Snorkeling

If you were going to buy something for a two and a half year old, would you get a ukulele or maracas? My friend has a little girl who I haven’t seen in over a year. Julianna doesn’t remember me, but I’d like to bribe her into liking me next time I get to see her. I feel like something really noisy that she can carry around with her would be a good option. The gift shop here has both ukulele’s and maracas. I could teach her this song called Pocked full of Sunshine by Natasha Bedingfield. It’s very kid friendly and sticks in your head and won’t leave. She could sing it with her new instrument. If anyone would like to weigh in on this, feel free to do so. Bill and I are planning to visit some other areas where shopping will be an option so I don’t have to decide immediately.

Bill spent part of the morning scrubbing our snorkel goggles with toothpaste. Once he was finished, we took them out to the ocean and they worked much better and didn’t fog up. It was really exciting! We are scheduled to do nighttime snorkeling tonight and we are planning to clean them again with toothpaste before we go. We just went into the water next to the resort this morning so there wasn’t a lot to see, but there are schools of little fish that are almost completely clear. The sand is white and there’s nothing to hide in close to shore so all the fish and crabs are either white or clear. You can see through them. It’s fascinating! I found a dead white crab and various sorts of whitish clear fish kept coming over it eat it. Unless you look closely, you think the water is empty of living things, but Bill and I snorkeled through some large schools of little fish. They were mostly clear with a blueish tent along the back where their vein/digestive system is.

It’s raining right now like it does most afternoons. I have Spanish lessons at 3pm so that will work out well. Bill and I are trying to decide what other activities we want to do next week. Even though this is an all-inclusive resort, a lot of activities are not included and they are very pricy. I thought about doing parasailing, but it cost $120 for about 10 minutes in the air. You can go snorkeling in the daytime as part of the resort package but it’s $35 to go at night even though the staff and the locations are exactly the same. There is an option for snorkeling, boating and cliff jumping that we will probably do. It’s a 3 hour trip for about $60 so that seems like a fairly reasonable deal. We want to mostly do things that are included since this is a fairly pricy vacation and we can do things like zip-lining in Costa Rica on another trip for less money. We are fortunate that we came to Jamaica now. Our cleaning lady just told us that 3 or 4 blocks of rooms are empty right now because of COVID. This place would be packed and crazy any other time. We are on a bay and it’s completely surrounded by resorts. I’m sure their numbers are low too. It doesn’t seem like this is a large enough area to manage all those people. I would definitely not want to be here when it’s full. If we get to keep traveling, Bill and I should become pretty good travel advisors. I’d consider organizing a trip to Costa Rica.

We did nighttime snorkeling tonight. It was awesome, but I’m completely wiped out so I’ll have to write about it tomorrow. Bill took some underwater pictures and video that we hope turned out well. I’ll post those tomorrow too.