Tuesday May 3 - Beach Day and a few videos to share

Prior to leaving we had a few excursion ideas loosely planned out, but without making any real final decisions on specific dates for what outing.  Tyrone's been having a fairly busy schedule himself, driving other people, so we are finding ourselves with several lazy beach days in a row.

Tuesday I woke up early again, around 5:30 a.m., and wandered the grounds with my zoom lens.  I was looking for bats (which roost up under the palm trees early in the morning) however I didn't see any, and the sun was still too low in the sky for decent light anyway.  After a few circles around the grounds, I headed back to the room and curled back up for a short nap.
I woke again shortly after 7, and walked up to the front office to get a form for laundry, when I noticed one of the housekeepers had stepped out of the office door and was taking a photo of something in a small tree.  I paused (always keenly interested in whatever anyone else is trying to photograph) and saw a tiny, egg shaped bit of brown wedged between two branches of a particularly sparse and tiny tree.  Inside the half-egg shape sat - perfectly still - a humming bird.  I lit up, tip-toed back a few steps, and hightailed it back to my room for my camera.

Momma Humming Bird on her nest.  It is in a dark corridor of the gardens, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO, which on my camera is plenty grainy.

After snapping a few shots to ensure I had good focus, I headed back to the room to join everyone for breakfast.  We went down to Chill Awhile again, and I had the oat porridge this morning with toast, coffee and orange juice.  After breakfast we lathered on the sunscreen, grabbed some bread, and headed out into the water for some fish feeding.  They appear to be so accustom to people feeding them that they tend to surround you as soon as you hit the water, perpetually circling and waiting for a morsel.

 G and Eric, the groundskeeper, tossing some bread to the fish while we wait for our breakfast.

In the 3 feet of water I've noticed 4 different regular fish.  There are smaller plain silver ones, which stay mainly at the bottom of the sea (and will sometimes nip at your toes if you stand in one place for too long)  There are the flat origami looking fish, which swim in large schools about mid-level, surfacing to attack lumps of bread.  These have short fins, the bottom fin tipped with a hint of yellow color.  There are larger flat fish, which look like the former only with longer fins tipped only in black, and they stay a bit deeper. Then there are the spikey guys... long skinny fish which appear to be a brilliant blue on their backs - when viewing them from the surface of the water - but seem to be all silver once you dip below the surface.

 From under the water, this shot shows the plain silvers, the flat guys, and the nose of a spikey guy up at the top.

From the surface looking down, this is what you see

 A year ago she was scared of the water, now she does not hesitate to swim through schools of fish on the beach.

Feeding the fish - in this video G helpfully drops bread directly in front of the camera lens



Here G swims right through the fish


I don't know why pizza kept sounding so good to us - perhaps all the swimming and walking we are doing - but we decided to head up the beach to Chances for lunch.  The pizza is OK... I preferred the plain cheese over what looked like canned toppings on our combination choice - but it was an edible lunch at least.

After lunch we were back in the chairs, alternating between swimming and reading, and chatting with some vendors.

 The Patty Man - for when you want a snack but don't want to leave your beach chair.

We had watched the clouds forming and dissipating all day, then... later than usual... the rain came through.  We decided to call it a day at that point and went in to shower up while the beach was rinsed off.  After cleaning up and checking on a few things online, we walked to the resort next door to check out their dinner menu.  It's something of a French influenced restaurant, with a few traditional Jamaican options available.  I ordered a shrimp curry (which I failed to take photos of) which was pretty good, though not my favorite on the island.  While we had waited for our dinner, I walked around the property's rows of neatly planted palm trees and took a few photos of the sunset.

I have noticed that while the days are generally fairly sweltering, the evenings cool down to a perfect temperature - from roughly 5:00 p.m. on it is comfortable enough outside for me to leave my hair down, and all the way up until bed time I've had no need for a jacket or long-sleeved shirt.

After dinner we walked back to Idle Awhile and hung around the porch and bar until it was time to close up shop and head to bed.

Oh, and D has been working on video montages for his travel blog... this is the first one he put together of our jumping adventures over at Tensing Pen... enjoy! (and please let me know if it won't play... we've had some issues with the videos intermittently not working)