Playa Santo Domingo Day2

Last night, I got to see Isla de Ometepe the way God intended it to be seen. Natalie and I treated ourselves to dinner at one of the more expensive places on Ometepe (Villa de Paraiso), which ended up costing us $8.50 each for a whole broiled fish (done chinese style with the head still attached so you can recognize that this was once a living being that you´re now eating), rice, salad, and dessert, and tea. All served by waiters in uniform who would chase stray dogs away from your table. Outside the restaurant is a house that has a pigpen where a mailbox should be. But this was no standard pigpen. This pigpen only had -3- walls, with the missing wall being towards the road. The mama pig lay in there with her 8 little piglets and the huge boar hog lay nearby, sleeping. Or we think it was a boar hog. It looked like it might have enlarged teats, but it seemed too large to be female. And it somehow seemed masculine to me. Maybe because it was big, hairy, dirty, and lying on the side of the road instead of sleeping in the pen with its family like a civilized pig would.

Midway through dinner, the power went out. Natalie, who worked at a hostel in Costa Rica for 2 months, says it happens often here. Within minuts, the generators at our pricey restaurant kicked in. But we didn´t realize until after we left that the rest of the island was still in darkness. Both of us, blessed and cursed with overactive imaginations, only made it about 500 feet down the pitch dark road clinging to each other before we turned back for flashlights. It was so dark we couldn´t see landmarks or even signs on the houses nearby. There was no way to mark distance and no way to tell whether Hospedaje Buena Vista was further along, past, or right beside us. A worker from the Villa Paraiso walked us back with his flashlight. And I´ve never been so thankful. The round beam of light dancing before us seemed so friendly and comforting as it lit up rocks and stones and holes in the road that we would have killed ourselves on if we´d been in the dark. When we arrived at Buena Vista, our hostel was similarly dark, and everyone was laying in the hammocks that adorn the place (7 hammocks overall!). Natalie got her headlamp and I got my flashlight and we found our own hammocks. I went out to the water, thinking it would be nice to swim naked by moonlight on el Lago de Nicaragua from la Isla de Ometepe, but the moon was obscured by the clouds. Enough light shone through so I could see without my flashlight, though I flickered it on in a hurry when I heard a footstep behind me on the dark beach. A giant frog stared back at me. All around, I heard mating calls, and I kept waitin for my frog to chime in, but he jus stared at me silently from his place in the spotlight of my flashlight and I stared back at him expectantly. I even made a frog mating sound myself in the hopes it would prompt him to utter a sound of love, but no such luck. Like most males, he was probably scared and froze up from being put on the spot. Or perhaps my mating call just wasn´t that tempting.

I found out yesterday that Natalie is nursing a broken heart over an unanswered mating call of her own. Her particular frog didn´t end up to be any sort of Prince Charming a he left her for the next backpacker that came along. Like me, Nat doesn´t fall often, but when she does, she falls hard. It´s really quite an annoying habit we have.

We didn´t swim naked last night in the moonlight. Because we´re both a little afraid of water where you can´t see the bottom. Instead, we waded. And I went all the way up to my knees, quelling any fears of strange creatures nibbling on my toes. The lake remains shallow for quite a bit, so I went pretty far out. I looked back at the island, enshrouded in darkness, with the occasional flash of lightnin lighting up the sky. For a second, I felt like the Lady of the Mist from Mists of Avalon. Until I realized I was standing in the middle of a lake with lightning approaching. As I splashed back, the lights came back on, and I breathed a sigh of relief. What is it about light and electricity that makes us feel so much safer? So much more secure? Why is God always the Light and Satan the Prince of Darkness? I think Darkness may be getting a bad rap here.

Regardles oif the fear and the terrifying walk in the dark, I´m glad the power went out last night. But that´s all very easy to say now that it´s morning and the sun is out on the water. I brushed my teeth at the outdoor tap today so that I could watch the sun rise as Colgate, cinnamon flavored, foamed between my teeth. Then I washed my clothes and hung them on the clothesline. Funny, at home, I never wake up early. Yet here, I´m awake by 6 am without any alarm clocks. And I´m sleeping by 9 pm. I like Traveller Me. There´s something about travelling that brings out the best in me. I´m not neurotic (imagine that), or irritable, or cranky. even the 7 mosquitoe bites I´ve accumulated over 3 days don´t bother me that much. But I suppose everyone is cooler on vacation. There´s no stress, no parental expectations, no obligations. I think those things warp an individual like any stress would warp a piece of wood. There´s a freedom here to be myself. And spending a day in a hammock is not accompanied by a sense of guilt that I should have been doing x, y, and z.

There´s a white bird here with stilt legs and a long graceful neck that stands by the water. I tried to zoom in on it from the hammock to get a photo of it, but everytime I´d focus, it´d flap away a few feet. And I rose from my hammock to follow it, and it´d flap away again. Until it flew off into the horizon, leaving me with an empty camera and only a memory of what could´ve been.

I´m going for a morning swim.