivalent to asking for a large yak wearing galoshes that knew the Charleston. So we gave up and finally just asked how we could get to the beach we wanted. And the fourth guy we talked to said, "You take the water taxi. Through there."
We went through there, and found the water taxi. We had to wait for it to fill up, which we didn't mind doing, since we were good at waiting by now and we were feeling like we were making some progress. Our boat-person (captain, I guess), finally satisfied with his number of passengers, set off, so we were on our way:
We finally got to the beach we wanted, Morne Rouge:
It's a nice beach. Sandy, with clear water and lined with trees. I think some were almond trees and some were something I can't remember the name of, with poisonous fruit (our captain warned us against those). We didn't have any snorkeling equipment, but it turned out to be OK, because some Canadians who shared our water-taxi with us did, and when we saw them on the trip back they said that there hadn't been anything at all. I did swim a bit, and if you could blow up this picture you would see a tiny head, which is me:
We stayed a couple of hours and then our water taxi captain had come back to pick us up, as we had arranged with him when he dropped us off. Which is a good thing, too, since I have no idea how we would have got back if he hadn't asked us if we wanted him to pick us up! (The picture is grey because I was experimenting with the settings on my camera again...)
On the way back, we stopped off at the other island again, to pick up more people, and again had to wait for the taxi to be full, which took a while. This is when I got badly sun burnt, since I wasn't paying attention to sunscreen at this point. We were there so long because there was this big conference of water taxi captains and a big hoohah at which our captain was at the heart. Someone who wasn't supposed to work on Monday HAD worked on Monday and this was a very bad thing.
This meant that our captain should get to take more passengers over the other boats, and should get to leave first, because the guy who wasn't supposed to work on Monday HAD worked on Monday. This is possibly the worst thing that anyone could do and it causes much slightly, but not overly, heated discussion. The result was that our water taxi went last and we were a bit later than we had hoped getting back to the ship.
But we still made it in plenty of time to get on board before we set sail, even though once we got back to the port, we weren't allowed off the boat until everyone had paid their water taxi fare. Still, not bad, considering...although it did mean that we were too late for lunch in the dining room and there were NO seats in the buffet area, because that was the only place serving food and everyone was on board at that point since we had such an early sailing time. No seats at the buffet was probably the lowest point of the cruise. But we recovered...
...because the next stop was Bonaire!
1 comment:
Yeah. After we finished with "Z" (sales pitch all the way), I thought I might have time to catch up with Mark and Jessica. I grabbed my snorkel gear and headed out. Arrived at the same (land) taxi location, and learned the same lesson as M & J - they don't bother to take people on short trips where they won't have a full car of paying passengers. "Take a water taxi - through there." Looked like a cutthroat alley to me, but through I went. At the water taxi dock, there were a couple of boats waiting for enough passengers to make it worthwhile. I waited, and discussed the situation with the boatsmen.... and waited... Finally, it became clear that there was no way I was going to get to the beach in time to do anything but stay on the boat and return. I did manage to get an offer of a reduced price, though. So I headed back to the ship.
(Jessica - I couldn't tell if this posted on the first try - please delete it if it's a dup.)
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