Snorkeling at Playa Paul

A word, for a moment, about the food on the Carribean side of both Costa Rica and Panama. It is magnificent. It is full of flavor and spice and is absolutly glorious. Almost every meal we ate we found ourselves mmmming and wowing and saying, "Taste this. You have GOT to taste this. It's incredible." The rice and beans on this coast are made with coconut milk and the plantains are fried and salty (unlike the sweet gooey plantains of the Central Valley). The fruit drinks are perfection and the fish is unbelievable. Our evening meal in Bastimentos was personally prepared for us by the daughter of the owner of the hotel...wonderful fish and fruit drinks and yummy good food. We also had an excellent lunch at a restuarant called "Roots" where they prepared a vegetarian entree of grilled veggies in the most incredible sauce.
Anyway. Enough about food.
Later that day at Bastimentos we took another boat ride with Javier to go snorkeling. He took us to Playa Paul, the best place for snorkeling in the area. It was a gorgeous beach. Perfect in every way. Unfortunatly I forgot my camera that day, so I have no pictures. I plan to get some from some of the other people on the trip, so I will add those to the blog when I can. Anyway...there is a small coral reef there and many beautiful fish to look at. Colorful and interesting. The water was great too...a nice temperature, on the warm side, but comfortable. We were able to walk in off the beach and snorkel right there. We saw some blue sparkly fish that looked like they were covered in sequins and many yellow and green fish. There was life teeming everywhere; you wanted to look at everything everywhere at once. The coral formed some neat caves that, if you could manage it, you could dive down a bit to see some sea life below. Katy taught us how to dive deeper by blowing out through our nose and then swallowing as you go down.
Tim bumped his foot on some coral and that hurt quite a lot.
Later Javier took us to his "secret" snorkeling spot, and we jumped right off the boat to see another coral cluster. There were a larger collection of sea anemoies and sponges here. One large sponge shaped like a giant flower vase was really interesting. We also saw some clear squid here and some lobsters.