Right now, I look like a freshly fried French lobster,
and I'm quite certain that I'm personally generating
half the heat in the islands. That's because I
completely forgot to put sunscreen on this morning.
Of course, what do you expect at 7:00AM?? I'm not sure
whose idea it was to wake up progressively earlier as
the week went on (OK, it was my idea), but clear,
rational thinking is definitely not one of the side
effects.
We drove over an hour and a half due West to the
marina at Luberon, and I took my first ever step on
board a catamaran. These things are incredibly cool!!
Now, I'm not generally fond of sailing or being on
extra large bodies of water in general. In fact, on
any given day if given the choice I'd rather skydive
out of an airplane at 10,000 feet than go sailing
around on a little sailboat. But even I had to admit
that a catamaran is one sweet looking sailing machine.
For those of you like me who have no clue about boats,
a catamaran has its main body resting across what look
like two gigantic canoes, so that there is air between
the central main body of the boat and the water.
(For future reference, this means that if you ever
find yourself in a James Bond-like situation and
someone is trying to run you over with a catamaran, if
they go directly over you there won't even be any need
to duck your head under water. You never know...)
The name of our catamaran for the day was Enterprise,
and the crew consisted of a captain, a bartender, and
two deckhands. The whole lot were incredibly jovial
the entire time and prone to dunking buckets of fresh
seawater over your head when you were least expecting
it.
We sailed for a couple hours to the sounds of dance
music, to some out-of-the-way beach I wouldn't be able
to find again if my life depended on it (it had sand
and palm trees, if that helps).
Nothing too exciting happened there (lunch doesn't
count), so while the rest of the passengers went on
this half hour, extremely boring-sounding tour of some
"genuine" local village (yawn), I swam back to the
catamaran and spent the next 15 - 20 minutes trying to
find a way to board without using the provided ladder
in the rear (you know, in case a James Bond-like
situation ever did come up).
Frankly, it's a lot harder than it looks and the
excercise ended up doubling as a good workout to boot
(but, yes, I succeeded, so if you ever need someone to
execute a hostile boarding of a catamaran, I'm your
man).
After everyone else got back on board, we sailed off
and lay anchor so that we could go snorkeling, another
thing I'd never tried before.
With those huge goggles, a rubber tube shoved into my
mouth and gigantic flippers, I felt like a gigantic
oversized duck, and I walked around like a retard
until I got the hang of the flipper things.
Once I got in the water it was a little better. I
could see all the way to the bottom (sadly, no ancient
gold or silver coins anywhere in sight), and I got so
absorbed into the whole thing that at one point I
forgot that I was supposed to breathe through my
blow-hole tube thing and accidentally snorted seawater
from inside my goggles. Cleared my sinuses right up.
When Pascal went in, he decided to jump off the side
of the boat instead of taking the ladder like everyone
else, and this wrenched his goggles and tube off. To
his utter consternation and embarassment, they
promptly sank straight to the bottom, and while Pascal
sloshed around bemoaning his fate one of the deck
hands dove down and fetched them for him.
I should point out at this point how unbelievably blue
the water was. If I hadn't known any better, I
could've sworn the locals had dumped blue food
coloring in just to sucker in the tourists--it was
that blue. And clear at the same time (that's a very
zen-like description, I know, but if you had seen it
you'd know exactly what I was talking about).
Anyhow, on the way back we all pretty much laid out on
the netting in front (suspended a couple feet off the
water) and basked in the Caribbean sun [insert
comments here about lack of sunscreen and skin cancer,
yadda yadda yadda].
So, on the whole, a very mellow, relaxing day. We're
back in Sosua now, gearing up to return to our evening
haunt, the High Caribbean Club. Tonight's feature? ...
the annual bikini contest extravaganza!!!! (I'm not
kidding!)
Cheers,
Gabriel
