Banana flower photo op

Liz and Beth at breakfast

Roosters crowing (at any time of day or night) was a sound we came to adore. If we hadn't had the air conditioner on and the windows closed in our room all night, I think we still would not have minded them.

Liz performed feng shui on our crowded little room, moving the mini-frig, chair, and luggage to make more room, and converting half of the closet into a dressing room. My clutter kept falling off the rounded edges of the dresser top.

On our way out of the courtyard, Liz or Beth noticed that the banana tree was flowering. We shot a bunch of photos and gawked and chuckled at the flowers, as big as bananas, the likes of which we'd never seen before.

We had coffee at a table on Sebastian's outdoor terrace by the beach. Once breakfast was available, we sat there and ate - rum French toast for Liz and me - until a light rain sprinkled us.

We took some time in our room getting organized for our first day's outing. Towels, lotion, cameras, swimwear, snacks, and snorkels.

We walked down the road to Long Bay, up and around the hill, where the beach came into view, and down to the row of dwellings on the beach, where we found a walkway between the buildings to the sand. The sky had become overcast with clouds and the surf hissed in.

Long Bay

Nature Boy's

Liz said she was going to take a nap. Beth and I walked down the beach. It was deserted. Toward the far end we came to a crude, but elaborately furnished and decorated beach bar. "Nature Boys" was painted on the little, one-bartender shack. No one was there. We put our beach bags and snorkel gear on lounge chairs.

Inside the shack was a cooler with a chain around it. Beer bottle caps were pounded into tree trunks. Scattered about the hillside were lounge chairs under makeshift roofing -- plastic sheeting, etc., and a hammock.

A light rain started. I went snorkeling and saw some small fish.

The sun was out when I got out of the water.

Two husky older women in bathing suits, Lucy and her mother Alexa were talking to Liz. They were Ukrainians from Odessa who lived in Philadelphia. Liz had told them our family was from Poland. Alexa explained to me, "My fadder -- husband," she corrected herself, "from Lodz, Poland. He die 10 years."

I snorkeled again and encountered a school of fish.

The Nature Boys guy came. Beth was talking to him. She told me later she wanted to find out if we were invading his territory, because the bar looked like a teenager's fort or clubhouse (the lounge chairs on the hillside were good for making out, I observed). His name was Winston, and he was trying to make a business of the bar.

Winston talked too much, all about himself and his plans, and I wanted to get away without being rude. The sun was burning and I sought shade. Winston sought someone to listen to his monologue (mostly it was Beth). Finally, it was close enough to lunch, which I suggested to Beth and Liz. Beth and I tore ourselves away from Winston, wishing him luck with the business.

We said good-bye to Lucy and Alexa. Lucy said to Liz, "I hope I haven't overwhelmed you with my talking."

(Later Liz and Beth told me that Lucy and Alexa despise Americans -- although they have lived in Philly for some 10 years now, and were nice to us. They think Americans are rude and corrupt. Really? I was surprised. Then I remembered when I told them my family was from Chicago, Alexa asked me, "Oh! lot of crime in Chicago?" At the time, I thought little of it, just the common naive stereotype of Chicago. I joked to Beth and Liz that we should find them and tell them we will beat them up if they don't give us money.)

We went back down the beach to the "1748" Restaurant. We sat under the canopy, with the beach before us, and had lunch. Light country-pop music played on the stereo. Chickens and a black cat came around for morsels of food. The chicks got bits of bread and the cat got bits of my burger. The older couple at the table next to us, we found out, were from Madison. They have a home here. The lady was dropping tidbits on the floor, too.

Liz wasn't feeling well. But she continued on with Beth and me, down the road to Smuggler's Cove we walked.

Smuggler's Cove

We walked for 15 or 20 minutes down a quiet road patched with sunlight and deep shadow where the dense woods closed in.

Smuggler's Cove had a beautiful, sheltered beach, with reef on the left and right. Quite a few people were there. We found a scrap of shade where the sand met the vegetation.

Beth bought a beach bag from the beach vendor. The vendor lady went to get change from Bomba, who was sitting in a car in the parking lot. I knew it was Bomba because I'd seen a picture of him on the Web, and the car he was in had "BOMBA" painted in big letters on the sides.

Beth and I got on our snorkel gear and went into the water, her first time on this vacation. But she wasn't ready to plunge in like I was. She got out.

I snorkeled around the reef on the left. Hundreds of small, fast fish whirled around me in a dizzying spin. Then another school of fish -- thousands of slow, minnow-like fish moving past in three-dimensional layers, like in mirrors facing each other.

I surfaced and saw that Beth and Liz were in the water, so I swam back to them. Liz was just getting out. Beth was getting used to her gear. Together we ventured out to the reef on the right. A large mound of coral was home to hundreds of small fish and dozens of medium-sized yellow fish.

Back on the beach, we gathered up our stuff. I went out to Bomba, still sitting in his car. A man was standing next to the car talking to him. I approached them and said, "So you are Mr. Bomba?" Yes. I asked for directions to Soper's Hole, where we planned to have dinner and look around the shops. "How far is it? We're walking. How hilly is it?" I asked.

The man standing next to the car gave me directions. He said it was about a 25 minute walk. There was one big hill, which we would climb up in about 10 minutes. "Just go straight, just stay straight" he repeated.

It didn't look far on the map when I had planned the day. I thought we'd have dinner in Soper's Hole, a group of shops and restaurants by a busy marina. Then we'd take a taxi home, since each leg of the day's journey took us farther away from our hotel.

I reported back to Liz and Beth. We put our clothes on over our swimsuits (then it looked like we wet our pants), grabbed our bags and hit the road. From the parking lot we walked down the short dirt driveway to the paved road.

"Go straight" the man had told me. But the road went left or right. Left led back the way we'd come, to Long Bay and Sebastian's. To the right, I knew, it was not far to the western tip of the island, so we couldn't go wrong that way, because Soper's Hole was just around the tip to the south.

Whether it was to the left or right, somehow we missed the road over the mountain -- the big hill the man mentioned -- that led directly into Soper's Hole. (That was the way the taxis went between the West End ferry and Sebastian's.) We ended up on the coastal road, no really big hills, but out to the western tip and back around it -- the long way, we discovered too late.

Bumpy dirt road. Not a single car passed us the whole way.

Rounding the western tip of Tortola on the way to Soper's Hole

We walked. Uphill past a private driveway where dogs barked at us. The three of us tended to spread out as we hiked, sometimes 50 yards or so apart. I would stop to take photos -- "Go ahead, keep walking. I'll catch up." I didn't want to break anyone's momentum. But the three of us clustered together when the dogs started barking. We got past the driveway, and I probably stopped to take more pictures.

Then I saw a dog was approaching me from the driveway. He came up to me. Beth and Liz were far away by that time. But he turned out to be peaceful, just curious, I suppose. I talked calmly to him and went on.

A snake crossed the road in front of Liz. On the left of the road, trees and cactus clung to the steep slope above us. Through the foliage on the right, the sun slanted in and we caught glimpses of blue water below.

Gradually we rounded the tip of the island, and moored boats came into view, then a cluster of buildings across the marina on the other shore -- Soper's Hole. (Soper's Hole is on Frenchman's Cay, connected by a short bridge to Tortola.)

We walked past the West End Taxi Company. We came to a man in uniform (customs officer or policeman). I said to Liz and Beth, let's ask him. We asked how much farther to Soper's Hole. "It's not far. The bridge is right down there." Maybe we could take a taxi? I asked. "No, it's not that far to walk," he assured us.

We couldn't quite see around the curve to the near end of the bridge, but we could see that the span of the bridge over the water looked rather long, and then on the other side we'd have to backtrack a bit to Soper's. The three of us debated what to do. We walked.

He turned out to be right -- just another ten minutes, but we had been walking for an hour since leaving Smuggler's Cove. (The blisters on our feet hurt for pretty much the rest of the vacation, at least when wearing our hiking sandals. It was flip-flops a lot of the time afterwards.)

Over the bridge, we started to the left, thinking there was a restaurant nearby there. Maybe there was, but we decided to turn back to the right, where the main cluster of commercial buildings were.

At Soper's Hole, we found the grocery store was closed. We found other shops closed. It was around 6:00 p.m. We wanted smoothies, then I wanted to eat dinner. At a coffee shop, a lady said she was just closing but she'd serve us. We asked for smoothies. She was out of the ingredients, so we left.

Pusser's was open. We joined the crowd at the circular, open-air bar. The bartender made us smoothies. Then I wanted food. We sat at a table on the deck by the water. I thought the waitresses would be able to get our order quicker than the nice, but over-busy bartender.

I ordered pizza. Neither Liz nor Beth wanted anything. We waited. I ate a snack bar I had in my pack. We waited and waited. Finally, disgusted, I said let's go. We left. I ate another snack bar and that was dinner -- much too sweet altogether.

Then we needed a taxi. I was grateful to Beth for going back to ask the bartender to call us a taxi. I had burned my bridges by walking out before my pizza came. Just as the bartender was dialing the phone, Liz called to me from the street -- there was a taxi right there ("Rasta Taxi"). I relayed that to Beth, who relayed it to the bartender.

It was getting dark when we rode back to the hotel.

We stopped in Sebastian's office and store for peanut butter and postcards, and they had the third room key that we'd requested.

Not the smoothest beginning of the itinerary I had planned for us for the next two weeks -- at least not the last leg of our hike. For Liz and Beth, I suppose the last hike was longer than they wanted. For me, the lack of a real dinner was all that I minded; the hike was a beautiful reverie in an unfamiliar land.