Blood On The Beach

Monday January 9^th

Today was to be our last day on Isle Grande; we plan to head out tomorrow morning for Portobello, just for a day and then carrying on to Shelter Bay on Wednesday.  After the crowds of the last 2 days we were hoping for a quiet day today to go hiking again, sadly it appeared to be a long weekend, as yet more boatloads swarmed across the bay, not even close to the amount that arrived yesterday, but still many more than usual.

We packed the bag with the necessary items and headed back to the lighthouse, where we spent a couple of hours trying to capture the Panama Blue, and Swallowtail butterfly’s on camera.  There were many, but they were not still long enough for me to capture anything other than a blur.  One of the Panama butterflies we saw was so large, if I put my 2 hands together it would have been about the same size, you would think that being that large I would have been able to get a photograph, but with the size also came incredible speed, too fast for me especially while I was struggling with exposure, aperture and focus. 

Local kids playing on the dock

We stopped at one of the seafront beach bars for a couple of beers and a quick lunch of Calamari and fried chicken, I had hoped it would be like the delicious calamari and chicken that Chris serves at The Dock restaurant at Shelter Bay, but it was as far removed from Chris’s food as it was possible to be. The chicken was VERY well done (meaning over cooked) and the calamari was so chewy it was like eating rubber, (not that I’ve ever eaten rubber).  But it was nice sitting on the restaurant deck out over the water sipping our Corona’s and watching all the going’s on. 

Hiking up to the lighthouse

People watching here is quite entertaining in a stomach-churning, puzzling sort of way, they are all at least 4 or 5 times larger than the clothing they wear, especially the women, I couldn’t help but wonder how they get the clothes/swimwear on in the first place, it must be quite an ordeal. They all look as though they stepped out of a Beryl Cook painting!  I concluded that they must spray paint the clothing on and then shrink it so that every visible inch of flabby flesh protrudes in a desperate bid to escape between all the gaps in the clothing.  Yes, I realize this is very judgmental of me, and I’m hardly in a position to criticize people for being overweight, but when 99 out of 100 people here are really quite large and then dress the way they do, I have to wonder, do they ever look in a mirror, or don’t they care, or maybe they think it’s OK to look the way they do, or maybe they think squeezing a size 20+ body into a size 10 swimsuit is OK no matter how it looks or feels, because they know that what they’re squished into is a small size, so in their minds that makes them small, I really don’t know the answer.  What I do know is that clothing that is much too small for you makes you look fat, no matter your actual size. My Nan always used to tell me “it’s not what you wear, it’s how you wear it.”  One doesn’t have to be skinny to look nice, it all just comes down to dress sense, something that I’ve decided is seriously lacking out here.

Late afternoon we returned to Daisy for a cocktail, and a bit of a rest before going back to the island at sunset to hopefully watch the Macaws.    Later as we walked along the sandy path on the shorefront, between the little houses, we came across a group of people looking at a man lying on the ground, “drunk” Bob said, but when I looked again I could see that his shirt was not red but soaked in blood, and his head looked like it had been split open, blood was pouring from a huge wound.  We stopped to see if the people were going to help the man, or whether we should do something.  An old woman in the house next to where the injured man lay, was just casually sitting on her porch watching us all.  One of the men in the group asked the woman for a towel and some water.  I watched as these people were obviously trying to help, and they spoke Spanish, which of course we didn’t, they then started to try to clean the wound, the man appeared to be quite unconscious.  I looked around wondering what had happened to him and noticed 2 men standing just a few yards away watching us all, I didn’t like the look of them, they looked angry  I felt very uneasy, “we should go” I said dragging on Bob’s hand, “there are people here helping him, there’s nothing we can do, we don’t even speak the language, come on please”.  I started walking away pulling him.  We left, obviously if no one had been helping we would have.  When we returned an hour later I was very relieved to see that the man was gone.  We hadn’t seen any Macaws, they didn’t return to the island tonight, I wished we hadn’t either.

 It’s very easy out here in the beautiful Caribbean to forget how dangerous it can be.  I was woken only this morning by the sound of gunshot. I didn’t know the day would end by seeing blood on the beach.