Sunday 26 July 2015

Day 270: Dinner on the beach

This morning we managed to get out a bit earlier, and were on the road to the beach by about 10am. This time, however, we took a little detour, turning off after one of the two bridges along the way to check out the so-called 'vegetable villages', where a lot of the fresh produce is grown to supply the local restaurants. We pottered around there for a while, following the narrow paths through the market gardens and houses and finally back to the main road.








We stopped again when we reached the second of the bridges. Here there were some areas where collections of sticks had been driven into the water – I'm guessing as some sort of fish- or prawn-aggregation devices. As I took a few photos, a woman paddled into view chasing her ducks across the water to the near bank. Soon after, a beautiful kingfisher with electric blue wings flew over to one of the fish-aggregators, stopped for a while, and then dived down into the water, returning with a prawn in its beak.








We then rode back to Cay Me for lunch, stopping off on the way at a sweet little market set up by some local women to sell their local products. There we sat and drank Fanta while Sarah did some cartwheels on the lawn – upon which we later saw a neat little lizard. After lunch, we rode back to the main beach, where we parked our bikes, set ourselves up with a couple of sun loungers and jumped into the ocean. 



While we were in the water, we couldn't help noticing the presence nearby of a couple of white children – a boy and a girl about our girls' age - swimming with their mother. We inevitably started chatting to them, in between being battered about by the waves, which were a bit more violent today. The kids all quickly made friends, allowing us adults to retire to the sun loungers and share backstories. Sue and Matt, and their kids Mitchell and Hailey (who were, indeed, the same ages as our two), are from Chicago, and a few weeks into an epic journey of their own that will take in 12 countries over ten weeks. We had a great time comparing notes on travelling with children (they have the added complication of both of theirs being coeliacs, which meant that half of their luggage was taken up by gluten-free snacks) and laughing at the idiosyncrasies of Vietnam – such as the guys who kept coming around trying to sell us sunglasses, apparently oblivious to the fact that we were already wearing, yes, sunglasses. (I hope they don't mind me posting their photo of the kids playing – none of mine really turned out.)



At some point during our steadily beer-fuelled conversation (it was pretty warm), we discovered that it was possible to order food from the beach-front restaurants that owned the adjacent sun loungers and eat right there on the beach. So, after the staff had set up the inevitable kiddie-sized plastic table and chairs at the foot of our sun loungers, we sat and ate noodles, rice and some stir-fries and drank beer as the sunlight steadily faded. 

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