Today we got up at 7:30 a.m. and went for a swim on our beach. We gave each other sand massages, then washed off in the ocean. We had some spray-on tanning lotion, and Michael said that it would work better if we got ride of the “dead” skin on our bodies. We sprayed on the lotion and waited for it to work. I guess we didn’t know what it should do, but it didn’t seem to make us look darker, except for Michael’s feet that turned slightly orange.
We went exploring on the beach and ended up going around a rocky, craggy point (in our flip flops....it was interesting!). It was really fun and very pretty. We were trying to get to a beach on the other side called Happy Beach that was, according to the map, just on the other side of the peninsula.
After we walked on the rocks for quite a while we decided to go over the top of the hill (it didn't look very high and was much closer than walking back to the road) to the beach on the other side.
It was OK for a while, then got really dense with sticky trees and very tall cactus. The going got really slow and difficult. We thought of turning back but we didn't because we figured it was easier to keep going than to back track, always thinking that the end was near. We could see the sky and the ocean, and it was so inviting and beautiful, but we couldn't get there. It got so difficult that we stopped and prayed for a way out. We soon came to a fence (Michael pulled up the post and we crawled under it) and got down to the beach. The beach was so inviting, and we were so hot and scratched that we jumped right into the water.
The salt water stung at first but ended up soothing or bodies from all the pricks we got on our incredible journey. We found 5 conch shells along the trail that we wanted to bring home, but found out we couldn't, so we left them for our land lady. After a while we walked out to our hotel. We found out that we were behind a locked gate for a deserted army depot.
We had to climb over the fence to get out! We decided it was a metaphor of our life. What started out to be a short cut turned out to be more difficult than we had expected. The stickers on the bushes and the sharp thorns on the cactus reminded us about how Satan can lead us astray by presenting what looks like the easy way. We need to keep our eye on the beauty of life as we pass through the thorns and stickers of life.
We got home and showered and took a nap, then ate lunch at another lolo. Afterwards we wanted to go to a town called Marigot, and started to walk. From looking at the map, we thought it was only a couple of miles. On the road we saw one of the locals, and we asked her if she knew anything about the buses on the island. She said "Sure, there's one right there" and pointed to a minivan that did not say it was a bus, but it was. And thus began our adventure with the mini van buses, which we used exclusively from that time forward. The buses had no schedules and no bus stops to speak of. There was a regular procession of mini vans going up and down the street, and you can ride to the end of their run for a dollar. As they passed you, they honked their horns twice. If you wanted to ride, you held out your arm. When you wanted to get off, you yelled, “Stop please”. It didn’t matter where on the road they were when they picked you up or let you off, they would just stop, most of the time blocking the traffic behind them. Sometimes, for a little extra, if you asked them, they would take you somewhere they wouldn’t normally go, and then they would stop when you needed to get off, so it was really like a cheap taxi cab.
These vans (and the bigger buses that went from Marigot to Phillipsburg) had drop down seats in the aisles, so you could really pack in a lot of people, but if a person in the back requested a "Stop, please", you all had to get out and get out of the way so they could exit and then get back on. This was always a trick for us, because we usually had backpacks, a food pack, and our snorkeling gear! Some (most) of the bus drivers, as well as everyone else on the road, were crazy drivers, and would pass other cars on these small roads with the oncoming cars only a few yards ahead. Most of the buses were legitimate with a bus license plate and a sign in the window saying where their destination was. But sometimes, we think we just rode with people who were going our way that were not buses at all and just wanted to earn a couple of bucks. Does that make us hitch-hikers?
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Generally they used their "horn" communication. A small friendly beep, beep as they came up behind you meant they were a bus and did you want a ride? However, a small beep could also mean that they were full or any number of other things. It was really fun for us to ride the buses and get a feel of the local color and the people of the islandWe went to Marigot and found a very nice, very modern mall. We were surprised at how pricey it was, and how much it looked like a smaller version of a mall in the states. It was a stark contrast to what we had seen so far, which was lots of very small, un-zoned houses that were generally unkempt. The industry of the island is tourism. They have lots of boat excursions, water craft rentals, hotels, bazaars, and restaurants, but they are all for the tourists. We walked along the boardwalk into a nautical shop and talked with a nice man who owned it and who had been to Salt Lake. He told us about places on the island to visit.
We found a grocery store, and bought some groceries, then took a bus back to the hotel. We were trying to track down where church was the next day, but couldn’t find the card with the phone number on it that we got before we left SLC (Michael found it after the fact!) That night, we went out on the beach and watched the sunset, then back to the room for a snack and watched a video (there were no TV's in the rooms, but we had a portable DVD player and our own videos).