From S. Wales to S. America!
 Playa Blanca: Donkeys in the night and one dead kitten..... Sunday morning we caught a cruise ship over to Playa Blanca. We spent the whole journey transfixed by a couple in their late thirties who couldn`t keep their hands of each other. They must have had some sort of hormone problem as they were tongue wrestling like it was their last day on Earth. I swear there was a puddle of drool and slobber developing underneath them. Get a room! I don`t like day cruises. I`ve been on day cruises all over the world and they never fail to disappoint me. This one was no different. We didn`t really want the cruise but it was the only way to get to Playa Blanca on a Sunday. We were herded on and off the boat at places with hundreds of other tourists until eventually reaching our destination mid-afternoon. We`d been told that the beach at Playa Blanca was stunning. It was nice but not in the same league as a lot of the beaches we`ve been to in other places (particularly Australia) on this trip. The water, however, was amazing. It was blue, clear and very warm. Welcome to the Carribean coast! For the first 2 nights we were the only guests at our accommodation. We were staying at `Wittenburg` which is run by a Frenchman named Gilbert and his Colombian wife Anna. We didn`t have a room, we just rented a couple of hammocks with mosquito nets. It`s so hot, day and night, that it`s nice to sleep outside in a hammock. Every night we lay in our hammocks watching the sky light up with distant lightning. I was woken up quite often by the sound of donkeys and cows wandering through the property. I wouldn`t be able to see them properly until there was a flash of lightning and suddenly there would be the silhouettes of four or five donkeys just a couple of metres away. We spent the days snorkelling, swimming, reading and just relaxing on the beach or in our hammocks. We were up at first light and I had usually already had my morning swim before having breakfast at about 7am. After a couple of days we were joined by some more travellers; Erika and Hilary (Canadian), Kevin (Irish) and Juan Carlos (Peru). Hilary gets the prize for most dramatic entrance after being carried into camp with a stingray injury to her foot. The owner of the place sucked the poison out of her foot (a very unreliable cure in my opinion as it had been six hours since she was stung!) in front of the crowd of people who seemed to appear from everywhere. That night we went to Hugo`s beach bar. Hilary couldn`t walk so we carried her to the bar. Hugo`s is basically a thatched hut on the beach with no electricity so we drank and talked in the dark. Hugo is a top man. Not only did he follow Hilary and try it on with her as she tried to hobble home one night but he also jumped on our boat when we were leaving the island and tried to claim that I had short-changed him the night before. Tourists short-changing Colombians....that would make an interesting change! Oh, how I laughed and promptly gave him nothing at all. One afternoon whilst we were all sitting around at Wittenburg we were unfortunate to witness the demise of one of the kittens that lived there. The kitten had made the mistake of trying to eat Fortuna the dog`s food and Fortuna grabbed the kitten in her teeth and threw it. We all sat there horrified as the mortally wounded kitten writhed in a circle on the floor with blood spurting out of it`s broken body like a sort of gory catherine wheel. When it had stopped twitching Gilbert took it away to bury it and we all turned back to find Kevin that the Irishman had disappeared. Apparently the sight of the wounded kitten dying was too much for him and he had made a sharp exit to the beach. The rest of us dealt with the trauma by cracking open a few cold ones. It was nice to experience Playa Blanca the way it is now. It has lots of small thatched huts and lean-to beach bars and restaurants and most of the accommodation is in hammocks or campsites. The bars and restaurants are run by locals. This is soon to change when the Sheraton hotel group build their five star resort. A lot of the buildings have already been destroyed. The Sheraton will be leasing the beach for 30 years meaning that budget travellers like us will no longer be able to afford to visit it. The locals who run the little beach businesses will probably end up waiting tables or cleaning rooms in the new hotel. It`s a shame but it`s also amazing that such a beach has survived this long without development.
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Diary Photos
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Kirsty in her hammock |
 We are in the Carribean! |
 Us at Playa Blanca |
 Beach at Playa Blanca |
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