Choosing Adventure Over Security: Boat Party!

Before I get to this past weekend, I just realized I hadn't written about a couple weekends ago when we had went to the beach. It was a pretty typical beach weekend, minus the ride there, so that's the only part I'm going to mention. As we were getting into Puerto, some guards on motorcycles drive up really fast and halt traffic and suddenly make everyone go a different way. We didn't think too much of it at first, but as we were deciding on the best way to go, we see a cop run past with his gun drawn, hear some blasts and see the smoke of some tear guns. Media isn't covering protests, but in certain areas they're definitely still going on. What would usually be an hour drive ended up taking about three hours. We drove all over looking for a detour to no avail. After a while we just told the cab drivers, look, we know where we are, we'll walk the rest of the way, paid them and let them figure out how to get home. The walk was fine and safe, just mildly long. The next day we learned that during the riots some girl had gotten shot in the face (and miraculously lived). We still went out to the beach, and enjoyed an overcast, but good day.

Now, onto this past weekend! We had a far less eventful ride up to the beach house and Dereek, Jay, Shannon and I got in on Friday night. We went out for some dinner, hung out, and went to bed to be ready for our boat ride the next day. The next morning, Morley, Matt, Andreina, Deliana, Shirley, and Camilo met us at the marina. The expats had all decided that since anywhere else in the world where we can't take advantage of a ridiculous exchange we'd never be able to rent a private boat, we'd take advantage of it here. For somewhere around $75-$85 per person (with five of us) we rented a 40 or so ft, multi level boat with captain and two crew men. We had a relaxing ride out to the island where we all just laid back, drank some beer, and enjoyed being in the Caribbean and having our own private boat. It was basically this: (note that the song that is playing is "I'm on a Boat")

When we were approaching the island we saw a whole pod of dolphins in front of us. There were TONS of them and they were all playing in front of our boat. It made for a really great way to come into the island. Note how close our hands are coming to where the dolphins were. They were literally right underneath us.

Once we got to the island we all had some fun jumping of the boat and into the water. Dereek arranged to have the oyster guys come out to us on their boat to bring us fresh oysters. So we just spent a good amount of time laying in the water with pool noodles, eating fresh oysters that were being handed out of one boat to us, and being thrown beer from one of the crew members on our boat. Really tough day.

Once it was time to leave that island, we continued onto a little cove where there was no one besides us and we had a bbq. Our boat had both a kitchen and an outdoor bbq so we were treated to salad, potatoes, and bbq-ed meats. After we finished lunch we went to yet another island for a little bit. At this point it was getting slightly overcast, so no one really continued to swim, but we did enjoy just sitting on the front of the boat and watching another pod of dolphins swim under us.

At about 4:30 we headed back to shore and our boat trip was over, unfortunately. It was really amazing to be able to live so luxuriously, it's likely something I'll never get to do again. We were constantly making jokes about the fact that we literally had a captain, one guy cooking food for us, and another to bring us beer, on our private boat. That's not something most teachers get to do. Shannon, Jay, Matt, Andreina, Dereek and I stayed at the beach house on Saturday night, too and then came back to Anaco and school on Sunday at about lunch time.

Here are some awesome pictures from the day: