Tuesday, May 15th
As it turns out, the proprietor’s concern was needless. Mom ascended and descended the top bunk flawlessly, much better than the drunk girl on the lower bunk would have done.
For the rest of the morning we wandered around the shipwreck-treehouse in search of showers, which we finally found in the corner of the lower level: little cement wet baths with only cold water. Like any shipwreck, the whole area was covered with sand, including the wet floor of the bathroom, so it was nearly impossible to avoid trekking it around everywhere.
That’s probably why ship captains are always calling their sailor men over to swab the deck, which is exactly what the proprietor kept doing to the volunteers.
I don’t mind paying less to forgo more convenient accommodations. I prefer it. They can be charming, can be quaint, and are definitely just cheaper. Our private double room was definitely in line with the latter as it had all the marks of cheapness: It was cramped, the ill-fitting screens allowed mosquitoes in, there were ill-fitting wooden shutters instead of curtains (like a ship) which let light from the neighboring hostel in, the shared bathroom looked like something from a prison, and the fan didn’t work very well. In short, it was in our price range.
So when the lady from Crime and Punishment not only refused to deduct the deposit I had made through Hostel World from my bill and then proceeded to charge me for two nights, it was a little stab in the back. I had stayed there for one reason: to save money. One minute she was going on about how troublesome online booking was, “I didn’t get the deposit!” (ergo she couldn’t go by online rules) and the next minute she was telling me that since I had booked online, I could not be refunded for what I booked (ergo she must go by online rules…except that I had abided by HW rules and changed the Flexible Booking I paid for within the time limit).
I like to think that I am an expert bargainer but this is not true. It’s just that I come from a fixed-price country and end up being in bargaining situations more frequently than many of my countrymen. So I only got a few dollars off for my trouble instead of getting what seemed fair. Like any good citizen, I left a bad review online detailing the scam. That would teach her…then I found a few other reviews relating that the exact same thing had happened to other travelers. Those reviews obviously hadn’t pushed her to amend her ways and I wished I had negotiated with a little more force…or just read more reviews in the first place.
Well, after shaking the sand off our feet from that place, we had a whole afternoon until we could check into the Airbnb. So we risked leaving our backpacks at the hostile hostel, and went off to explore the island, which took about 7 minutes since the sandbar was only about 5 miles long and less than 1 mile wide. We could’ve taken one of the golf cart taxis (cars being understandably forbidden) but it felt indulgent.
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What we really wanted to do was to go snorkeling. Actually, diving or harpoon fishing sounded more fun but we couldn’t work it out. We weren’t good enough free divers to fish and the diving trips were just too expensive. My memory is a little shaky on this point but I believe we paid about $180 in Australia for a half day boat ride and dive at the Great Barrier Reef (I was cruelly robbed of actually diving by my lingering cold, which wouldn’t let me equalize). I believe one of the cheaper guys here wanted $150 for less time. Not being expert enough to take advantage of the famous diving attractions (the Blue Hole etc.) and knowing that cheaper places existed (i.e. Honduras, Thailand…), we opted to see the coral via snorkel. It cost $33 each for an afternoon at the baby reef (Raggamuffin Tours, if anyone was wondering).
The main place to snorkel is in the Hol Chan Marine Reserve which means “little channel” in Maya. It’s only about 30 feet deep and packed with sea life: angelfish, blue-stripped grunts, schoolmaster snappers, eels, and human snorkelers.
Our afternoon tour kept to a small section of the Reserve called Shark and Ray Alley – locally called the Aquarium – for the Nurse Sharks and Southern Stingrays.
Our boat, the Raggie Gal, was manned by a few very friendly, very Caribbean chaps who tried to make us feel like we were very Caribbean too. It was a good effort, but deep down I know I lack the gifts to be Caribbean and I guessed the same was probably true for the others. I don’t even have a Bob Marley t-shirt. I just wanted to see fish. I also can’t dive more than five feet to save my life but I enjoyed bobbing along the surface and peering down at the colorful things swimming beneath me. That is, I know in my head that they must have been colorful but under that slightly murky water everything just looks aquamarine or aquamarine with darker aquamarine stripes.
The snorkeling went better than usual. Which is to say that I didn’t gasp even once or lose a flipper or swallow any seawater. I definitely swallowed seawater in Australia (which contributed to my gagging over the side of the boat later) and I’m pretty sure I sampled the ocean in The Philippines as well and if I recall the water was kinda choppy in Cambodia so of course I had to swallow some of that ocean too.
I hate seawater. So as I leapt from the boat into the sea I was very stern with it about my boundaries.
Meanwhile, mom watched from the boat which wasn’t actually so bad for her since the water was extremely shallow for being a half mile or so out. So when the pile of nurse sharks began to show up in expectation of getting fed from the boat (some tour boats toss over shark food to the consternation of environmentalists), mom could see the backs of them clearly.
When one of our group asked a reggae crew member if nurse sharks were dangerous he smiled. “No,” he said confidently, explaining that they are called nurse sharks because they’re like bottom feeders and only suck as opposed to chomping.
“Just don’t get close or they might suck the skin off your fingers.” This was a comfort to us all and we enjoyed the rest of the snorkel wondering if trying to swim with our hands balled into little fists was a safer option.