Ardastra Zoo and Gardens cont...

So, yesterday I posted most of the cool pictures of animals and plants and things that I took while Adam and I were at the Ardastra Zoo and Gardens in Nassau. However, there are two experiences in particular that were super cool while we were there, but I didn't have room in my previous post to put in even more pictures, along with a video!

So the first cool thing that they have at the Zoo is that you can go into the Lorry Parrot cage, and actually feed the parrots. You can donate $ (but you don't have to), and the feeder gives you pieces of apple, and the parrots fly to you and land and then you feed them the apples. We were lucky that we showed up at one of the feeding times, because I really wanted to do it. Adam stayed outside the cage, once again (I love that I'm braver than my boyfriend :P), and took pictures of me feeding the birdies. So here are a couple, through the bars of their cage unfortunately, but still fun!
















The bird that landed on me stayed on my head the whole time, and every time that I dropped the apple piece he would squawk very loudly until I picked it back up and continued feeding him (or her, I really don't actually know). It was pretty cute, even though usually I'm not the hugest fan of birds. The only bad thing was that he dropped tiny apple pieces all over my head, so Adam had to spend a couple minutes after I got out of the cage picking them out - I felt like those monkeys that pick bugs off of each other! But it was still a really neat experience.

The other cool thing that they have at Ardastra is the Marching Flamingoes. These flamingoes have actually been trained to march on vocal command from their trainer, and it's really cool to watch!

Here's a picture of the flamingo arena, before the flock was brought in:
The two pictures below are of the flamingoes posing, after their show. The trainer took one person out of each of the sections around the arena, and had them pose for pictures with the trainer. You could really tell that these flamingoes were made for entertaining, because they really posed!















The next picture is of one of the marching flamingoes. There were two flocks of flamingoes at the Ardastra Zoo and Gardens - one that marches, and one that's a breeding flock (because this type is endangered, supposedly). The marching flock wanders free-range around the Zoo, but the breeding flock are (understandably) kept behind a barrier. This guy below was part of the marching flock, but he was bound and determined that he was going to get in with the breeding flock - I guess he'd heard they were easy! :p
Next picture is of the flamingoes actually marching. Also, here is the link to the video that I took of them (I love my new camera!), where you can actually hear the trainer giving the commands.
And as a cute little ending, here's a picture of me and Adam that I actually really like. Usually at least one of us manages to look completely retarded in a picture of us, but this one actually turned out not too badly!
Next post I'll start posting pictures of our day at the Atlantis Waterpark and Marine Habitat. Also, there are a couple more pictures of our day at the Zoo, so if anyone wants to see I can send an email with the link to my Yahoo Photos album.

Lata!

"We're going to the zoo, zoo, zoo, How about you, you, you?"

So, on the Monday (the 18th), we decided that it was a great day to go to the local zoo that I'd found out about on the internet: Ardastra Zoo and Gardens. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, but not too hot - perfect for wandering around outside looking at cool animals! So after eating breakfast and putting together a little travel pack (Adam found out the hard way this trip that it is imperative that I am always close to a washroom, and that I always have protein-rich food to snack on), we got one of the hotel doormen to hail a taxi for us - there are always a couple waiting in front of every major hotel - and headed off to the zoo. It was about a 15 minute drive, and cost us about $11, which really wasn't too bad! When we got to the zoo, it was apparent pretty quickly that this wasn't going to be the typical North American zoo. It was very small, very informal (!) and very 'wild'. I guess that was partly because it was also the 'Gardens', so part of the fun was getting to be surrounded by natural flora as well as fauna.

We paid (don't remember how much, but extremely cheap), and went on inside. I'd been looking the zoo up on the internet the day before, and had seen a list of all the creatures that were there. I didn't realize at the time, but quickly came to realise when we got to the zoo, and that many of those creatures weren't actually kept in cages or display areas, but were actually just wild, hanging around! The first thing that made us realise this was that right when we walked in, there was a parrot just hanging out on a little personalised (or animalised) perch, with no cage around. Which made me a little nervous, because there was also a sign saying something along the lines that parrots can be aggressive, so don't try to touch them. Interesting safety measures!
The second thing that made us figure out that not all the animals were caged is when we walked around a corner in the path (very narrow, grassy pathways - few of the pathways were paved, so it was sometimes even hard to tell if it was a pathway for visitors or just for employees), and encountered this gal:
Yeah, that's a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. She was just lying right by the side of the path (the whitish part to the very left of her are the stones on the edge of the path). What you can't tell from this picture is how big she was, cause she looks all cute and tiny in the picture. Not so much in real life. She was about 4 feet long, and I have no idea how many pounds but just imagine how big if that pig was that long! We walked by her empty cage later and learned that her name is Lulubelle. Slightly more dainty than she is, wouldn't you say!?

EDIT: also, I figured out that not all the animals were in cages because on the website they'd had a whole bunch of insects and spiders listed, and yet they didn't actually have any in the zoo... turned out that those were all just native insects, and native spiders which were living in the many spiderwebs to be found around the zoo!!

(Back to the original post) Using the map that we were given when we entered the zoo, we managed to make sure that we saw all of the animals in the cages. I'm just going to post the pictures of them, so you can see the different animals we saw.
Here's a serval. Yeah, I'd never heard of that either. Some fairly small wildcat, pretty cute!












These jaguars were being so cute and cuddly. I know it kind of looks like they're mating, but I'm pretty sure they were actually mom and baby, because of the way they were behaving the rest of the time (see the licking picture).






























Aw, look at those lazy little lemurs (I love alliteration).
















This is a caiman (sp?), cute little fella.














This iguana just looked so relaxed and content, I was envious!













These were the only 2 parrots in the whole zoo who were in a cage. By the extreme aggressiveness that this guy showed, I'm assuming it's because they didn't do well being out around people!




There were also some domestic animals in the zoo, not really sure why, and you could even buy food pellets and feed them. There were 2 of those sheep and 3 little goats altogether, and they were adorable!!

Like I mentioned above, the zoo was also the Gardens, so it was beautifully landscaped, in a very natural, wild way. Here are some pictures of some of the plants and landscaping around the place:















This tree to the right is some kind of palm tree, I don't remember what it was called, but you can see how tall it was by the 2 people beside it.



















There were waterways like this all around the park, with a bunch of cute little ducks, and some beautiful black swans. Well, I thought they were beautiful until I ran out of food to give them, and one attacked me!



Here's some more of the pretty scenery at the gardens, I don't know what the flowering tree is called, but it was very colourful!




All right, I think that this is enough pictures for this entry, but there are still the 2 coolest things about our day at the zoo that I need to tell about, so I'll do another entry about it soon.

I'm so bored I can't be bothered to do anything... it truly is a paradox

Okay, well, so I'm stuck here in this craptastic city because it's my school's reading week, and all my friends are out doing fun travelling, and Adam is crazy busy with about a million really important assignments, and my sister is out of town visiting her boyfriend. So I'm pretty much just entertaining myself. Anyway, because of that, I am super bored (as the name would suggest), and for some reason that means that I have no motivation to do anything.

Anyway, I finally convinced myself that continuing to update this thing is a good way to entertain myself. That and watch Men in Black I and II one after the other. Nothing wrong with 4 and a half hours of Will Smith, let me tell you! But I digress.

So, the next day after the snorkelling, Sunday, we did nothing but relax, which was awesome. Wandered around the marina village a little (did I mention how much I loved that place?), had lunch at a really good deli place at the Atlantis, laid on the beach, just basically relaxed. Crazy that you can spend an entire day doing nothing worth relating, but I guess that's kind of the whole point of vacation, right?

Since this day doesn't really have any stories to relate, I thought that I would post some pictures of the Atlantis Marina, just to give you an idea of the crazy big 'boats' that were hanging around.

This is the view from the drive-up circle at the main towers of the Atlantis. I love the Christmas tree against the backdrop of tropicalness!



A nice bit boat, and the Atlantis condo complex behind it. The walkway around the marina went all the way along in front of the condo and around to the right of it. Adam and I walked the whole pathway one night - it was so beautiful, and you could see in the windows of the yachts, which was very cool.


Here's the walkway into the Marina Village (and to the Marina itself, to the right just after the wreathed colums).




This was one of the largest yachts we saw, which I'm pretty sure was in the movie Casino Royale, if you look closely. The picture really doesn't do it justice, the thing was just ridiculously huge!


Anyway, that's really it for now. Next post will be about Monday, when we went to the zoo/gardens in Nassau. Lots of pictures to come the next time, that's for sure!

I am SO BRAVE!!!

So, our 2nd full day there was Saturday. I got up nice and early once again, went out on the balcony to read again. It was so nice to just sit out there in the warmth, totally relaxed, and know that I had nothing to do! Adam eventually got up just before 10, and we went downstairs to get the breakfast buffet before it closed at 10. Then we did some wandering around until noon, when our bus for the snorkelling trip was supposed to come and pick us up.

The bus got there just a little late (the Bahamians really are a laidback bunch!), and we all loaded in - there were about 4 or 5 other people from our hotel going too. After about a half an hour, we arrived at the Stuart's Cove Marina, where we would be starting out. Adam and I went in to the shop, filled out all the forms ("if you die, no one can sue us"!), and bought some extra mouthpieces. Honestly, for $3, who wouldn't buy brand new mouthpieces for the snorkels... cause otherwise, eww....! We all piled onto the boat, about 20 of us and 2 of the workers. They were pretty young, but it was apparent fairly soon that they really knew what they were doing, which made me feel better. They handed out all of our equipment, and then we started out on the ocean. It was pretty windy on the boat, which looked kind of like one of those smaller fishing boats, but big enough that people can do deep-sea fishing off of. There were two stories so that you could go up on the roof if you wanted, but I was feeling a little nervous at that point so I decided to stay down where it was nice and safe! The ride was only about 15 or 20 minutes out to the first site, so it wasn't too long at all before we got to start!

The first site that we went to had a really big area of reef pretty close to the surface, which was great since we were just snorkelling and obviously couldn't go too far below the surface. There were SO many fish, and they were so incredibly colourful! And they would swim all around you, it was so neat. But one thing I noticed was that I would be completely and totally surrounded by fish, and they would be really, really close to me, but I could never actually touch them - they would always just swim out of reach. Which was too bad. But oh well. And at one point, I'm pretty sure that I saw a barracuda out in the open water. I do have a picture, but like I said in my last post I took the snorkelling pictures on a disposable camera, so I still have to develop them.

The Stuart's Cove guys stayed on the boat to watch out for things, and they were also throwing fish food into the water, so that if you swam where they threw the food you'd be so surrounded by fish that you couldn't even see around you. It was pretty cool. At first I was a little nervous, and the first 30 seconds or so I had that shortness of breath that I get every time I snorkel, but eventually I was fine, and then I started really, really enjoying it. In fact, I started to wish that we'd decided to scuba dive instead, because I wanted so much to dive down to the reef, check out all of the fish, and really get in there! For the first couple of minutes I tried to stay near Adam, because it is a little nerve-wracking to be out in the open ocean. But then I just started swimming all over the place - well, within the area we were told was safe, which was a pretty big area. After about 30 minutes, they called us back onto the boat so that we could go to the 2nd dive site.

The boat ride was only about 10 minutes, then we were at the next dive site. Apparently this site is the place where almost all underwater scenes in movies are shot, including Jaws and Pirates of the Caribbean. There was even an airplane that had been sunk there from Jaws 4 as a prop, which I got a picture of. It's supposed to be a really good place to see sting rays, the Eagle rays and one other kind, but I didn't get to see any, unfortunately. So that dive site wasn't too exciting, because it wasn't near too much reef so there weren't very many small fish, and like I said, I didn't see any rays. But it was still neat to see the props and know that movies had been filmed there! Again, after about 30 minutes they brought us back onto the boat, to head for the last and final dive site - the best part of the day!!

So we got to the 3rd dive site, and the guys started to load a bait box into the water, because at this site we were going to be diving with... duh duh duh... SHARKS!!!!! Oh yeah, that's right. The kind of sharks that were there were Caribbean reef sharks, which the dive guys told us were only scavengers, that would respond only to the dying vibrations of fish. Well, that turned out to not exactly be true, as I found out later when I looked on the internet (don't worry, no one found out the hard way!), but they do respond to vibrations of fear, etc., which is why the dive guys told us they were scavengers, so we wouldn't be too afraid. Also obviously the bait box full of fish kept their attention towards the ocean floor, so they really didn't care about us. And every website I looked at also said that they're not an aggressive species of shark, and will only get aggressive if they feel cornered.

The people who decided to swim with the sharks went in to the water, but we had to all stay hanging on to this big thick rope that they had hung off the back of the boat. The sharks were about 5 - 7 feet long, I think, and usually stayed toward the bottom of the ocean, so about 15 or 20 feet away. But some of them did come closer, just to kind of give us a look, and I have one picture of a shark like 9-10 feet away from me!! It was pretty crazy, let me tell you! But also incredibly cool, and because the guys had said the sharks were scavengers, I wasn't even nervous. But that didn't help Adam - he decided to stay on the boat. He said it was because he was watching to make sure nothing happened to me, but I think we all know that I'm just way braver than him! :P

We stayed in the water about 10 minutes, during which I got a couple of pretty cool photos, one showing just how many sharks there were (at least 2 dozen!). One guys had a real digital camera, the Olympus one that you can take underwater, and he dropped it and one of the sharks ate it!! I felt really bad for him, he was so upset.

Then they brought us all back onto the boat, and brought the dive box onto the boat. Then, they took the fish out of the bait box and threw it into the water, so that all the sharks came up to the surface to feed!! That was also extremely cool, and a little scary to see them feeding, too. I got some neat pictures of that too.

When that was done, we headed back to their marina. All in all, we were gone about 2 hours. Plus the ride there and back to the hotel, was about 3 hours altogether. Not too bad for $58 (including a brand-spanking-new mouthpiece, of course)!. So that was pretty much the coolest thing I'd ever done, I think. I mean obviously, I swam with freaking sharks!!!!

When we got back to the marina, we changed in the washrooms, then got back onto one of the buses. The buses got pretty crammed, because they picked up and dropped off from all of the hotels in the area. And those Bahamians, they're kind of crazy drivers - they don't exactly love to use their turn signals. However, we got back safely to the hotel, just in time to have a shower before heading down to dinner at one of the specialty restaurants (oh yeah, I'd also gotten up and made the booking for the specialty restaurant that morning, before Adam got up). That night we just went out for a walk around the hotel, relaxed a little. The day had pretty much tired us out, so we then just went up to the room, hung out, watched some tv, and of course as always I fell asleep at like midnight at the latest.

So that was my day of being adventurous. I know it's not a HUGE deal, but for me it's pretty crazy, cause I think we all know I'm a wuss! Anyway, that's all for now. I know I didn't put up any pics, but I just don't have any! I will post them as soon as I get them scanned, hopefully this weekend.

Hope you enjoyed hearing about my adventure!

Pretty, pretty pictures!

I would just like to apologize first for putting so many pictures in here. I know it can take a while to download for some people, but I don't really know how to do it otherwise, and frankly I just can't be bothered. So here goes...

On the morning of our first full day there, I woke up nice and early, probably around 7:30 or so. Partly because I’d been getting up that early for my exams at 9, and partly because I’d gone to bed so early the night before. Instead of going down, I decided to sit out on our little balcony and read for a while, which was very relaxing. We had requested an ocean-view room, which we did get – sort of. We technically looked directly across at the back of one of the Coral Towers of the Atlantis, but to the right was the ocean, so we had a good view from the balcony as long as we turned to the right a little. I read and relaxed for a while, then had a shower, and by that time Adam was awake. We went down and got breakfast at the buffet, which was decent-enough food. Here are some pictures of the eating area in the hotel:

This is one end of the waiting area, where hotel guests would wait for the specialty restaurants to open (they had specific times for dinner sittings, and you had to reserve those times every morning for whichever specialty restaurant you wanted).

The other end of the waiting room for the dining area.

Here is another Junkanoo figure decorating the buffet area.

Here is the outdoor eating area at the hotel, which was attached to the area where the lunch buffet was served. The pool, and the walkway down to the beach, is to the left.

After breakfast, we had our ‘introductory meeting’ at 10, where the SunQuest representative told us about a bunch of different activities and tours and things we could do while we were there. There were a couple of things that interested us particularly: there’s a company called Stuart's Cove that does snorkelling, scuba diving, and has these things that are kind of like little mopeds (they call them SUBs), that have a glass bubble that your head goes in, and you ride along a couple of feet along the bottom of the ocean floor. That looked really, really awesome, but it was $110 for 45 minutes, whereas the snorkelling was $55 for a 3 hour tour, so for the price we figured the snorkelling was a better bet. I wanted to go snorkelling first, and then if we decided to we could go scuba diving later, but I wanted to kind of get used to things first. So after the meeting, which only lasted about half an hour, we went and got some more information about the snorkelling from the SunQuest representative about reserving a snorkelling trip.

Once we decided that we definitely wanted to go, we had to go get some money from the Atlantis hotel (that's where the closest bank machine was) to book the trip. So we decided it was a perfect time to explore the Atlantis while we were getting some money. We walked over to the Beach Towers, the part of Atlantis closest to us, and followed the signs through the hotel.

These are two pictures of sculptures from the Atlantis casino. I know it's all based on the myth of the lost city of Atlantis, but I'm not 100% sure exactly what these represent. I mean, obviously the Earth and the Sun, but I'm not sure why they relate specifically to Atlantis, and everything in the hotel is supposed to relate directly to the myth. Anyway, they were neat sculpture thingies.

After we got our moolah, we headed back to our hotel, but on the way we decided to go outside through one of the Atlantis doors, and do a little more exploring. And that's when we discovered the absolute best part of the entire island: Marina Village. I don't remember if I mentioned it in my last post, I don't think so, but I loved this little place SO much. It had all these adorable little shops (and some expensive ones, because it is Paradise Island after all), and cute little restaurants. And it also had Starbucks, which I will not deny definitely helped in my love of it. But that definitely wasn't the best part. It was so colourful, and adorable, and Christmas calypso music was playing constantly. It was just so pretty. I guess words can't really do justice, so I'm going to post some pictures, but I'm pretty sure that they won't do it justice either since I'm obviously not a photographer!

Look at those pretty palm trees and colourful buildings! And so many happy people!

And this little area was made even better by the fact that it was right by the Atlantis Marina, which had HUGE, gorgeous boats parked in it. But I'm not going to post those pictures today, because there's quite a few and I think I've already put in enough for today!

After we went back to our hotel, we booked our snorkelling trip for the next day, then had some lunch. The rest of the day we just kind of lazed around, went back to the Marina Village for lunch, explored the hotel a little, etc. - nothing exciting, just taking it easy and relaxing! We ate supper at the buffet again because we hadn't known about making reservations that morning, then went up to the room and hung out, and went to bed fairly early again.

And that's all for now, folks. Tomorrow I'll post some pics of the Atlantis Marina, and tell you about my snorkelling adventure. I won't be able to post pictures of that, unfortunately, because I bought a disposable underwater camera to go snorkelling and didn't bring my camera along - I was way too worried about taking it near water, after just having got it a few days before!

Feeling cold? This post'll warm you up! (Or just make you realize how miserable Canadian winters are)

I'm just diving right into this baby...

I wrote my last exam, Income Tax, on the 12th, the Tuesday. It was a great way to finish exams, because it was by far the hardest, and it felt the best to have it done. That afternoon I got my eyebrows waxed (they actually have some shape now!) and then a bunch of us went out for a celebratory dinner at the Keg, which was fun. The next day was for relaxing and getting ready to leave, because I was taking the train to Toronto that night.

I left on the 7:20pm train to Toronto on the 13th, and took the subway from Union to Sheppard, where I was going to visit Adam’s brother and sister-in-law, and their brand-spanking new baby girl, Sophia. She is absolutely beautiful, I must say. It is very exciting to be a ‘quasi-aunt’, as I call myself. Hopefully this well let me get a little more comfortable with children – i.e. not absolutely terrified of them!

Adam and I stayed there for a couple of hours, then went back to his parents’ place. We still had a bunch of preparations to do, so we ended up not getting to sleep until about 3 or 4 in the morning, which was pretty stupid considering we had to be up at 7am, and leave the house at 7:30. We called the taxi the night before to make sure that they would be there for 7:30, because we had to be at the airport by 8:30. After WAY too few hours of sleep, we were awake and on our way to the airport – getting a lecture on the way from the cabbie about the negatives of flat rates (bulls**t if you ask me!). When we got there, the Canjet line wasn’t even open yet, because we were there at about 8 am, earlier than we had expected. So we got to sit around and have a bite to eat at least before lining up. Even when we did line up, there was only one flight of probably about 100 people that Canjet was dealing with that morning, so the line went really quickly. We had out e-tickets and everything already too, so that was nice and easy. Then it was time for 2 hours of waiting in the waiting area. Luckily the plane boarded and left right on time, which was nice – the necessary waiting is bad enough, without having to wait even longer when they’re late!

The flight didn’t go too badly, it was only about 3 and a half hours which really isn’t too long. They even served a little meal – I couldn’t eat the meat sandwich, of course, but I traded my sandwich for Adam’s veggies, so it was all good. It’s nice to travel with someone for some things! :P We landed pretty much right on schedule, and just looking out the window I was SO excited, because it looked crazy warm. Although not too picturesque at the airport; Bahamas airport isn’t exactly the picture of a nice, clean, safe airport, but what are you gonna do, right?

As soon as we got there and picked up our luggage, which went really quickly because obviously there weren’t too many flights going in and out of Nassau, we went outside and caught the bus to the Riu hotel. Most of the people on our plane were going to the same place, because everyone on Canjet was travelling through SunQuest vacations (since Canjet now only does Charter flights - don't actually fly it, by the way... nothing bad happened, per se, but I did concentrate on that plane staying in the air the whole way!). We just followed the crowd and jumped onto one of the buses, which were included in the all-inclusive rate – nice not to have to worry about getting Bahamian money and paying taxi drivers right away!

The drive to the hotel was interesting. The driver told us he was going to take the ‘back way’ because the traffic in downtown Nassau was terrible as a result of the Junkanoo parade going on. We still got to drive through the city a little bit, which really didn’t seem like a city at all, much more like a small town, but I guess we only ever saw parts of it. All the buildings are made out of the same material, which looks basically like sand/stucco (and I’m guessing that’s pretty much what it is). Very colourful buildings, which was neat. But a lot of poverty, which was kind of depressing, especially once the tour bus drove over the bridge to Paradise Island, which is the exact opposite of poverty!

The island was essentially made for tourists – I’m pretty sure the entire island is actually man-made, or at least significant portions of it. Our hotel was right beside the Beach Towers of the Atlantis hotel. For those of you who don’t know about the Atlantis hotel, follow the link (if you follow any of the links in this post), because it’s a very interesting, amazing place. If you see the ‘bridge room’ in the Royal Towers, that room is owned by Michael Jackson (he’s a shareholder in the hotel) and runs at about $25,000/night – and you have to stay for a minimum of a week. Of course, it also includes a butler and maids and is some ridiculously large number of hundreds of square feet or something, so I guess for the price it’s worth it if you can afford it!

After about half an hour, the bus pulled up to the hotel - this was our first view of it:

Check-in at the hotel (the Riu Hotel Paradise Island) was pretty fast and painless. We piled our luggage along one side of the lobby, and went into one of the boardrooms to sign in and get our bracelets (Riu only does all-inclusive, I think, because every guest there seemed to have one). They had the drinks lined up for us as we came in to the hotel, which was cool, although I didn’t have one because they looked a little too sickly sweet for me.

15 minutes later we were up in our room, on the 8^th floor, right across from the elevators (very convenient). We ended up being giving a king-sized bed, which we had requested but wasn’t guaranteed, and which I was very grateful for. Unless you have shared a bed with a 6’4” bed-and-blanket-hog, you do not fully appreciate the wonderfulness of the king-sized bed, let me tell you!

We unpacked quickly, changed into some beach wear (the jeans and sweatshirts we’d left Canada in weren’t exactly temperature-appropriate!), and by ~5pm we were headed out to explore the beach a little. The second we started walking down the stairs from the pool area to the beach, Adam was approached by a Bahamian guy wanting to know if we wanted to rent a jet-ski. When Adam said ‘not right now’, the guy then wanted to know if he wanted any weed. We had seriously not actually even set foot on the sand yet. Does Adam just draw that kind of attention? Does he give off a ‘I’m a pothead’ vibe? Or did they just figure we were about the right age for it? I don’t know, but it was funny as hell! He said no, of course (no, really, I wasn’t about to get put in Bahamian jail thank you very much!).

We headed up the beach towards the Atlantis hotel, and walked as far along there as we could. The sand was absolutely beautiful, and were right on the ocean – except for one little island a little ways straight out, it was ocean as far as the eye could see! Pretty windy, but definitely beautiful and a gorgeous walk, especially in the evening.

Here's a couple of views of the beach:

Here's a view to the left, down towards Atlantis

View to the right

View straight out from Riu

After we got back from our walk, we decided to check out the supper buffet, see how the food really was. Unfortunately, it was not quite up to our expectations, but to be fair both Adam and I (especially Adam) have fairly high standards when it comes to food, so probably most people would think it was quite satisfactory. It was good, it just wasn’t as good as we had expected and hoped it would be. But there was at least plenty for me to eat, which I had been worried about, especially since I knew there would obviously be a lot of seafood and I was worried their idea of ‘vegetarianism’ would include seafood, which it often does in places like that.

Junkanoo figure and buffet to the left, eating area above. That eating area is where the buffet dinner and the breakfast buffet were served. The lunch buffet was served in a different area, where one of the specialty restaurant was located for dinnertime (the outdoor eating area, which I'll post a picture of in the next blog, was attached to the lunchtime eating area).

After dinner we explored the pool area a little bit, but we were so tired from having no sleep and travelling all day that we pretty much just went up to the room and watched tv, and fell asleep probably around 10, 10:30. I know, we’re such exciting travellers!

All right, that's all I'm posting for now, because my internet at home has a 100mb upload limit/day (I know, total ass), and I'm afraid I'm getting close and I want internet still tonight!