Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Where I stayed

I stayed at Royal Caribbean Resort, about 1.5 miles south of town. The resort is made up of rows of cute little yellow cabanas. I stayed in #6:


^A panorama of the interior. When I got there they had put red hibiscus flowers on the bed and a few other places. It was a spacious, comfy room with awesome AC.
The TV got a lot of American cable stations, with local news for Denver, Los Angeles and Atlanta. It also got Al Jezeera, some Indian stations (one in B&W and another that played a lot of Bollywood movies), and a Japanese channel that had ridiculous game shows and awful karaoke. The local station was #7; most of the day it played advertisements for local businesses set to pop music, then there was incredibly low-budget local news in the evening.

^The ceiling of the cabana was neat looking. Geckos like to hide up there and come out at night. Unfortunately, so do ants. There was one night when over a hundred enormous flying ants descended from the ceiling. I have a phobia of ants, and was not willing to share my living space with them, so I ran around smashing them all with a deadly flip-flop.

^Here I am standing on the resort's section of the beach at sunset.

^I had the beach to myself most days. It's the off-season for tourism right now because their summers are very rainy, but the weather was perfect--mid-80s with a constant wind off the sea. There were a few brief, intense storms; inside the cabana it sounded like driving through a car wash. There were a couple thunder claps that made the ground shake like in an earthquake. The storms were wonderful.

^This is the resort's dock. Guests get picked up here to go on boat trips, or you can climb down the stairs and swim in the shallow, warm water.

I also had the pool all to myself most days. I brought a submersible book of fabulous, beach-related short fiction, with stories like Doerr's "The Shell Collector" and Marquez's "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World."

Here's a panorama of the water from the resort beach at sunset: