First and Last Tropical Christmas

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Merry Christmas! Waking up to a blazing sun and the sound of the ocean on Christmas day may sound like complete luxury, but all I can describe as, is odd! We passed around some pressies and I opened my little present bag from Mum and Dad that I had been carrying around for the past week. Besides all my makeup that you just can’t get over here, there were other lovely nik naks and a beautiful silver heart locket with a photo of mum and dad inside (which made me want to cry) and a lovely leather Thomas Sabo Bracelet for Ste, which he was very happy about. With the confusing situation of the resort changing management on Christmas day, of all days, we weren’t sure quite what to expect as we headed up for Christmas breakfast. To cut a long story short, we didn’t get a Christmas cocktail and instead of four amazing ‘deluxe burgers’ we got two cheese burgers in a bun, a cheese burger in a baguette, one chicken burger in a bun and another chicken burger in a stale bun! Not quite the breakfast we’d hoped for and to top it off the new owner decided to start interviewing us about our stay! It’s Christmas bloody day, I thought!





To be honest, the day wasn’t set to get much better. We took Verity to the hospital for her antibiotic drip where enjoyed some Christmas Day entertainment watching a woman having her ear syringed and a couple being decompressed after some diving problem! Verity didn’t even get a bed this time. It was the next few hours that did my nut, everyone wanted to hire a jeep, but I refused as none for the vehicles are insured on the island and if something like a jeep got totalled for any reason, we would have to foot a colossal bill and be on the first plane home. So instead we looked for scooters for about 2 hours. Me and Ste didn’t manage to get one as we didn’t have our passports on us and when we finally found someone who would take a deposit instead, they suddenly no longer had the bike available! Disgruntled, bored, fed up and wishing we had just done something… anything, instead of traipse around town in the baking heat we headed back to meet the other guys at Tesco and argued with a taxi driver to get a good price back to the resort. Chris, Ben and V followed us closely behind on their scooters, the entire way back, and I prayed Verity wouldn’t come flying off and do any more damage to herself. We had made it pretty much back to Lucky when I turned round and saw Ben sliding across the dust sideways on his scooter. Fortunately no damage was done and he just laughed! Oh lord I thought, is this the tale of things to come?!





Christmas Dinner, was the next challenge. The other guys on their scooters and me and Ste on foot we set off up the road to find somewhere decent to eat. We had accepted there would be no pigs in blankets or chestnut stuffing for us this year, but we still wanted some good quality food in a half decent establishment. It took us a while to find somewhere that looked worthy of having Christmas dinner in and once we were seated we went all out on ordering cocktails (which were lunch) starters and mains, to get in the Christmas spirit a little. Id love to say we received the best service ever and had a great time, but no, it was a shambles. The starters didn’t show up for an hour and a half, then Ste’s Prawn cocktail with 6 prawns and an ocean of cocktail sauce in a martini glass appeared. He instantly complained but the guy was insisting we were paying the money for his ‘special’ Brandy prawn sauce, that tasted like utter crap! The decision was unanimous that it tasted like tea. The mains then arrived and it wasn’t until this moment that she decided to tell us my starter of garlic bread had finished. I just gave her an eye and started on my main that had no rice. Me, Ste and V had all finished our mains and the guys Mains didn’t showed up until a good half hour later! Disaster! I don’t know how the European manager dared bring us the bill! Chris decided to leave him a special gift in his special sauce…a tiny dead snake that I had brought off the road to scare Verity with! Perefectly curved around with its head poking out of the glass; we shot downstairs in hysterics to get Verity’s change, unfortunately he needed to get smaller notes from the 7/11!! Uh ohhh, they were going to find the surprise before we had left!! “See you guys, we’ve got a long walk, better go off ahead” Ste said, and we scuttled off laughing. The entire way, we were thinking the grumpy manager was going to appear on his scooter and so we virtually ran up the hills. We also picked up a scary barking dog on the way, which wouldn’t leave us alone and followed us for 15 minutes all the way to our resort entrance! A kind man tried to shoo it away from us to no avail, but eventually it darted off into the bushes!






Back at lucky I finally managed to get in contact with my family and it really made my day to speak to them all! But today was one of those days, I would really love to be able to pop back home. Ste reckons it was written in the stars that Christmas day would be rubbish, but I think we should have just gone for sweet and simple and just headed to a lovely beach, snorkelled and done some fishing perhaps, instead of faffing about with scooters etc. People will probably think it’s my fault for not agreeing to the jeep, but to be honest; I wasn’t even really up for hiring a vehicle that day anyway. I just wanted to DO something, something simple. You don’t have to walk far to see somewhere new and beautiful on the West coast.

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Photos

Deluxe Burger
...new managment style = rubbish

Banana Shake
...because they had no cocktails

Snowman
just chillin' - no pun intentdd

Hospital
wainting for Verity to have her drip!