Day 3: Beach and stars

Date: 03.03.2014

Today we had an off day from diving. When we got our asses off from the bed - it took some time, because I was resting my leg outside, drinking coffee and watching the geckos to do their things and the guys joined me. After that we headed to Esperanza to see the "tourist town" which is basically few beach side bars, small souvenir stores, and a large beach. There is a pier one one side, and it's filled with fish, so it's a great place to snorkel. The guys snorkeld for a while, and I staid at the beach underneath the coconut trees trying to get some sun on my white as... well, everywhere.

Unfortunately they did got bored pretty soon and Eerik wanted to rent scooters. He only got one and after a quick math, I offered to take the taxi back to our apartment and hang there for a while with my scraped knee.

The guys went to see some bunkers with the scooter. The marked road was really an overgrown dirt road, and they came back to the apartment complaining how they didn't feel their balls anymore (yeah, thanks for the info, and I loved to share that info also with you  ;) ), I'm pretty sure the suspension was dying underneath them, poor suspension.

After lying around for a while, we wanted to go to the biolumincent bay to see the glow. Getting a taxi back there wasn't possible, the dispatcher was force feeding me the bio tours and saying that the taxi cannot go nearer than in Esperanza, but fortunately they really could take us to the parking lot where the tour groups met. From there, we started walking (me and Timo) and Eerik played with his scooter.

Unfortunately the bay was pretty silent, except the lights and people around in their kayaks. We decided to head back and take some night pictures of the sky from the Sun Bay, before heading back to Esperanza to visit Carlito to get my Diving log book and temporary diving license.

Taxi service stnz as your service

We sat down at Lazy Jack's and I had a short chat with Carlito what to do next with my longer plan as a diver, before getting a taxi back to Santa Maria and heading back to bed.

Debriefing at Lazy Jack's (by stnz)

I found a 10cm moth, I placed it somewhere dark and safe after admiring it for a while

Day 3: NOLA-MIA-SJU

Date: 24.2.2014

Before we left, we visited a local dive shop because stnz wanted to buy his own diving computer and missed  the store in NYC. The store didn't have the right computer so we left empty handed. We stopped in a nearby gas station (BTW, the gas is annoyingly cheap here). I managed to see the local newspaper and it had a suitable front page for me, on the day of my b-day; Banksy! I had to buy the paper, and I'll frame it at home :).

We got to the airport on time and returning the car was hilarious because we changed the car's units to real ones. The person checking our car asked us where did we drove with it? Then it came clear that she was overwhelmed of the mileage we got into the car in 2 days, she calculated them to be 15 000 :D. We realized that she didn't see that we had changed the car off from the miles and into kilometers so the conversion from the mileage when we got the car and the amount in kilometers afterwards didn't add up.

Time to head out of NOLA and change scenery somewhere even more warmer from the ~20C weather.
Yesterday it rained but today it was beautiful (of course).

The long ass Causeway

New Orleans from the sky

Miami

At San Juan, we waited for our rental car bus to pick us up for 45 minutes, and made 3 phone calls. It felt like the Hertz-people taunted us, because they passed by us 6 times. Stnz rented our car from some small place instead of the big ones we usually use, so this wasn't really a good start.

After a while, the guy picked us up, saying that they didn't know someone was coming. Funny, we called 40 minutes earlier and they said someone was "right there picking us up"..

While driving to the company, there were two big collisions on the highway, fortunately the cars were new, so it seemed that everyone escaped without major injuries.

The car was basic bulk, but it was cheap. Good enough for our purpose. Waiting for the car and problems with their printer I gave up on anything fun happening on my bday. Sucks ass. Well, the weather was nice.

Stnz at the rental car company

Our little four wheeler

Our aparment is really nice, and there are ACs in the bedrooms. I really love it - and it was our home for 4 days (one day more than we planned, because we don't have any flights reserved and paid).