Today’s Burmese breakfast was fried rice with fried egg – along with a double helping of the Premier 3-in-1 coffee mix and orange squash Lello refuses to drink.
We watched as two teams of fishermen strung out their nets in a large arc off the beach, laboriously hauled on either end of it for at least half an hour, and maybe caught a fish or two. Tourists from our breakfast nook trudged across the beach and leant in close with their cameras to record the process. A tourist is an intruder who takes a photo then turns her back and moves on. I (also) took a photo of the white flowers by the path up to the restaurant and the young waiter told me proudly that they were his flowers, he had planted (he mimed planting) them himself. We borrowed a knife from the kitchen to cut up our papaya (yes, I too cut papaya with this knife, mimed our waiter) and ate it on our porch. When I took a photo of the restaurant menu, the older waiter behind the counter beamed; it turns out he’d designed it.
Lello looked at the calm sea and said it’d be a good day for snorkeling. I rented a mask and snorkel from the front desk; Lello carries his own with him. About 9.30am we walked down the beach past some more fishermen hard at it, and, it being high tide, waded over to Lovers' Island. We walked left along the rocks – those long flat rocks covered in barnacles are much less ouch-y with shoes on. The island was deserted but for the guard ‘out front’ by the sign that announces the camera fee of 500K that doesn’t ever seem to get collected. We walked almost to the far end of the island along its perimeter, then jumped into the sea and discovered a plethora of fish worthy of the Great Barrier Reef: yellow-and-blue horizontally striped ones, black and yellow vertically striped ones, a parrot fish (is that the one with the fan of wavy tentacles on either side of a crayfish like body?), and a parrot fish (or is a parrot fish the one with the beak?), a blow fish (round like a ball), a lobster, tons of silver minnows flashing by in schools, small pods of small silvery fish feeding together on coral, lone red and brown fish, and on and on.
We drifted along the rocks with the ebb and flow of the waves. After about an hour, we clambered out onto a patch of smooth hot stone to warm up. A sloping rock formed a shallow pool, warm as bathwater. Occasionally spray or a whole cold wave would cascade over the surrounding rock wall. So beautiful lying in the water in the sun in the wind, with the waves swirling around and about, foaming white and sucking deep hollows only to rush back in with the force of a giant’s bellows.
We swam around the far end of the island, following the bulge of the rocks and the darting fish. Lello reached into a hole and pulled out a perfect shiny brown mottled shell, the kind that folds ‘round on itself to a set of lips; he showed it to me, then let it go noting, ‘She is alive.’ We took a rest around the north side of the island to shake off the chill and de-prune the skin of our fingers.
Around lunchtime we swam back to the shallow channel, and walked back onto the beach where a pair of lively brothers were dancing in the water to a portable radio. A group of fishermen – thirty or so in all, divided into two teams – were still fishing the shallows. Lello bought some fried dried fish from the Pi-Pi Lady as a snack, and I settled for a banana and the last of the ‘biscotti’ (or Pucci Special Cakes, round biscuits sprinkled with sesame seeds).
After 'lunch' we went looking for the Kiss-Me-Quick thorny flowering plants that Lello wants to take cuttings from, and found some red ones and a pink one. Then headed over to the restaurant for a coconut – first they cut off the end so you can drink the juice, then they hack it in half so you can eat the succulent white flesh lining the inner cavity. Lello explained that coconut oil is made from mature coconuts that have been left to dry out; the white flesh is thick in them, and cutting the coconut in half to reach it is a precise skill. He worked at it when he was in Costa Rica, and it took a day’s work to make about a litre of oil.
Got a Tiger beer to drink back on our porch together with the left-over peanuts from our EFR visit yesterday, and then I showed Lello some photos of the family: Huub in Middelburg, Mom moving, our family reunion in Lurray. He dozed off and I switched over to writing. Around 5pm we moved out to the porch to watch the world go by and the sun go down.
We walked down the road to our local restaurant again, and chose a table to the right on the grass ‘for a change.’ I had shrimp and cashews, Lello a whole steamed fish (better than last night’s fried version) and he tossed the head and bones over the fence to the hopeful dog. I got a bit snippy with him (first time), which put a damper on the rest of the evening (for me).
No comments:
Post a Comment