As I write this blog our new friend Haley is currently performing pocket knife surgery on Amanda's foot to remove the remains of a sea urchin. This is actually an injury from a very exciting day in Bocas del Toro! We rented kayaks in the afternoon and paddled to Isla Carinero to go to an over-the-water bungalow cafe that had legendary pina coladas. On the way over we stopped at a little bluff of rocks where we tied up our kayaks and did some snorkeling while we waited for our friends to catch up. Amanda made a fancy double knot to 'secure' our kayaks to the rocks, which army Sam laughed at and commented ''What do you call that one? Two-times-safe?'' which we all got a big kick out of and then promptly dubbed this bluff Two-Times-Safe.Amanda and I snorkeled around for a little while and since it was her first time snorkeling I warned her not to touch the coral since some of them can leave some nasty burns (Sam has a nasty welt on his knee from a coral run-in in the San Blas islands a few days ago). We saw so many pretty fish and when Dov
joined us a little while later he even found a hermit crab! He picked it up and out of the water and let it crawl all over his hand... I held it next and as Amanda and I huddled together to look at it it took a nice bite at my hand which made me drop it in the water. In the same moment Amanda and I BOTH instantaneously sat right on top of a nice chunk of fire coral which gave us incredible burns on both of our right butt cheeks. FML! We promptly changed the name of our 'island' bluff to Peligroso Point (Danger Point). Needless to say we were ready to leave our bluff and check out those pina coladas.Update on Amanda's surgery from Haley: ''We've got another one! Numero quatro and a half. Oh man this one is... really... really big. Mother f-er.''
We paddled over to Isla Carinero and pulled our kayaks up onto a little patch of beach right next to the Pickled Parrot. We all had our fair share of pina coladas (which truly were epic) and had some fantastic lunches to go along with our drinks. Jimmy Buffet and some other island tunes were playing on a mini plasma tv which was hanging over the bar and right over our view of the ocean which (oddly) completed the picture.
Amanda and Dov decided to go kayak surfing while Sam Haley and I hung out on Pickled Parrot's dock. It turns out that Haley worked for the Obama campaign! So we had lots to talk about :) Amanda and Dov came back a little while later with both battle wounds and success stories of waves ridden. Apparently during this adventure Amanda met the beloved sea urchin which decided to leave half of his body in the ball of her foot... which we discovered a few hours later. At the time being we were too distracted by our previous fire coral burns to inspect Amanda's foot which apparently hurt worse than our burns for 'some reason'. After showering later on I looked at her foot and realized there were about a thousand ''splinters'' in her foot... And I quickly realized Amanda hadn't stepped on fire coral- she had pulverized a sea urchin!
Which leads us to the beginning of this blog. Haley ended
up removing about half of Amanda's venomous sea urchin spikes with a pocket knife and a safety pin and only caused Amanda to bleed about 3 times. Hooray! For future reference should you need to know how to remove a sea urchin's body from your foot. At this point we decided to let her body fight off the rest of the spikes so we could go and be social and join our new found friends in the game of Texas Pound 'Em (''I'll check your sip and raise you a pour!''). Two entire crates of beer later (being that our hostel is also the town bar it was easy to stay hydrated) we decided to play another card game called Mojo... a fast paced alcohol fueled game of nonverbal communication. Needless to say Dov and I dominated the game...We are off to the Sunken Ship bar down the street... To be continued :)
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