The weekend didn't end with my new puppy. I also went snorkling for the first time ever. LTM, Julia, Simon (Clif & Julia's 6 year old son), and I all decided to take a trip to Airport Beach. We live right next to the Airport and there is a beach on the other side of the airport that has just about the best snorkling on the island. There are 2 ways to get there. Either you can go on the garbage walk past the dump (uh, no thanks), or you can walk along the cliffs on the ocean. We opted for the more beautiful, less smelly route. This is where the journey begins...
We tried to go to Airport Beach my first weekend here, but we couldn't find the opening in the wall that you have to climb over to get onto the cliffs and while we were searching for it, being the klutz that I am, I totally lost my footing on the wet lava rocks and cut up my knee and hand pretty bad. We didn't make it to Airport that day.
This time we did. And the hike is really easy. You walk along the ocean front on a series of lava-rock cliffs with dotted with blowholes where the waves splash up and out. It really is beautiful.
There are a few spots where you walk along a narrow trail that cuts through some vegitation. As long as you go early enough in the day you don't have to worry too much about spiders and other bugs (other than mosquitos--they are always a problem). But the closer to sundown that you go, it seems that the spiders come alive. On the way to the beach we had to move maybe 1 or 2 spider webs out of our path. But when we came back it was getting dark, and there must have been over 30 big spider webs with spiders in them that were blocking our path back. The person who walks in front needs some kind of stick to move the webs or they could walk face-first into some nastiness.
The beach at Airport is not a sand beach, but rather is made up of crushed coral. So it's not fun to walk around barefoot on.
My snorkling gear hadn't arrived yet (after all I only shipped it a month and a half ago) so I used Julia's sister's equipment. We started out and the current was so strong that we were quickly going to be swept away from where we wanted to go. So we army-crawled under water (about a foot and a half deep at this point) over to a place where the current wasn't so strong and pushed off into the harbor. At first, it was hard to adjust to the thought that I was breathing underwater, and I'm not going to lie, I may have had a minute or two of starting to hyperventilate, but then I relaxed and realized if 6 year old Simon can do this (and he was doing a great job if I do say so myself), then I could certainly do it. And once I let go, it was AMAZING!!! The area that we were in got pretty deep for snorkling on the island (about 20-25 feet in spots) and there was all kinds of coral and fish to check out. The cool thing about snorkling is that when you're out in the woods looking at nature, the animals can hear you coming and they take off, but in the water, the fish don't swim away--they just look back at you like, "yes, can I help you?" It was also kind of wierd to realize that this entire other world is just below the surface. I can't wait to go back.
Here are a few shots from the walk back at sunset...
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