September 29

---

Wow, it is Thursday already!!

Guess what we did at 7 am? Jumped up and went birding at the Spanish Lagoon of course. Can’t beat the photo of the Ruby-topaz humming bird taken the other day, but there’s a really cute one of the hummer with a HUGE bare-eyed pigeon on the same branch. You can imagine lots of subtitles for that.And another where he is displaying his lovely red fanned tail.

We returned home for a small breakfast and to change into our snorkeling gear – let’s see how the drift looks at Mangel Halto. It was THE BEST ever. Hardly any waves or current and so very clear. We had so much fun just exploring near the entrance to the drift because a local coming out as we entered suggested we go “upstream,” which we’d never done before : elkhorn corals, very alive varieties of all sorts, and eels and many fish. In fact, we were in no hurry and spent an hour in that area before drifting - it took about 2.5 hours to the end.

We met a family from Columbia at the end, who spoke very little English, which was great fun for us. They wanted to know why the one little snorkel set they had wasn’t working well, and could they go out to see fish right there? We demonstrated our snorkel tube (seco – mas caro) that doesn’t let in water, our prescription masks, our boots and fins. They are here for a short time mostly to attend a Christian financial seminar – they invited us to the session on Friday night. We’ll check out the church for Sunday perhaps. We exchanged hugs and got a photo together.

We had our tomato and cheese sandwiches overlooking the turquoise bay, and then jumped in the drift again! Only for another hour this time. You can’t waste that clarity. We just hung around the entrance area.

It started to drizzle when we got home, and I didn’t get in the pool – I was already like a prune!

So we went off towards La Cabana to do some birding up that way. Yes, we spied the peregrine falcon that lives on the sign at the Riu – one of the high rise hotels. And David thinks he saw the scissor tailed flycatcher but didn’t get a photo. We finally stopped to see the blowholes up on Eagle Beach. And by the way, the signs that indicate the number of turtle nests this year compared to last show a decrease 😞. Last year's had been up. Let's hope it's just that last year there were more volunteers finding the nest, and this year these volunteers are back to their jobs. We did hear that Aruba is back to being as busy with tourism as usual. Yeah. And it is hardly crowded, which is fine by us.

All in all, still no new fish this time (we really think we know them all, including their middle names), but 2 more birds for our life-list – that’s 4 this trip.

Then we had dinner at Indo, the very basic Surinamese rice and noodle shop with great peanut sauce on their sates, and did a little shopping at Superfoods (mostly because our local store only takes cash and we don’t want to run out).

David promises I can sleep in tomorrow morning – no more early morning birding. Ahhhhhhhh. (He's already having second thoughts about that promise. hhmmm)

---