sucked inside the discovery channel

We're presumably in our last few minutes or hours in Charlotteville. I'm in an internet cafe (duh), Amber is sitting a few yards away in a shady bus shelter, hoping that a bus will show up eventually. There's no bus schedule, it's a major national holiday (Republic Day), and the petrol station that sells bus tickets is closed. We're betting that a bus will show up eventually, but who knows?

Normally, I wouldn't try to travel on a day like this, but we don't have much of a choice. If we want to catch Wednesday's ferry to Venezuela, we need to get to Scarborough (Tobago's capital) tonight, catch a ferry to Trinidad tomorrow (Tuesday), then be at the ferry terminal at the buttcrack of dawn on Wednesday. So we're waiting.

We've spent the entire week on the same beach--lovely Pirate's Bay. Arrg. Pictures coming soon, maybe.

And we're a little bit stupid.

The whole time we've been here, we've seen groups of snorklers in the water. Small groups, sure, but there are always a few of them. It didn't really cross our minds that there might be something neat in the water, at least not until we saw this beautiful iridescent blue fish a couple of days ago. I had a pair of swim goggles in my backpack, and decided that we should bring them to the beach the next day.

And then I forgot the next day, and finally brought them to the beach on our last day there. I floated over to a few rocks, just to see if there was anything cool over there.

Turns out that we've been splashing around next to a coral reef all week. Absolutely stunning--it felt like the TV had sucked me into some aquatic documentary on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic. There were fish everywhere, all of them completely different from each other, most of them were ridiculously colorful. Some of them were large enough to be a little bit scary. Even after spending several hours floating around in the reef, I still saw new types of fish everywhere I looked.

To be honest, I never really had the least bit of interest in diving or snorkeling or anything like that. How cool could it possibly be? You couldn't possibly see too many neat fish, right? Nope. It was absolutely amazing--if you ever get the chance to do something like this, I strongly recommend it. A snorkel and flippers might have been nice, but a $10 pair of swim goggles from Target did the trick just fine.

And it was all under our noses for six days before we figured it out. Lame us.

I'm off to sit by the side of the road for awhile. Yay.