What´s up, Beaches!

Tonight I went out around this tiny town on this huge island with some of my new hostel friends. It´s crazy how transient the whole situation is... I always thought of people in NY as transient as everyone is coming from somewhere, staying a while to accomplish some goal, then vanishing as if they were never in your life. But going through hostels is expectedly a bit more intense than that. You have a friend for one day, then they~re gone. Half the time I don´t know the names of the people I´m hanging out with. I´ve never thought names were important anyway-it doesn´t matter what a person is called whether you´re enjoying them or hating them. But I usually remember the names of people I hate more easily than the ones I like.

Anyway, just sitting here at the computer by the reception desk, people are constantly coming and going. They are all close to my age, mostly a bit older in their late 20s or early 30s, doing just what I´m doing. I was thinking about it today, and how fitting is it that, at this age, while we´re wandering through the things of life anyway, we choose to wander through life in a foreign place, seeking the same adventures and experiences as everyone else we seem to come into contact with? I love the back-packing/hostel-hopping thing, it´s really fun. I´m sick of mosquitos though, one thing I didn´t anticipate before I came on the trip. Malaria isn´t big here, so that´s not a problem, but there´s something in me that makes those blood suckers crazy.

Today we hiked to the beach. It was a beautiful hike through the forest. I guess I said jungle in my last post, but to be fair, it´s more of a forest... a tropical forest. The trees are incredible, and I kept wondering how the huge boulders along the path came to be placed the way they are. They´re huge and round, and it´s almost as if they´re floating, just resting maybe 5 feet above the ground on smaller rocks. We took about 3 hours to reach the beach, stopping off at the smaller beaches along the way to exchange sea water for sweat. At the first beach, there was this rocky point that my monkey-boy spirit couldn´t resist. I swam over to it to find a place to dive off of. The first thing I did once I reached the rocks was fall and ram some barnacle shell into my thumb. Great way to realize I had to walk lightly, because that shit was sharp! I climbed up, saw some really cool bugs along the way, and found the high-point of my destiny. Much like the Chattahooche River that I grew up down the street from, the water was clearly a bit shallow to dive into, and had a rocky bottom to boot. But whatever, I decided to do a shallow dive, and now my left hand looks like I ran a cheese grater over it (at least I´m a righty, HA!). The rocks one the bottom where covered with the same sharp shells, and the slightest pass over it ripped me up! I was thinking about my friend Ryan, who would have been shaking his head and telling me how stupid I was...and I already know how stupid I am, but the image in my mind was funny.

Then we hiked and hiked and hiked, ate and hiked, drank, stopped, and hiked finally to Lopes Mendes, the beach that everyone had been raving about. The water was as clear as the air, the sand as white as sugar, and the densely forested mountains all around the cove gave an enchanting backdrop, better than the Corona commercials..´Miles away from ordinary´. Even sitting on the beach you dont get the full effect. Once you go out into the water, surrounded by the cove, you can see the breaks in the trees where the shear rock face has no soil, and the little irregularities that make each jungle-mountain unique. I just stayed there, floating around, for about 2 hours.

As beatiful as this quaint island is, mosquitos are tearing me up right now, I have to get into my tent!