2012 December 11 Snake Patrol

Another beautiful day in the neighbourhood, and we're off to Barra de Navidad, a beach community just 2 km down the beach, 5 km by road.  The plan is to meet up with our friends Jack and Irma and to mooch around Barra for the day.  We decided to stop in to see our friends Kelly and Cheryl on the way over, who promptly invited us out for a day's sight-seeing in their jeep, so the Jack-and-Irma-visit will have to wait for a bit!

 

Our first stop was Playa de Oro, which is a deserted beach at the end of a 7km bone-jarring bush road.  We got down there and, can you imagine, there was another family there!  On OUR beach!  Oh well, we'll just have to make the best of the remaining 5 km or so of unspoiled sand.  There's a honking big rock in the intertidal zone, and when we walked around it I noticed a young man and woman in the surf up against the rock.  We had various opinions about what they were up to out there by themselves, but we were all wrong as the young man came back with a machete and a big net bag full of abalone!  Hmnnnn, note to self....



Molly the Security Dog, Cheryl, Kelly, and Debbi,
with the Honking Big Rock in the background

Then it was back up the road to go check out some more sights.  A few km up the road Kelly lurched to a stop as there was a very large snake stretched across the road.  Honk honk.  No response.  Rrrm, rrrrm!  Drive right up to it.  No response.  This thing is so big that there's no room to drive around it, and we didn't want to kill it, so Kelly got out and threw rocks at it for about 5 minutes.  We REALLY didn't want to get too close as this thing looked pretty dangerous (anything with no legs and larger than an earthworm looks dangerous to me!), and the rocks were just pissing him off, so we were in a bit of a quandary.  Finally we outlasted him; he slithered off the road and we drove past VERY quickly.  Whew!  After much searching on the internets, it turns out he was probably some type of boa constrictor.  I still think Molly could have taken him....

 

"Hand over the dog, and no one gets hurt."

Recovering our equilibrium, we crossed the highway and cruised around for a bit before fording the Marabasco River a few km upstream from Cihuatlan.  This is really cool; the government put a 1 metre-high weir all the way across the river and there is a shallow ford across the 400-metre river just below the weir. 
 

The ford across the Marabasco River

The locals use it for swimming, picknicking, washing their vehicles, and hanging out, usually all at the same time.  There were a couple pickups backed up to the weir with their tailgates down, turning the truck beds into swimming pools!  Pretty cool place.
 



Swimming pool?  We don't need no steenking swimming pool!

We then went on a tour of a very small farming village out in the middle of a zillion acres of banana plantations.  I had seen a number of kid's 'beach balls' in the back of the jeep, but just assumed they were for Molly or something.  Turns out Kelly and Cheryl bring stuff like that along for Christmas, they drove around until they had found 4 kids of the right size, and gave them each a ball.  There were a lot of bright eyes in the village as we drove off, as most of these folks don't have disposable income the way we think of it.  Good on ya, Kelly and Cheryl!

 

We ended up for comida (main afternoon meal) at the Coco Cabanas, which is stuck out in the middle of nowhere on the beach and makes the best coconut prawns in the solar system. 

 

Debbi, Steve, and Giant Christmas Coconuts at the Coco Cabanas



 

Fed-up, wore-out, and sun-baked, it was definitely time for a ride home and a quiet evening.  Talk soon.