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Published: October 16th 2008
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I woke up bright and early ready for the breakfast drum. I pointed out to Matt that they don’t cover up their food here so any buffet set up will be swarming with flies if we don’t make it down as soon as they lay it out. I was right. When the time came we arrived at a table set with a plate of weird looking pink muffins. The couple the previous night had been warned by someone else not to eat the breakfast muffins (they couldn’t remember why), but I gave them a try anyway just before the flies landed. They were ok, just bready muffins with a slightly sticky pink top.
There was an urn of water for tea and coffee and some big containers of cereal. Just as we were finishing our food a swarm of people gathered around the table where the cereals were - someone must have brought out some more food. I saw people grabbing slices of fresh fruit from platters and realised that there were also cubes of cake there too (chocolate cake for breakfast - weird!) We waited for the crowd to move off and then went to check it out. All
that was left was the chocolate cake, a jammy cake and a couple of slices of watermelon. Anything worthy had already gone. We gave up and finished what we’d been eating. Just as we were getting ready to go (half an hour after the breakfast drum had sounded) someone brought out a toaster and started doing toast for a little queue that formed immediately (with a single two slice toaster it was surely going to take a long time to do toast for everyone!) It was a weird way to do breakfast - you’d think everything would be ready when the drum sounds but instead everything happens at little intervals.
We gave up and left. It was all too much like hard work for us.
We headed back to our room for a while then got our things together and headed down to the beach. Matt felt that we should go in straight away for a snorkel as it was still fairly high tide. The weather wasn’t great; it was overcast with occasional spits of rain so snorkelling seemed like the best way to spend the morning. If it was going to rain anyway it didn’t matter if
we were already in the lagoon.
This place had a snorkelling area to follow along the reef marked by empty squash bottles painted orange and strung together with rope. They’ve been trying to preserve the reef here and have even been farming coral. To do this they’ve trimmed off bits of coral and attached these to cement ‘cookies’ which are held on squares of netting. It takes six months for a little piece of coral the length of your little finger to grow into a more substantial lump that can then be transplanted onto the reef.
The snorkelling here was great. Immediately we were surrounded by fish. Many that we had seen before, but we also saw plenty of new ones. There were even two giant racoon fish that were at least four times bigger than the others we'd seen. Unfortunately for me we still didn’t see the lion fish that we’d heard lived on the reef, even though we went quite a way along. We did see a massive fish that we think might have been a snapper. I wasn’t too keen on him as he was so big but Matt dived down and got some good
snaps of him.
By the time we got out of the water the weather had turned worse and we decided to head back to our room to warm up with a hot shower. The rain came down and the weather stayed terrible for the rest of the day.
When the lunchtime drum sounded we were pleased to see today’s meal was spaghetti bolognaise and garlic bread. OK, it didn’t quite taste like the stuff you make back home (the garlic bread was made with sweet bread and the garlic butter was raw for a start!) but it was a nice change having something that we recognised.
The afternoon was spent laying in various places reading our books. I started out in the hammock until the rain got too heavy and started coming down through the trees, and then it really was time to go indoors.
Matt got so bored at one point that he started packing without being asked which felt like a miracle! Before we even went out to dinner in the evening we were all packed up and ready to go.
In the evening we sat with a group of other backpackers and
a father and son. It was fun chatting to some other people our own age for a change and sharing our experiences about where we’d been before. Dinner was some kind of salty sweet corn soup, a salad with bacon and a weird dressing, followed by roast beef! It was served with the toughest roast potatoes I’ve ever had (at one point I almost pinged them off my plate while trying to cut one in half!) Pudding was cubes of the weird sweet bread in a kind of custard.
Matt headed off to bed really early as he was too hot and I stayed back chatting with the other backpackers. By 8.30pm we were both in bed.
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