After snorkeling for about an hour, we noticed what looked suspiciously like our hotel room key about 15 feet down on the ocean floor. Huh? Much to Mike's surprise, the key had slid out of his pocket. Having narrowly avoided disaster, he swam down, retrieved the key and safely tucked the room key AND the car key in a velcro pocket for safekeeping. Problem solved, right?
We continued to snorkel for another hour, came back to the beach and Mike announced that he had no car keys. Quite confident that leg pulling was afoot, I refused to believe his first earnest announcements. Eventually, he convinced me he'd actually lost the keys. In a national park in the Turks & Caicos at the bottom of the ocean.
It was 5:30pm and the car rental place was closing any minute. We ran up the beach and borrowed a cell phone from someone to call them for replacement keys. I then waited by the car for the new keys while Mike sheepishly offered to take one more snorkel to look for the keys. Against monumental odds, spiny lobsters and swirling currents, lo and behold he FOUND the keys. He practically walked on water from one end of the beach to the other, hooping and hollering, fins in one hand and keys in the other. Unbelievable!!
Deep in the mangrove swamps, we spotted lots of baby baracuda, baby puffer fish and baby lemon sharks. The water was so shallow, we grounded the kayak a couple of times and had to get out. Good thing we didn't step on the mangrove jellyfish, who fortunately are more interested in eating algae than tourists lubed up with SPF60.
We also stopped off to see Iguana Island, a small island home to over 3,000 iguanas. It was mating season, and they were, ahem, busy. Apparently the male iguana has not one but two penises. Between the iguanas and the glowworms (see post below), it was quite the sex education vacation!!
We kid you not. Once a month, they do a sailboat cruise to catch the GLOW WORMS mating. The phenomenon happens about 4 days after a full moon. Once it gets completely dark, you start to see little phosphorescent green dots in the water (female egg mass), about as big as a pencil eraser. It's like spotting stars in the sky. As you concentrate on one, you see a dim zig zag green dot chasing it. That's the male. Once they collide BOOM! The lights go out, the deed is done and the male dies. But what a way to go :)
Lizards and geckos are abundant here - at dusk you have to watch your step, because they're out eating sand fleas and mosquitoes (yum). The sign near the beach says "Ring the bell if you see JoJo the Dolphin" - which we did! Isn't that beach beautiful?
This rather vast sand trap looks like it's decorated with flowers...but on closer inspection, they are actually painted conch shells. Seems like a sacrilege to paint something as naturally beautiful as a conch shell, but there are so dang many of them!
Conch is plentiful here - found on every menu. We've had conch fritters, conch salad, pecan crusted conch, coconut crusted conch, cracked conch and conch wontons. If they had conch ice cream, we'd probably try that, too. The beautiful shells are all over the beach. We've seen live conch while scuba diving. I may go into conch withdrawal when I get home!
Beautiful weather and 84 degree water makes for pretty cushy diving! We saw eagle rays, sting rays, lots of crabs, parrotfish, snapper, baracuda, little fingerprint snails, and garden eels that pop out of the sand. We also saw these little one inch worms called blennies that looked just like the creature in Alien that popped out of the guy's stomach. Eeeewww.
Turks and Caicos is south of the Bahamas, in the British West Indies, tucked between Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The music is a heavy footed reggae/rap combo, like Jamaica. This guy greeted us at the airport with his band - he was playing percussion on the saw! Not sure how many shirts he goes through a week, but the music was great :)
