Day Three: Trouble in Paradise... Arctic conditions!

You know how sometimes when you travel, you wake up and either don't know where you are or you think you're back home in your own bed? Well, that happened to us the first night we were in the Bahamas. We woke up to cloudy skies, windy weather, and a temperature at a teeth-chattering 63º. So much for escaping Portland weather! Fortunately we had our Portland clothes with us, or we would have frozen. We went to breakfast, which was served on the waterfront, and noticed some kids leaning over the edge of the rails. I thought they were feeding the seagulls, which was aggravating, since they had already stolen Margaret's toast and I'd gotten the blame for not watching it closely enough. (I just don't know how I could have kept a seagull from swooping out of the air and grabbing her toast with the alacrity of a lacrosse player snatching a ball from the air!) Anyway, when we got up to leave, we saw what they were really feeding was a bunch of fish... overly fat fish that had developed an unhealthy addiction to Froot Loops. We were suitable impressed and couldn't wait for our snorkel trip, because if the breakfast fish were any indication, the snorkeling was going to be amazing.

After breakfast, we joined a couple other people for our first excursion of our trip. We were booked on a kayaking and cave tour at a national park on the island. I was pretty excited about it, as the kayaking portion when through a mangrove swamp. In fact I was so excited about it that thinking about all the great pictures we were going to get got up in the middle of the night to recharge the camera battery. When we started the kayaking tour, and as we were slowly making our way through a particularly spooky section of mangrove, I got out the camera to start taking pictures. I pressed the power button, but thought I'd pressed the wrong one since the camera lay lifeless in my hands. After I pressed the power button a second time, I realized that the battery was by now VERY well charged and still plugged into the outlet in the hotel room! Noooooooooo!

Fortunately I'd bought an underwater camera in anticipation of snorkeling, so we did get a couple of shots in the mangrove swamp. (So forgive the low picture quality in the photos from this day). And it was pretty cool, too. A couple of times, the waterway was so narrow and the light so dim that it felt like that scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where they were going to see the Voodoo priestess. We didn't see any Voodoo priestesses, but there was a couple in our group from Spain who hardly spoke any English, so Margaret spent the whole time translating the guide's instructions and comments. I had to laugh when the guide was talking about some plant that had traditionally been used to make a love drug, but now in the age of Viagara, the plant was taking over because no one had need of harvesting it any more. Well, when Margaret was translating that and got to the Viagara part, she just said "Viagara" to which the couple both said, "Ahh, Viagara." I guess that word is now universal.

After the kayak trip swept us all the way to the ocean, we landed on the beach and waited while the guides loaded the kayaks on the trailer. While we were waiting, we wandered around and came upon two ancient and practically disintegrating ships. And not just any ships, but classic, pirate-era galleons. They were both beached and weathered. One had a couple of cannonball holes in its side. We were amazed... imagine PIRATE SHIPS right before our eyes! As we walked around them, I noticed a couple of plywood patches to them, which I figured was the government's way of keeping them from falling apart, given their advanced age. When the guide told us that they were sets for the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, I was a little disappointed. It was like finding out that the Bible was just a book patched together form a variety of disparate sources with questionable authorship. Talk about having the rug pulled out from under you!

On the nature walk portion of the tour, the guide did something that you'd NEVER see a US park ranger do... he was chumming animals so all the tourists could see them. He even did it inside a cave we descended into. A fragile ecosystem held in the balance for thousands of years, with fish specifically evolved to the location and water so pure you could literally drink it, now having bread thrown into it and the fish coming to expect it. Can you imagine Yellowstone rangers chumming buffalo to come over to the tourists?

When we got back, it had warmed up a little bit so we went on a walk on the beach. We got in the water, and to our surprise, it was warmer than the air. That was okay as long as we were willing to stay in the water, but the second we got out, we were freezing. Fortunately the hotel had a hot tub, which was the only way we could warm up. Blue lips and uncontrollable shaking didn't really go with our outfits. After a couple of hours in the hot tub, we were finally warmed up and we went into town and had some more fried conch. And we went to bed with the high hopes that the last of the cold weather was behind us. We both thought that it better be... we didn't fly a quarter of the way around the planet to viist a cold and rainy locale. Kharma OWED us! (Plus we had reservations to ride horses on the beach the following morning and although riding a horse in the rain may look romantic in the movies, it's not everything it's cracked up to be.)