Saturday, February 11, 2006

Today has been the chillest of chill days. I woke up last night around midnight to find the fan off. I thought it was Michael again, but he said the electricity had gone off on its own. Then we had a confusing interlude where I asked if he’d turned the TV off and he kept saying, no the electricity just went off. But what I meant was that I thought he should turn the TV off anyway, or else when the electricity came back on the TV would come blaring on and scare us to death, but he said TVs don’t work like that anymore since they no longer have manual analog switches. Who knew?

Anyway, things sucked without the fan. It was sticky and humid and the mosquitos were having a field day – but only on delicious, tasty me. Michael didn’t get one bite, but I was up every twenty minutes with a new one. So when the cool of early morning arrived and the fan (which evidently has a manual analog switch) popped back on around 8:30, we took advantage of the comfort to sleep nice and late.

Michael went out to pay for the room and came back and told me that the electricity was only out in our room, that we’d used up our daily electricity ration and it wouldn’t be coming back on until noon. But when he saw me about to explode in fury, he didn’t have the heart to keep up the charade, probably because he didn’t want to experience the fit I would throw, and admitted he was just kidding, that the electricity had gone off all over town. He's funny, isn't he?

Later we found a little comedor for lunch. The food here has been wonderful, but at about $10 USD per meal, not exactly cheap. So we hoped to scale down a bit by checking out the down-home comedor. Two men were already sitting at one of two plastic tables outside the people’s house. We sat down at the other and waited for a long time, just gazing out at the sand street and brightly colored sheets hanging on laundry lines. Finally a woman came out to bring a drink to one of the men and spotted us.

“Oh, you don’t want nothing to eat?” she asked pleasantly and rhetorically. “Just refreshin? …ok” and she started to head back inside.

“No, we do want to eat,” Michael said, just in time, and she came back. “What do you have today?”

“Well, I can make you some fried fish,” she said. “That’s what I’m making for them.”

We said that sounded great and asked for two plates. Then she wanted to know what we wanted to drink. She said she had gaseosas (sodas) or she could make us a lime refresco with ice. We opted for the lime refresco and she said, “I’ll make that now and then you can drink it while you wait for the food?” This we agreed to.

Her daughter then ran across the street and came back with our ice, a plastic bag that had been filled with water and then frozen, which would be hacked into smaller pieces for our beverages. “We’re taking a real chance,” Michael said. But what’s a travel saga without the traveler getting wretchedly sick? The lime drink, which was like lemonade, was tasty and nice and cold.

The fried fish came with a huge mound of rice, some plantains and cole slaw. We took a further risk by garnishing our food with spicy pickled vegetables from an unlabeled jar. Yummers. She also brought us glasses of cold water that prior to being refrigerated came straight from the open cistern next to the house. I took a tentative sip and it tasted muddy. We were too afraid to drink it, which was a bit silly because we each drank two glasses of lemonade that was made from the same water.

After lunch we went back to the room to lie down and watch a little CNN and then in the cool of the afternoon we went down to the main dock and had coffee at a little upstairs balcony restaurant overlooking the dock. Before the coffee came we wondered if it would be real coffee or Nescafé. I guessed Nescafé and was right. The coffee situation down here would be hard for a true coffee lover, but for me it’s great. Super sweet, creamy lightly coffee-flavored yumminess with no caffeine. “Celebrate the moments of your life,” I said.

At first the dock was largely deserted. Two little boys in shorts and ragged t-shirts and a little girl in a dress printed with strawberries flung rocks into the water and two teenage boys stirred green paint but never seemed to actually paint anything. The light danced on the water and the clouds and strains of reggae music drifted by.

It’s clear we’re not in a touristy spot because although we hear reggae music everywhere we go in town, we have never yet heard any Bob Marley. The more touristy the beach spots are, the less likely you are to hear anything that's not on Legend. Don’t get me wrong, I own Legend, but it’s nice to hear some variety.

The calm continued until the slow boat came in. It was packed and as soon as it was tied up, people started streaming off. Bags and boxes were handed down and everything was carried away by hand. Giant, dripping bags of frozen chicken parts went off on men’s backs – one came up the stairs to our restaurant. Sheets of corrugated tin – someone’s new roof – were handed down, mattresses, suitcases, and what seemed to be a dissasembled house or shed, bristling with old nails.

We saw everyone we’ve come in contact with here so far. The woman who cooked us lunch came down, Wesley, who runs our hotel came down. The process was still going on an hour later when we drank the sweet, cold dregs of our Nescafé and left.

So I’ve been sitting here on the porch writing and Michael’s been out shooting. He met a few people while he was out. Two little girls asked him to take their photo and when he said no (because this always costs money) they told him, “f- you.” Which is much worse than “mala suerte.” But he says they all laughed about it afterwards.

The other person he met was the captain of an ice boat that said he might be going to the Corn Islands tomorrow. That guy, Augusto, just came by the hotel to say he was indeed going tomorrow and he’d be willing to take us, along with the French guy, Brice, whom we just met this afternoon who was also waiting out the time to get to the Corn Islands. He said we need to be down at his place at 7:00 a.m. sharp. The ride will cost us two gallons of gasoline and some other charge which he has yet to decide upon. So hopefully that will work out.

 

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The Green Lodge, our guesthouse.

Laguna de Perlas street.

Boats, Laguna de Perlas.

Water view.