Isla de Margarita, off Venezuela Continued

On account of the sheer magnitude of the stress involved and oppressive burdens of responsibility, the mysteriously named M asked me to help inform the masses about our heroic exploits in South America. When I read this blog last night I discovered that compared to ¨M¨and ¨Rubio,¨the name used to refer to me is dangerously close to my real name, so from now on the character refered to as Pete will be called Pedro, so as not to compromise my identity.
Ok, I´m supposed to write more about what we did on the Isla of Margarita, so I´ll explain some pictures I took when we went to the beach the first day here. It all started off like any normal trip to the Venezuelan beaches. After slathering ourselves in canola oil and butter to protect against the menacing South American sun rays, we donned our caps and shades and hopped into a couple of cabs. Now that I´m writing, I wish I had the motivation to go find a picture of these cabs on my camera and upload it, but I already uploaded the pictures I was going to write about, so just picture some big old cars in various states of disrepair; some with doors falling off, some with windshields cracked and shattered beyond recognition, and all with engines that growl and rattle like they´re burning more oil and transmission fluid than gasoline. Imported car parts are hard to come by on the island. Ok, so we got to the beach safely, and walked toward the dunes expected the soothing sound of singing birds and softly breaking surf to greet our ears. Instead, we heard low drum beats and a mysterious chanting. As we warily neared a circle of loincloth-clad island natives waving fearsome war masks and instruments of decapitation, I could tell this wasn´t the local boy scouts earning their ocean safety merit badge. Since I don´t know who exactly reads this blog and their tolerance for vivid depictions of frightening scenes, I´ll skip over the gruesome details, but in short I broke up their little tete-a-tete to insure the safety of my companions. We walked over the what the group had apparantly been ciricling around, and much to our horror, we found only these sad remains of their ritual:


Yes, we had stumbled upon an ancient tribe of head-hunting savages. This adventure was getting deeper than we had ever hoped for. So, we found a spot further down the beach, and set up our beach stuff.
I can´t think of anything particularly exciting we did in the water, other than the usual, swimming, floating, not sinking, keeping our heads above water, splashing, frolicking in the frothy waves, doggie-paddling, and whatever else people do in water other than drowning. We swam out to a big rock, which was a lot more fun than I just made it sound in this sentence.
Later, when we got tired of swimming and wanted to find other creative ways to get sunburned, we went for a walk down the beach. When I say we, I don´t mean everyone, but I don´t know everyone´s code names on this blog, so just assume it was Pedro, J, Ruby, Slick, Space City Sam, and Jane X, which I´m pretty sure are all names of characters in this blog, but I haven´t been fllowing the episodes too closely so I´m not entirely sure, but anyway, we started walking down the beach. After a while, we came across a bunch of washed-up drift wood and scattered palm tree fronds littering the beach. Ever the ecotourist, I decided we should help clean up the beach. I also noticed my companions seemed to be suffering from the first symptoms of the third-degree sunburns we would all eventually incur that day, so I thought I´d throw together a little shelter, a temporary solar respite, if you will. Anyway, after lashing together a few pieces of driftwood, tossing a few palm fronds on top, and fashioning a makeshift door or two from immediately available materials, I had constructed a crude beach shelter.

Voila.
And yes, you may have noticed by now, I don´t know how to write accents above letters.
Sooooo, after cooling off in the shade of my shabby but adequate construction, we continued down the beach. Actually, I´m kind of getting tired of writing this intense narrative of our factual adventures, but I still want to show you this cool cave we found on the beach, so to make a long story short, we found a couple cool caves. The first one, which looked like this (looking in the entrance), was about 3 or 4 feet high. After walking about 30 feet, the cave branched off the the right and continued straight. Off to the right, the cave led to another entrance which was closer to the water and had waves coming in. And by entrance, I don´t mean to exlude its use as an exit, because I did in fact leave the cave that way. Where it continued straight, it just went further into the mountainside, and it was too dark and scary and ferocious-monster-lair looking for me to go down. This other picture shows the inside of the cave looking out.















And....... this is another cave that had a really big opening and waves came inside, and it was cool.



The End

Ok, it´s late and stuff, so I´m done writing. I took lots of pictures that I´ll post online and provide a link to here soon, because I´m going home next week. M is responsible for anything that is posted on this blog, so if you have any questions or comments about the validity of anything you read here, feel free to ask her. Thanks,
Pedro