Beach & Other

My last two days at the beach were wonderful. I even went on a snorkeling trip to the neighboring beaches. We were promised some sea turtles and dolphins; hordes of dolphins appeared only inches from our boat, but no turtles this time. I guess that is some kind of an unspoken rule - you cannot see everything at once.

Some of my fellow passengers on this trip was a strange trio: a butcher from Florida, who has been at the beach for a month now and decided not to go back to his butcher shop and take an early retirement instead; a dodgy-looking sixty-something American from Virginia who - I am convinced - is probaly wanted in the US and is hiding out in Zipolite (the beach town); and a French woman, who could have been anywehere between 35 and 50, lives in New York and claims to be a special events organizer, which only surprises me because she had few teeth and seemed to be having a serious alcohol problem. That, actually, was a problem all three had in common. On the trip we got to see lots of colorful fish and even jump off of a 4-meter rock (scary), but afterwards the freaky trio invited me and an English guy (he had the longest eyelashes I have ever seen on an adult and resembled the actor Billy Zane in a lighter version) to have a few beers with them. We could not keep up either with the drinking habit or with the drug habit or with the conversation so Billy-lookalike and I escaped and hung out for the rest of the time in the comfortable knowledge that we would never end up the way these people did...

On the other end of the spectrum were a lot of seed-eating, new agey, yoga maniacs on this beach. (I had no contact with them, but I saw them doing their sun salutations every night at sunset on the beach) and .... the nudists. I did not know that this was a nudist place, but the first morning, as I walked out from my cabana to the beach to watch the sunrise (yes!), the first thing I saw was a middle-aged white (German?) guy with a leathery skin, his balls hanging for all to see. I guess that was the first hint and later I got to see many more of these. When I was little, my parents (and especially my French parents) used to take us to these nudist beaches and I hated them. By now I am more tolerant, but the only time I was wiling to fully denude myself for a bit of skinny-dipping in the wavy and ominous ocean was two nights ago, under the moon and the stars, upon the invitation of a cute 21-year-old New Zealander. The boy assured me that I need not worry, he was used to hanging out with "older people" because he had shared an apartment with 24-25-year-olds, no less.

I am now on my way back. Tonight a long bus ride awaits to Mexico City. Tomorrow - back to the cold and the snow, which I have a hard time imagining as I am sitting here by a fan boiling up in the heat.