Me and my silly hat, at Fort Charlotte. More photos here.

Curry was brilliant. Also helped make banana fritters. Mmm. Full.

Have spent the last two days in a frenzy of cousin-inspired activities, since Keira and Jason leave for Vancouver tomorrow morning at the ass-crack of dawn (I am SO getting steamrolled at 5am, oh baby, you know it). Have succeeded in transforming my pasty white flesh into a lobster-red burn laced with stark white bikini string marks. Today I have ‘boat head’ from spending too much time on surfaces with unstable horizons. But no complaints. Except that my vocabulary has grown to include the word “BossMan”: I’d better drop that before getting back to Toronto. Not cool.

Snorkelling

Yesterday, Caius *finally* convinced me I wouldn’t be eaten by any gigantic-tentacled squid or eaten by wrathful sea kraken if I snorkeled closer to the rock shelf in the bay, so he and I went for a long swim, and then suddenly… there were clouds of tiny fish, millions upon millions, darting around me. The water was silver with them.

I kept wondering how there was enough oxygen for all of them and two big humans to be breathing at the same time, and then I remembered that I was actually breathing through a big tube sticking *out* of the water. The whole experience was surreal. Silent, because your ears are underwater. Super bright, because the sun is reflecting off the white sand and the fish. Like being immersed in a National Geographic special, but with control where the camera goes. Marvelous.

Glass Bottomed Boat

Today, I went out on a glass bottomed boat with Keira, Jason, and about eight thousand overweight American tourists fresh off the Disney cruise ship, who were being herded around by a bossy blonde guide with about as much enthusiasm for her job as if she was working as a janitor in a fish processing plant. The two stops over the protected coral reefs were excellent, with the clear highlights of the day being 1) I got to see a whole bunch of blue parrot fish – my favorites, and hard to see unless you’re way offshore, and 2) no being eaten by sharks who broke through the bottom of the boat – not a common phenomenon, just a personal paranoia.

Brain Coral: Why aren’t we afraid of this stuff?

The downside of this adventure is that I have and am have found something new to be unreasonably fearful of in the big blue ocean. What the hell is up with brain coral? How can nature have possibly evolved two such similar looking organisms as coral and mammalian brain tissue, without having similar purposes for each of them?

Having never seen live brain coral growing wild in the ocean before, I was previously unaware of it’s truly freakish resemblance to what is inside my own noggin, directing me to breathe and eat and read Frank Miller and Sartre. It’s freakish. There is simply no way to convince me that the few remaining ocean reefs are not riddled with synaptic thought centers made out of biologically complex sponge, plotting their revenge against the foolish humans who keep destroying their habitat by poking it while scuba diving and breaking it off with the keels of their absurdly oversized yachts.

And that is my X-Files report for tonight. Thank you, and sleep well.