JAMAICA: OCHO RIOS AND DUNN'S RIVER FALLS AND KONOKO FALLS

 February 18, 2023

Ocho Rios (Spanish for "eight rivers") is a town on the north Jamaican coast. Many believe Christopher Columbus first set foot in Jamaica just outside the city.

Our hotel in Ocho Rios was a once grand multi-building complex, but it is now in a bit of a dilapidated state. Our room had no hot water, no AC, no wifi, and a cockroach on the bed.

However, they had a great sign on the office wall.

We were worn out by heat, humidity, and walking, and in spite of all the hotel issues, we just needed sleep.

The next morning we were in no rush to get started. Chad was snorkeling, and we had a plan to meet at 11:00, so we drove down to the Ocho Rios Craft Market. It was about the junkiest tourist trap we've ever seen, not even meriting a photo. Nothing was original. It all looked like it was made in China. There were multiple stalls, all selling the same items, and every vendor claimed to have made the items in his/her booth. We decided we needed breakfast instead of shopping.

Definitely not a breakfast spot:

PORTUGAL: TAGUS RIVER ESTUARY AND SR. LISBOA RESTAURANT

 June 25, 2022

During the Covid pandemic, Bob somehow got into birding. I'm still not sure how it happened. He has always loved wildlife photography, and so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he narrowed his focus to what he could see a lot of nearby. His interest in birds expanded as we took several trips to Texas during the last few years and on our trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands in March.

But who knew that PORTUGAL would be a birding paradise? Certainly not I.

Bob hired a private birding guide, Bernardo Barreto, to take us out looking for birds for a full day. He was an excellent guide, and in one day we saw 53 different species of birds. (For more about Bernardo, see his website here.) But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Bernardo picked us up at 7:30 AM. On our way out of town we saw this great mural. I have no idea what it means, but I like the anachronistic combination of the clothing and the can.

We traveled across the Vasco da Gama Bridge, opened in 1998. At 10.56 miles long, it is the longest bridge in the Europe Union. As a point of comparison, the Coronado Bridge in San Diego is 2.1 miles long, and the San Francisco Bay Bridge is 1.7 miles long. (On the other hand, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana is almost 24 miles long.)

The Tagus River ends its 626-mile journey in Lisbon and provides the city with its main port. Its estuary is the largest one in Western Europe. It is a critical spot for bird migration, hosting over 50,000 birds during the winter. A 35,000-acre nature reserve was established in 1976 to preserve the wetlands.

Bernardo had an impressive scope mounted on a tripod. The scope had something like 600x magnification. That, combined with his amazing eye for finding birds, made for a very successful day.

Another really amazing thing about Bernardo is that he can take pictures with a cell phone through the scope. I tried doing it, and I had 0% success. Almost all the bird pictures I have here were taken by Bernardo with my phone through his scope. Most of the time I have cropped the photo and rotated it, but they are still pictures he took.

The first bird we saw was a black-winged stilt.

SRI LANKA: LAGOON PARADISE BEACH RESORT AND A SNAKE HOUSE (NO WORRIES, THOSE TWO THINGS ARE UNRELATED)

Our last night in Sri Lanka was spent in the Lagoon Paradise Beach Resort in Tangalle, Sri Lanka. Again, it was in a spectacularly beautiful setting. Our room was enormous and had very high ceilings. 

The bathroom was almost comically large. It was bigger than our master bedroom at home--but almost empty. There was a toilet:

. . . a sink attached to the wall, and an open shower:

There was a lot of empty space. Seriously, you could move about six pieces of gym equipment in here and add a big screen TV, and it would make the perfect workout room.

We made our way across a bridge to the restaurant:

. . . where we ate dinner at a table in the sand on the beach. The only light was a candle, and we were serenaded by the irregular beat of waves against the shore. What the place offered in atmosphere, however, it totally lacked in food quality. To say our dinner of giant prawns and shrimp cocktail was mediocre is kind. Our breakfast the following morning was equally mediocre:

MEKNES, MOROCCO: LUNCH, GATES, SNAKE CHARMERS, AND THE SOUK

We had spent the morning in Volubilis and the town of Moulay Ismail, and we were hungry. Hassan took us to a restaurant in Meknes and sent us to the top floor--the roof. It was much like the place where he had left us the previous day. The other tourist groups were all eating on the main floor, and we were the only ones on the roof.

Here is THEIR setting:

. . . and here is ours:

We felt a little like poor relations, but we felt a little better after we checked out the view, which is not your typical restaurant view in the United States: