Ship Tease

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The goal for that day was to go to the beach and chill and snorkel, and I found a group of people who wanted to do that as well, including Aleeza and Erin from UVA and Maria from Italy and Natalie the Mexican/Lebanese girl and Margalit and Lauren and a bunch of others – ten in total.  We went to the desk and arranged for a minivan to pick us up, and we started planning sometime before 8:30 and planned to leave at 8:30, but we ended up not getting on the bus until like 9:45 for some awful group of reasons including the guy driving to the wrong side of the port.  We were all getting pretty impatient but there was nothing we could do about it.  Apparently some people got some cabs for cheaper but whatever.  Furthermore, we arranged a ride back with the guy for half the price ($3 each) which was great.

Anyway, he dropped us off at the hotel near Trou aux Biches and we asked if we could rent snorkel equipment and they said no, the only option was to buy it from the store down the road.  We knew that was probably false so we went to the beach and figured we’d look there.  We kept walking until we found something that looked sort of civilization like, which wasn’t far, and there was a guy with a boat who said he’d take us all snorkeling for 2000Rs between the ten of us (which comes out to about $6 each).  He only had six masks though, but we were like, whatever, that’s fine.  So we all hopped in and went out beyond the reef and he tied up.  I was the first to just dive in because the water looked so beautiful, and other people put on fins and masks before they took the ladder in off the little boat.

After a couple times diving in off the boat, I figured I’d take one of the masks that no one was using and got a snorkeling tube too.  It wasn’t a very lively reef, but there were a good number of fish, including a yellow/black angel fish, sergeant major, and a school of cuttlefish that I’m pretty sure were kind of starting to swarm me.  There were also some pretty cool canyons in the coral that went from like 4m to about 15m down.  But I got sort of tired because I didn’t have fins or a life vest or anything and the salt water burnt my nose a little bit, so I made my way back to the boat and chilled out at the front of it in the sun for a while.  After a while all the girls came back to the ship as well, and in the tiny French I knew I asked the guy for like ten minutes to just chill and enjoy the water, and he said sure.  In that time there was a bee on the boat that scared the crap out of everyone, but the guy killed it for us.  He also showed me that the huge wooden stick that I was leaning against was an enormous harpoon.  I asked him to show me how to use it right now but he said no, not now.

(This is longer than I expected but exactly as lame as I thought.  Sorry)

After that we went back to the beach and some just laid out to chill, but I wanted a little bit to eat.  Kelly and Aleeza and I found some places with a bit of food but I just got some ice cream and they got some Samosas and I ate one of Kelly’s on the way back and it was fine.  Then I jumped in the water and Rob A from the ship was there with his kids and Jenny F’s kids and we launched them out of the water and let them stand on our heads and they pretty much had a blast.  He’s a really nice guy and the kids were really cute too.  They needed to leave and actually kind of hurried away (bus?  On duty?), and we pretty much headed out at the same time to meet our guy.

Everyone but Margalit and I just got out at the waterfront to do some quick shopping.  I had to get my computer, so we took money from everyone and paid the guy at the port.  I got on the ship, got my stuff, got in a cab with five other people and paid $2 each to get to the waterfront and said goodbye to them because they wanted to eat and I wanted to use the interwebs.  I sent a Oceanwalk to Tarik like I’d been meaning to do since like Vietnam, and downloaded some audio converters, and checked my Facebook maybe, and Huffington Post maybe and definitely NPR and I downloaded Audacity as well, and the latest episode of This American Life, and I also streamed the one with the Mike Birbiglia car crash story so I could show it to Catie.  I’ve had to keep my computer turned on or asleep ever since though – I can’t turn it off until I show it to her or else it’ll go away forever.

After that I wanted to get some stamps, so I went to the post office but it closed at 4pm and it was 4:16pm or so.  I asked some guys who worked for DHL or something who were sitting right nearby if there were any place to buy stamps, and they said to go to Sunasee, which I had never heard of, so they pointed me toward where it was and wrote it on my hand.  I went through the underground to look for it, and ran into the DHL guy again as he was walking away, and asked at a watch store where it was, then finally found it right across the street.  I asked if they had stamps, and they had collector stamps but not regular stamps that would actually function on postcard.

So I walked back to the mall where you could take the water taxi, but I realized I only had $1 left in my wallet and it wasn’t worth it to go to an ATM for more money, so I just found the people I had taken the taxi with and asked them if I could have a dollar and I’d pay them back the first time I saw them after I got on the ship.  So Ben gave me a dollar and I walked through the mall to get to the taxi.

As I went to the taxi, I saw it leaving the dock.  I tried to scream for them to wait, but they wouldn’t.  I was NOT going to wait for another half hour or whatever to get on the next water taxi, so I RAN down to the dock, but it was too late to jump from the dock to the boat.  It was still not as far away as the end of the boat next to it.  So I jumped onto the front of the boat right beside it, and sprinted to the back of the boat, got up on the side of it and jumped over to the water taxi and landed safely.  It was awesome.

We drove right under the bow of the ship when we came close to the dock.  And when I got back I just chilled out and relaxed and got ready for breakfast for dinner, which was a total letdown.

But yeah.  So that was my time in Mauritius.  It was cool.

Peace out.