One of the birds that delights in waking us in the morning.
I was still exhausted, so I rolled over and fell back asleep. When the sun broke through the shutters I woke for good, thinking I must have slept in until 9 or 10 easy. It was 7 a.m.
G and I got up, slathered on the sunscreen, and wandered down to the restaurant to join D for a continental breakfast of toast with guava jam, fresh fruit, coffee and orange juice. After eating, G and I decided to let our food settle so we meandered the garden paths looking for interesting things to take pictures of. G turned out to be a Jedi master at spotting the tiniest of lizards amongst the leaves and branches on the ground, as well as the scuttely little crabs down by the water.
One of the shy crabs trying to hide behind a rock.
For perspective, this tiny lizard is standing on top of a garden hose.
I feel extremely lucky to have captured this guy showing his colors, not many of the lizards did this at all, and he's in focus to boot!
While we were having a lovely time shooting, D had strapped the Gopro camera on with the chest harness and went to get a point of view shot of the jump off the cliff into the ocean. He quickly learned that the chest harness is not the right rig to use for this kind of shot... as soon as he hit the water the harness flipped up, and the camera hit him squarely on the lip. He had just come out of the ocean as I walked up the cliff to find him... dripping wet and a look of absolute shock on his face. The first thing I thought was he must have seen a shark in the water and didn't know how to tell me. I asked him what was wrong, he looked at me like I was insane...
"Can't you see?"
His lip was bleeding a bit, but it was hard to tell with all the ocean water dripping off of him. He ended up with a significantly deep cut on the outer lip, and another on the inside where his lip had hit his front tooth. He - not being able to see it yet, but watching blood drip and feeling it swelling - thought he'd taken a chunk out of his lip and didn't understand how I could miss it. Thankfully we were able to stop the bleeding, and we iced it right away to keep the swelling down. As all this was going on, a large amount of seaweed had floated in along the cliff's edge, so we wouldn't have been snorkeling anyway... so while he iced his lip G and I spent some more time in the pool.
After drying off, we got dressed and took a walk down the road to find lunch.
G and D walking up the road on the west end.
We ended up at the Rockhouse, another cliff side resort a little ways down the road. I had the grilled snapper plate, which came with a fried plantain (one of my favorite foods) some sauteed veggies and a bowl of rice and peas. 
My grilled snapper.
G is super happy with her coconut shrimp.
One of the many goats you can find munching away on the side of the road.
A mural painted at the entrance gate to a home.
G and I standing outside of Ras Rody Organic food stand, located directly across the street from Tensing Pen. They were closed today, but we got to stop for a photo.
On our walk back we listened to the occasional sound of distant thunder, which was a warning for things to come. The "rainy season" here generally consists of a daily hit of passing rain, seems to usually be in the afternoon, and dumps for roughly 20 minutes, then clears out for the rest of the day. It's an impressive display of how nature can turn into an instant firehouse. Equally as impressive is the way the staff can feel the rain coming, and clear out all the cushions from the chairs in the restaurant and around the pool before the drops start falling. (I have video of the thunder storm, but am having difficulty uploading video today so that will be in a separate post)
Once the thunder storm cleared, D's lip was feeling much better, and we decided to go for our big bridge jumps. Last year I hurt my ears pretty badly from the pressure of the water hitting my ears when I jumped from the cliff, so this year D bought me some ear plugs to see of that would help. I did two practice jumps from the lowest platform, just to re-introduce myself to the salt water and swimming in the ocean without a floaty, then I strapped the camera to my wrist and made my way up the steps to the bridge.
Unfortunately the earplugs did not help as much as I'd hoped they would... once I resurfaced I felt the familiar stabbing pain in my ears, and I went straight back to the room for some advil.
After D did his jumps with the camera, we got G into her gear and all went snorkeling around the cove together. G was fond of swimming to the far ladder, getting out to take a break, then getting back in to swim back to our ladder. D noticed something floating around along the cliff edge, and I stuck my face down to take a look. Three massive lion fish were bobbing along, looking as though they were sleeping with their "wings" stretched far out, hugging the cliff wall but moving with the current... immediately below the ladder. I watched for them to be pushed out of the way before getting G out of the water, then grabbed the camera to take a few shots of them. The camera wouldn't focus through the sunbeam beating through the water, but I did manage to get close enough to capture this one.
This fish was a good 15 feet below me, and I'm not zoomed in. That sucker was HUGE.
Once we were done with the snorkeling adventures, we showered up and headed over to the restaurant at Tensing Pen for dinner. D ordered the pumpkin snapper that I'd had the night before, while I tried the jerk shrimp.
The jerk shrimp was excellent, nice and spicy with a slightly smokey flavor.
As we were waiting for our check, Tyrone showed up and hung out with us for a while, playing dominoes with G and D while I took advantage of the good wifi signal to upload the videos of my jump. After some fun visiting and a few games of dominoes, it was time to hit the sack.
That is one honkin' big fish. Shudder!!
ReplyDelete(lol: voldwx - Voldemort's personal online weather station)