Honeymoon 6.4

Things looked SO much better in the morning, both literally and figuratively. I woke up to a view from our balcony straight over the bay, the sun casting colors off the sky that the water echoed, almost seeming to combine the colors halfway between off on the horizon. I lounged on the balcony for a little while , sipping coffee and dozing on a beach chair.

Mike roused a bit later and we took off to the airport to pick up the rental car. In our battle with the map and poorly-marked roads, we slowly realized it may have been a blessing in disguise that we couldn't pick up the rental car the night before. Navigation is so confusing that I'm not sure we would have ever found our resort until we had the benefit of daylight. Winding our way back to the resort, it was about noon and we decided to hit the beach for some activities.

We had been informed that the majority of tourist activities and attractions on the island are totally dependent on the cruise ship business, and that many of those things would not be open unless there was a ship in port. We'd had our eye on the jet ski rentals across the bay from us, and knew we could tell if he was open for business (and therefore whether there was a ship in port or not) by whether or not he had his sun-faded red canopy up.

We walked around the beach to there (the canopy was up) and the owner was busy haggling with some half-drunk college students who were being wrangled by one of their fathers and trying to decide if they were going to go out. The vendor finally acknowledged our presence and told us it would be at least an hour before we could rent. By then, we were fine with that- highly hesitant about sharing the bay with these yahoos on jet skis. I couldn't help but chuckle later when I saw those knuckleheads on the beach just a short time later. They hadn't gone jetskiing, and I sympathized with the vendor- I guess there's really no way for you to be sure who's ready to pony up and get going (us), and who's gonna dinker around, waste your time, and make you lose your other customers in the process (them).

We had brought our snorkel gear with us, so we walked across the road to Coki beach and staked our claim in the sand. We spent the next hour and a half snorkeling at Coki beach. A young islander offered to sell me some tuna to feed to the fish, but I passed. At first we saw just a few schools of very small fish, similar to minnows. We started swimming along the west curve of the bay where it was rocky, and realized thre were coral formations on the rocks in the shallows. Wind and wave were virtually nonexistent in the bay, so the rocks didn't pose a safety hazard. We swam that for a while, watching all the fish zip and dart away when they realized we weren't going to feed them. We finished snorkleing and lounged on the beach for a little while, just soaking up sunshine.

Heading back to the hotel, we decided to find a grocery store- $17.25 for a pound of bacon, a quart of milk, and a small box of cereal from the hotel "pantry" just wasn't going to cut it, and we wanted some better breakfast food. We found KMart, which seems to be the center of commerce, not to mention cheap booze. By the time we got back we were ready for an evening dinner at Fungis, and a straight shot upstairs to collapse into bed for the night.