Hakuna matata

Well last evening was fun. We spent our sofa time at the piazza (we are SO institutionalised!) after dinner and before the ‘entertainment’ started checking up on our understanding of grammar…can’t remember why!…T learned a lot about adverbs and when to use ‘smelled’ instead of ‘smelt’ and other past tense oddities. We also enjoyed spotting all the characters we’re not so much getting to know as recognising around the place. There’s Matt Hancock (he looks so much like him!), Barry the pool patroller, yellow trousers girl, Kelvin lookalike man, the Nordic young women, and, most entertainingly, Madge and her friend gnarly nonna. There was a bit of a fracas as gnarly nonna berated Barry during Bruno’s singing and Madge was furious with her - wagging her finger and getting very aerated (unfortunately we couldn’t hear what she said!). Oh my what a lot of nonsense but we did have a laugh making up backstories for them all!
Unfortunately we had a fire alarm at 1am and T and I walked up to reception to report it (everyone else in our block was clueless!). Took a while for the night porter to get through to relevant staff so it was after 1.30am before we got back to bed!
Up early to catch our pickup for the half day tour of the island. We stopped at coral beach, ‘blue eye’ underground water pool (not visible because of cloud but the waves around the rocks were beautiful), Palmeira the port with prettily painted houses and fishermen gutting the morning’s catch, the Mirage area of desert in the north, Espargos the capital (and surrounding shanty town), and then visited the site of the first commercial salt production (for export to Brazil!) in Salinas de Pedra de Lume. Took 4 years to hand cut the tunnel through to the caldera where the salt pools were, and then later construct huge structures to run the bags of salt from the pans to the port nearby. We had a look around and then a float in the very salty water…really odd but lovely feeling and left our skin very soft. Later as we dried we got crustier but were soon back at the hotel and could shower and change.
Good salad lunch then off to the zip wire. I stayed at the bottom picking up shells and coral on the beach whilst T went up the mountain and zipped down…he had a great time!
Rather a long time after the zipwire before our ride home arrived, but we hopped off at an earlier hotel to walk through it and then along the beach and home. We got changed and nipped into the pool. Amazed ourselves by scoring 117 in our regular volleyball tournament on our first attempt…ecstatic! After two mojitos we couldn’t top that despite many tries but had a lot of laughs in the process.
It’s been a busy but fun day. In the collage I’ve also included a photo of the cats and dogs that are around almost everywhere…very friendly but goodness knows how they survive here.