Mofongo, Mojito, Miguelito, y Pescado!

Wednesday, March 21: Hold on to your coconuts!
As had become our brief custom, we arose yesterday for breakfast at the pool bar. If you get there early enough, there are only a few souls there, the breezes are light and fresh, and you get first dibs at the buffet. I am enamored with the fresh fruit bar! And Dios Mio! these folks know how to make a fuerte cup of café! Right, so, we’re sitting there enjoying breakfast before the heat of the day, and notice a small crew going palm tree to palm tree. One guy has on climbing gear and goes scurrying up the palms. Once up there, he hacks with surgical skill at the lower lying palms and dead bits, and these drop to the ground. Waiting below are a couple of other fellows who load up the palms and debris into a dilapidated Chevy Astro. We both remarked at how amazing this whole ballet was. Then, as he climbed the next palm, wife remarked with approval that at least this time he was climbing up with a safety rope. She was almost right. The rope was to ensure that the coconuts he was whacking free from the palm could be lowered safely to his amigos on the ground! Safety rope? We don’t need no stinking safety ropes! I asked the waitress about this. She said he comes every other month, charges by the tree, and then sells the coconuts at a stand back in the village. This would explain the parallel track marks each palm sports!

And while I’m thinking about it, breakfast is also the best time to watch the local black birds. I’ve seen these same birds in Nicaragua, Grenada, St. Vincent, and St. Thomas. I’m guessing that they are just warm climate foul. They are solid black, have long thin beaks, make ear piercing shrieking calls, and fold their tail feathers like a rudder when they fly. The males have little feather puffing boxing matches to stake out the best tables and the most desirable females. And they all love to nab abandoned morsels from plates the service staff hasn’t cleared away quite yet. But the real shocker is their predilection for artificial sweeteners! On each table, there are little ceramic boxes with sugar, Splenda, and Equal. The sugar packets may as well contain the cure for cancer, the secrets of the Kennedy assassination, and the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. The birds couldn’t care less about them. But each day, the careful observer can empty yellow and blue packets lying about the bar with beak-shaped gouges through them. Although the birds may gorge on sausage, egg, and butter, these flying reivers steer clear of sugar. I guess they’re all on the Adkins diet?

Right. The dive. Ok, this time we remembered both the diffuser and the memory card. The dives went well. One more trip to the wall, one more tour of Andreas Reef. Although we were shark-less this go round, we did get some good shots of trigger fish, a trumpet fish, schools of snapper, a queen angel, and some crustaceans! I’ve attached a couple of shots. More to come once we get back in the States.

After an impossibly tasty plantain encrusted mahi-mahi lunch back by the pool, we retired for our afternoon nap. After three days of daily diving, we were a bit worn out, and took dinner in the room. Sleeeep. Sleeeep.

Thursday, March 22: To the Bat Cave!
Despite the fact that we didn’t dive today, we nevertheless arose for our early breakfast. Sure, that means waking up early, but when it comes to buffets and communion chalices during flu season, I’d rather be first in line than last! Today is the local version of Labor Day, so there would be many people at the beach.

After breakfast, we went on a hike through Guanica’s “dry forest” up to a cave. The cave itself is made of igneous rock, home to many bats, and despite its cooler temperatures, it was still quite humid. Reminded me of Paris Hilton: picturesque, hollow, and creepy, all at the same time.

Afterward, we cleaned up and had lunch. I made a futile attempt at a nap, hence the occasion for this blog update. Dinner is at 8:pm. We leave the resort tomorrow to start our way back to San Juan. Already I feel that inescapable vacation dread, the one you feel when the time is almost but not quite done. When you know that soon you’ll be back to work, but not yet. How insanely hard it is just to be where one is, rather than preemptively being where one cannot yet truly be. Bleh. Fortunately, the bar received a fresh shipment of mint leaves. I believe we may be able to treat this with a carefully built mojito, born of mint leaves, a mortar and pestle, DonQ, and a squeeze of fresh lime.

Hasta Proximo!

The Kind of Memory You Can Forget to Remember

The Rest of Monday . . .
Monday night wife and I took stab #2 at a quiet evening of dining. Four little girls, a birthday cake, a violinist, and an unhealthy amount of self medication later (I’m only kidding about the self-medication) we decided that we’d done something horrible in the eyes of God. I mean, I don’t go to McDonald’s to get lit and use loud, abusive profanity. Why has Chuck E. Cheese decided to relocate to Restaurante Alexandra!?!?! We got desert to go.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007: The Sea Was Angry, My Friend . . .
Breakfast is easily one of my favorite meals here at Copamarina, even if an inaccurate signage did put the chastity of my Lenten fast at risk with the unannounced smattering of ham in the Eggs Fritata. Speaking of which, fast forward to lunch. I tried this “Seafood Mofongo” thing that was made of a smashed plantain edible bowl filled with various cuts of shrimp, octopus, and fresh fish covered with a garlic butter sauce I still haven’t stopped tasting. Afterward, I asked the waitress what “mofongo” meant. “Oh, uh, that is just what we call this dish. It has the plantain all mash up with the bacon . . .” Oh. Bacon. Right. Next year I gotta give up something less perilous for Lent.

The dive. OK, so we went back to the wall. Before we got in the water, I noticed that we had inadvertently left the “diffuser” for the camera strobe (read: high powered underwater flash) back in the room. Fine. We dropped in, and I started taking some better shots of wife than I did Monday. That was of course until the camera began to flash “MEMORY FULL.” NO! NO NO NO!!!! That was what I screamed ineffectually through my regulators! “This can’t be right! Wife emptied ALL the photos from the memory onto the computer when we put the memory card in it.” (insert moment of clarity . . . . HERE!) Oh, crap. Yep. Memory card was STILL in the computer. In the room. On dry land. So, just imagine, to humor me, that we had inserted a couple of photos here of the numerous barracuda, the 12 foot shark, the lobsters, the HUGE crab hiding in the barrel coral, a drum trigger fish, and an indeterminate but substantial number of yellowtail snapper schooled conveniently under the reef.

We ate dinner at the seaside bar tonight. We chatted with a nice couple from Germany. They asked where we were from. Not only did they know Alabama, I got to hear a German pronounce “Pascagoula.” Good times, good times.

The Last Spring Break.

Sat. March 17: Be Careful What You Wish For!
The flight to Puerto Rico was a play in two acts. Act 1: The flight itself was largely uneventful, which is to say, we slept. And it wasn’t even really the landing. It was more the sitting on the tarmac for 45 minutes waiting on a gate to become available while the stewardess-Nazi forcibly raised people’s seats into the up, locked, and perturbed position and made intermittent snarky comments over the PA about the inability of the plane to taxi while even the least little bit of a buckle was not securely fastened into the metal fitting. This rousing melody served as a counterpoint to the incessant yammering of the three little boys in front of us playing a game of “slap” to which I wanted to play a brief but demonstrative role. I quietly wished three things: That we would not miss our connecting flight, that it would not be populated by annoying children, and that the flight attendants would be less fascist.
After a not-so glamorous jog through the Charlotte airport, we arrived at our connecting flight just in time to sit there and wait for late arriving flights to delay ours. Wish 1 answered! And the flight attendants? In a word: Fabulous! Wish 2 under wraps. And the annoying children issue? See, now that’s were it gets complicated. If by “children” you mean humans who haven’t reached the age of majority, fine. But if you include drunken, extroverted, spiky haired, fifty year old exhibitionist trophy wives who don’t have an “indoor voice” nor know when to grow up, um, you must have been on our flight. A flight which, by the way, sat a mere 30 minutes on the tarmac waiting for a gate to come available. I feel a theme developing here.
Firmly expecting things could only get better, Wife and I set out to find our first night’s accommodations. All in all, that would have gone swimmingly but for a single letter of the alphabet: S. See, in Spanish, if you are choosing North v. South as a direction for a given highway, Sr is the abbreviation for “Sur” (i.e., South) and Nr. is the abbreviation for “Norte” (yup, you guessed it, North). Two different webs sites told us to go Sr when we shoulda gone Nr. We discovered this only after an impromptu tour of an area just South of where our reservations were.
We ate. We slept. Better days were to come.

Sunday, March 18: Something about this feels VERY familiar.
We got up early and drove South and West through the interior of PR. The island is as breathtaking as I remembered it. The northern faces of the interior mountains are lush, green, and resplendent with hillside farmlands. Then, on the ride back down the mountain, the topography changes to a more “brown” theme, cacti become the common vegetation. Wife handled the driving, I played navigator. Although the overwhelming majority of locals we have spoken with are bilingual, the road signage is not. Hence, the his and hers roles.

We arrived at the resort and within 15 minutes, I was reminded of our days in Grenada! This place looks almost just like the Coyaba on Grand Anse Beach. The low-lying architecture, the palms, the beach toys, the pools and the adjacent pool bars, even the birds. Felt a lot like coming home. Our room has a back door that opens onto a private patio which faces the garden area around the second pool and its associated tiki bar, which in turn face the Caribbean Sea. Yeah, this will do fine. We made dinner reservations, took a dip, took a nap, and awoke just in time to make our reservations.
Dinner was delicious. Seafood crepes in coconut milk and wine sauce. Some kind of cannoli I really can’t remember the ingredients of. Halibut and risotto. Filet and lobster. Flan de queso and crepes. All of which were enjoyed accompanied by the distinctly annoying tunes of children produced by parents who have no business taking them out in public. Mmmm, the dulcet tones of parental irresponsibility!

Monday, March 19: Tony and BamBam.
Breakfast was early and worth every bite. They have a serious handle on the whole dining thing here! We then set out with the dive boat. Wife, me, and one other lady were the divers. Tony was our divemaster for the day, and Bambam our boat captain. Tony is tall, thin, dark, and confident. Like so many dive instructors I’ve known, he wears enough neoprene for about two normal people. I never fell prey to that thin skinned business. Wife and I were both fine in swim suits and spandex shirts. The ocean is bath water temperature as far as I’m concerned.
Dive one was a wall dive. Now, when I say “wall” what I mean is, the ocean floor rolls along at a depth of about 70 or 80 feet, then abruptly drops off to a couple thousand feet. I mean, you look down and there’s more “blue” than indigo day at the Crayola factory. We swam down the wall to a little over 100 feet. Great sea life. Very little coral damage. These sites are virtually exclusive to this dive operation, they’ve taken great care of the ocean floor, and it shows.
Dive two was a shallower reef dive. The current was a bit more aggressive, but there were some great morays, lobsters, angel fish, trumpet fish, and few schools of smaller species. We got a few good shots with the new camera. The ride back was rough, but quick.
Lunch! Well, see, if I keep writing about the food here, I fear it’s gonna get annoying. Plantains rock. MahiMahi is yummy yummy.