On the Third Day of Christmas

While taking Audrey on a path through the jungle today, she was walking ahead of me for a portion of the “trail” and accidentally walked through the web of a massive orb weaver. With any other girl I would have been a single man only microseconds after the six inch spider started running across her back, but luckily I picked someone who later described the moment as the highlight of her afternoon. Still, I’m glad I managed to get the arachnid off of her before it ran onto her bare neck; she loves spiders, but that might have been too much even for Audrey.

Our day today consisted of scuba diving in the morning and an ill-fated attempt to photograph birds in the afternoon. The scuba diving was again fun; the other couple who was supposed to dive cancelled, so it was just us and Hama underwater. We again saw a giant moray, a couple of sharks made appearances, and my favorite for the day was a school of about ten giant trevallies, 3-4 foot long tuna-like fish that were hanging out under the boat, apparently hoping we had been fishing and were about to dump some fish parts overboard. At some point hopefully I’ll either get some video up, or else I’ll steal whatever Audrey puts together and post it.

Following an afternoon siesta we set out to a park that had been recommended for birds, and took some flight photos from a clifftop overlook for a bit. While we saw a few of the unique golden tropic-birds, numerous boobies (relax, they’re a species of bird), and a bunch of frigate birds, bats were again a surprisingly common sight and not an animal I ever expected to be photographing in flight. Unfortunately our vantage point was limited, and I could see tons of other birds flying and landing nearby, so I figured we’d hike down to Smith Point, which the nearby trailhead indicated was only a short distance away. This was a poor choice on my part.

The path started off well enough, with a set of stairs and an informational panel, but at the bottom of the stairs it simply dumped us out into the jungle with zero indication on where to go next. Scanning the jungle, we would occasionally see a post or sign and set off towards it, but whenever we’d reach a point where nothing was visible we’d have to make a best guess of where to go, set off that way, and trace our steps back if we didn’t eventually run into some indication that we weren’t setting ourselves up to become crab food once it got dark. After bushwhacking through crabs and spiders in the heat and humidity for thirty-ish minutes I finally gave up, and we retraced our steps back to the trailhead, with Audrey becoming close personal friends with the giant orb weaver along the way. Tomorrow we’ll give the birds another try, but this time we may check in at the visitor center to get better advice on where exactly we should go before heading out again.