Adventures of a Tribe

Walking/Snorkeling the beaches

Posted on July 4, 2015

After another great bowl of oatmeal this morning, we all decided to explore some coastline that we hadn’t ventured to yet. Following the coast past Red Frog Beach, is Turtle Beach, and this is the farthest we’d gone thus far.  On the way Danny and I told the creatures that whom ever see’s the first sloth gets a dollar.  Emma won, with Jonathan about 5 seconds behind her.

The little brownish red guy on the bottom looked so comfy, all snuggled up and fast asleep in the tree.  The grey one up top had a nasty itch he just couldn’t seem to get on top of.  His fur was tinted green – a common sight in sloths, because they move so slowly that algae grows on them. They only descend once a week from their eating and sleeping places, and it’s to go to the loo – the rest of the time they move at a…well, a sloths pace, like each movement is very well thought out, then reconsidered, then thought out again…very…slowly.

I love textures, patterns and colors…

Mangrove roots hang 20ft down from high branches, searching for a place to anchor in the sand. I wanted to crouch down and run through them.

We walked across Turtle Beach to Polo Beach, and snorkeled for a while, then ventured on to the next beach and snorkeled there too.  The creatures found so many beautiful shells, including some huge conch shells.  At one point I was snorkeling and was focused on a coral head off to my right, then turned my head to the left, and there, about a foot from my face looked like a huge gaping mouth was coming at me.  My first instinct was to punch and I did – with all my might into what looked like the creatures nose, and it ended up that is was a tree trunk resembling a big fat open mouth.  I surfaced shaking the sting out of my hand and the creatures looked at me with puzzled faces.  I showed them what I saw and they agreed that it did look like a mouth, but that their first instinct would probably not have been to punch.

We came across this in the sand and felt like we were in a horror movie for just a second :0

Eventually on our way back to the marina, we stopped at ‘Nachyo Mama’s’ for fresh fish tacos.  They were SO delicious.

It felt so good to sit back in an Adirondack chair, feet in the sand and sip on a cold drink.

We figured we’d head down a path we hadn’t been on to get back to the marina, and ended up in who knows where!! It was a dock with a panga traffic jam, and we were too tired to back track, so we payed a gentleman $7 to drive us all back to Tanda Malaika in the panga.

I loved our day exploring, I love our island and I love my family.  At one point today Emma brought tears to my eyes.  She was sitting quietly on the beach with the waves lapping up against her and she said, ‘Mama, do you know what I love most about life?’ I said what’s that my love.  She replied, ‘You Mom, you’re what I love most.’  What an honor it is for me to me be a mother.  I may not be the best at it, but I love my 11 children so much, and absolutely LOVE being their mom and I love having Danny as my Sweetheart.