7 January 2006
Ensenada Carrizal (Manzanillo area)
Paradise is still wonderful but not so perfect lately. After happily snorkeling for two days in a row, we jumped in the water for a third round and found ourselves face to face with jelly fish - lots of jelly fish. John doesn't think it's so terrible, but I have to admit it doesn't take many jelly fish to freak me out. So far I've come up with four different species. We identify one of them as "string of pearls" since it's the one that looks like a thin clear piece of line with small brownish dots at intervals along the line. These range anywhere from three inches to two feet long, and are especially frightening looking when you can see their short clear tentacles. The tentacles are only an inch or two long, but John says he's seen tiny fish trapped in them. The other really dangerous one (okay, so I've only seen one in this anchorage so far) is the translucent blue bubble on the surface with dark blue tentacles hanging down from it. Those are supposed to be really painful. There are two others which I don't know anything about. One is golf ball sized, completely clear, and looks kind of like a Chinese lantern. There are lots of these in the water here, so I must have brushed through them without any sting. The one I spotted this morning is something I first noticed when we left Barra de Navidad because there were tons of them out around the point there. It's like a clear nickel sized disc with something brownish in the center. The odd thing is that I've seen them in both single units and multiples attached like rope up to two feet long. I'm not sure I'll be snorkeling today.
Yesterday we took our friends, Roy and Marlene from Jellybean, for our third hike on the beautifully landscaped dirt roads to nowhere in Rancho Majagua. We tried a different fork in the road and once again didn't make it to the end before giving up and turning around. This road stayed right above the coast line headed North, and we turned around when we were almost even with Piedra Blanca. We were almost back to what we assume is the "main" road, possibly leading up to the highway, when a truck with three people in it came roaring up from the direction of the beach. The driver spotted us, screeched to a halt, and backed down to us at high speed. I waved and smiled, happy to finally find someone we could talk to about what this place was all about. But it was immediately evident that this was one pissed off Mexican. His English was limited but he spoke no Spanish to us (even though we were speaking a little to him to start off with). The gist of his tirade was, did we have a problem (which we later understood to mean, did we have a problem understanding that we were trespassing - not, was everything okay), this was private property, even without posted signs it was "logical" that it was private, he had better not see us there again, and "Go back to your boats!"
What left me shaking was that he was clearly so angry with us. This was the first time we'd ever encountered a local who wasn't friendly, even when giving us a gentle admonishment for whatever minor offense we'd committed. Needless to say we analyzed the incident as we hurried the rest of the way back to the beach. The group consensus was that a) he was just a gardener on a power trip, b) he was a caretaker who feared for his job because we had breached security, or c) he had been most worried about us stumbling upon an illegal activity of some sort way back in the woods that might have gotten us into even more trouble. The latter never would have occurred to me, but it seemed to be the most popular conclusion. Or maybe we've all seen too many movies.
Linda and John