Looking for things underwater

It’s surprising (or maybe it isn’t) just how quickly the beautiful and exotic can become mundane. Pretty soon, fish caught hours before you eat it is just the standard (Silvia: This fish was caught yesterday? Gross); if the water is less than absolutely clear for fifteen feet down, it’s not worth going in; and the scooter becomes more of a hassle than a pleasure (actually, that last one’s not true, I still really love driving the scooter).


But then this past Friday, we went snorkeling for the first time in a while. (Although once again, I didn’t actually have a snorkel, just flippers and goggles, so I guess it was really just goggling. Kind of like Googling, but underwater.) We swam for quite a while, and at around the midpoint we found ourselves on Crab Cay, the islet we had been to before about two months ago. There was nobody else there at all, so we had it all to ourselves for the afternoon, and took advantage by lying down on the dock in the late afternoon sun for half an hour and doing nothing in particular. Sitting there on the dock, with the entirety of Providencia y Santa Catalina spread out in front of us and the sun setting into the mountains, it struck me anew, being as isolated and far away from normalcy as I’ve ever been. And then we jumped back in the water, and startled a cloud of calamari into spraying their ink and darting away, and the feeling stayed. Coral reefs will do that to you.


So will meeting other people who are just as intent on savoring the experience, culinary and otherwise. The other day we made friends with a Swiss couple who was here on their honeymoon, and met up with them several times. The first time, they brought along a Spanish couple they had met, and after a not insignificant period of requisite awkwardness, we all ended up talking about Christmas traditions in different countries. (Turns out the Swiss Santa is considerably more violent than the U.S. version, and the Catalonian manger has at least one figurine you would never expect to be there. Hint: the Spanish name is el Cagon*.) The Spanish couple left the next day, and later in the week we went out for dinner again with the Swiss couple and one other Swiss woman they met at their hotel. To the extremely incongruous sound of Enya playing from the restaurant speakers, I ended up talking with the Swiss couple for a while about health care, but more generally about medicine (they’re both med students in their residencies, she’s an OB/GYN and he’s focused on public health). It was really interesting to hear them speak, both from the perspective of doctors who know a lot about medicine and members of a different system who have an outside view on the U.S. And though health care can’t really compete with miles of clear blue water, afterwards it did seem just a little bit new.

*it means "the shitter." It's apparently pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

One Month Left

Things left to do: go snorkeling at various places around the island; kayak through the mangrove forest (possibly); make it to Mancanillo on a weekend; go to the highest point on the island, from which you can see the next island over, San Andres. Return to our original shack before we leave, just to look at it again with a very different perspective; go with the waitress at our restaurant to some of the nightspots on the island, where she said she would show us around. Try and learn as much Spanish as I can. Say goodbye to Mario and Ingrid; Suzette and Herman and Sandra; Greg; the slightly crazy guy who runs a bar on our beach; Deibis and Teresa. Return our moto (sadly), and figure out a reliable way of getting to the airport early in the morning. Then go to Bogota, explore the city for three days with Silvia as a guide. Pack up and fly home the morning of December 21, leaving behind Christmas celebrations in Bogota for the ones at home.



Things done: swim and eat, and a lot of both of those; learn how to ride a scooter; sample tamarind wine (very sweet and a little firey). Overcome many obstacles in pursuit of living on a small tropical island, albeit temporarily. Discover Kitty Wharf, and explore the island; go scuba diving and snorkeling; develop better Spanish comprehension, if not speaking so much. Resume running; read a lot, write a lot, and listen to a lot of music. Attempt a diet for three months that consists almost solely of seafood, rice, and plantains. Watch a large number of mediocre American movies dubbed in Spanish—action and horror movies are better, romantic comedies worse. Make some acquaintances, though not really many friends. Look at the water a lot; develop a new appreciation for laundry machines and high-speed Internet connections. Engage in all-out warfare with the entirety of the insect class. Come across as a complete tourist, despite having been here three months. Forget things I’ve done, and things that I should still do. Pre-empt nostalgia.

Kitty Wharf in Pictures

I had planned to put the pictures below in order so that you would be seeing everything as though you were walking there, but I cannot for the life of me get blogger to let me arrange my pictures as I want, so they're a little discombobulated. But here they are, more or less in sequence:

Getting off the scooter, the stone wall with the path is just visible in the background.

Fire ant tree


Coconuts!

Here you begin to come out of the forest



















standing on the wharf, looking to the left













The beach to the right


















The beach on the left, with a waterfall and a rope swing.
















Looking back out towards the ocean, and trying to give a sense of the clarity of the water.
















Some more views, and some conchs
















And my semi-successful attempt at using my camera timer

Pictures

Among the pictures below are:

-a view from our hotel balcony
-the edge of the mangrove forest
-our daily restaurant El Divino Niño and its mascot
-some hiding crabs
-a view of our beach (Southwest)
-some fisherman cleaning what was very possibly our lunch one day
-the entrance to the cemetery
-a hotel where we go swimming sometimes

If you click on the image it should expand enough that you can view everything in detail.

The Special Center for Children God Bird

We finally have transportation! I just drove to use the Internet now instead of walking half an hour! It was awesome! On Friday we took the bike to Aguadulce (where we get Internet) and back twice without any problems, so by island standards we’re good to go. It was the first time we went out on the main road, I was driving and Silvia was on back. And of course, because we have a very odd kind of luck on this island, on that first ride I had to navigate both a torrential downpour and a herd of cattle. (It was the first time we’ve ever seen cows on this stretch of road. There were maybe 20 of them and we just kind of honked and poked our way through). I feel fairly confident in our ability to deal with unexpected situations at this point, automotive or otherwise.

Also, I was bit by a fish the other day. It was like a marine blitzkrieg, it just made a beeline for my finger out of nowhere, attacked, and then darted away. It really wasn’t serious at all, there’s not even a mark, but it was off-putting all the same.

So my next post is going to be a bit odd. A little while ago somebody commented on one of my posts, referencing the literary critic Harold Bloom. It’s a name that I’ve heard before but didn’t really know anything about, so I went and googled him to see what popped up. I tried reading a few pages from one of his books, but more to the point, I came across a review he wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Harry Potter back in 2000. You can read it for yourself here, but the gist of it is that the Harry Potter series sucks. I happen to really enjoy the whole series and consequently was really irritated by his review, so I ended up jotting down some thoughts while reading it and then putting them together into a defense. (Hey, I’m on a remote tropical island and have plenty of time on my hands. And it’s a good activity while watching Futurama in Spanish, which I can only follow because I’ve seen them all before anyway.)

I’m going to post that review as its own post, but in case you really just came here to read about Providencia (very understandable), I decided to do a parallel post. Since I was already writing one review, I figured I’d do another, this one of something related to Providencia. It’s a bit of an odd idea, but it’s for a blog, so why not? Call it a review/treatment of a hypothetical movie. They should both be up in the next day or two (assuming our Internet connection isn’t interrupted by a thunderstorm or passing bird or something).

And now, for your viewing pleasure, some pictures. I haven’t taken a huge amount yet, as we’re going to be here for a while and I was going to wait until we had transportation and could get around more easily, but here's a small sampling nonetheless:

San Andres from the air


Front view from the shack


Back view from the shack


The shack

Bathroom area

Road to the beach

And a small narrative:
Look at the children playing and having fun!


Whoops.
(He was fine, but the game was over)

And in case you were wondering about the title of the post, it’s what’s written in huge letters on the side of one of the school buses here. It doesn’t really have to do with anything else, I just thought it was funny.

Water Pics

Here are some pictures to give you an idea of what I mean when I say I can't get over the color of the water: