Writings By Date| Tranquility and Diving in Bocas del Toro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
After a while, I swam back to the dock to take a picture of Erin in our secret little spot, and damn near threw up when I got back because I overexerted myself so much. The dock was also amazingly unsteady, and just the motion of that made me queasy, adding to my uneasiness. When Erin got back, we walked ashore and dipped into a restaurant (this area seemed to be part of a resort that appeared to have no guests whatsoever) and got some soda, which helped me a bit. Unfortunately, if I wasn't exhausted enough before, now I was jelly. So I didn't help a whole lot kayaking back, and we ended up just returning it a little earlier than planned.
On the way back to our hotel, we stopped off for lunch, then went wandering in search of snacks for the boat tomorrow. We found, of all things, a gourmet food store. A great idea for a place like this — crawling with Americans and Europeans — it offered tantalizing selections of cookies, snacks, and various cooking sundries that I'm sure are impossible to find anywhere closer than Panama City (if even there). We talked to the ex-pat American women that were running it, and found that it was actually their first day open. They had come to Bocas from Guatemala the year before, and were looking for a good store to open; the woman said her husband wanted to start a whorehouse, so they needed to come up with something quick before he could act on that, and thus the gourmet food store was born. They saw a need for lots of specialty items, so all they needed was to find someone to help ship items from Panama City, and they were set. They even had a "wish list" for customers, too, which I thought was a nice touch. We wished them success — definitely a good idea that deserves to succeed.
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| "Botel" Las Brisas |
We sat on our deck-over-the-water reading, and had a little nap, then went out for dinner at a really cool Thai/Lebanese place, that had "jonny cakes" to die for. Beyond that, we were simply too tired to do anything else for the day.
We happened to stroll by Hotel Laguna on the main street yesterday, with a restaurant that served German pancakes. The temptation was too great to resist, so we ducked in here for breakfast this morning, and was it ever worth it. Pancakes rolled up like crepes, with bananas and a sweet vanilla sauce filling the cracks. We were seriously thinking about getting the chocolate ones for lunch.
After filling our stomachs in an effort to improve our buoyancy, we walked to the dive shop to get ready for our dives! These would be our first dives since being certified, so we were a little nervous, but our grumpy and happy instructors trained us well in what to look for to determine if a shop was reputable.
