The next day we finally set off on our planned trip, or rather, a boat ride. It cost 25 euros per person, and for this price we were supposed to be dropped off at "Desert Island", which turned out to be not so deserted, and on a second island, which was supposedly inhabited, but in fact was incredibly deserted. As often happens in human languages, backwards, everything reversed.
The captain immediately started entertaining us with jokes and banter, cursing out the bosses, showing off with full throttle and drifting among the seaweed, and generally catered to our every whim, short of offering us hashish.
However, as Andrey rightly pointed out, the boat ride itself is devoid of interesting events, and the high speed of the boat (about 25 kilometers per hour, up to forty) is only entertaining for the first few minutes. The wind, on the other hand, stays with you the whole way — it is still winter outside, after all, so I was glad more than once that I wrapped myself up like a Muslim woman in a hijab.
Anita has a good story about this. She once went for a walk on the beach in Fuseta closer to the night, and caught the low tide. It turned out you could walk right up to a little shack on stilts, which is normally above water. Just as Anita started climbing up the wooden boardwalk in the dark, she heard rustling and knocking sounds all around her. She turns on her phone flashlight — and all around it's like the movie Alien, everything is swarming with crabs. I don't envy those with crabophobia. Fortunately, we don't have anyone like that — everyone has crabophilia, and for me it's reached such a stage that I'm ready to eat them.
Next are a few beautiful photos by Vika.
We found a spot slightly sheltered from the wind and sat there for about half an hour with Andrey and the kid. We ourselves were in warm spring jackets, while the kid tears off all his clothes at the slightest opportunity, like a psychonaut who had too much acid, and messes around in the sand stark naked. People of the older generation (for me that's my mom, and for the kid his grandma) are horrified by this, but those who are more modern know that nothing will happen to him. As you know, the common cold is a myth, it's all about bacterial and viral infections. On an empty island of sand in the winter there are far fewer bacteria than if you go visit each other, sit in apartments, and never go outside. Some people also rarely air out their places, because it's cold, right.
Even in the sand, the flora here is quite diverse.
The second island, which we were taken to an hour later, is more inhabited and a more decent size.
Anita mostly speaks Latvian in everyday life, but the readers of this blog (if there are any left after so many months of silence) don't all understand the native tongue, so I won't play the aesthete here and do inserts in the original language.
We agreed that Culatra is very, very cute, just some pure kawaii. There are practically no people — it's winter, off-season. The restaurants are closed, I'm not even sure if there are any stores. It just makes you want to come here for a couple of months, walk thoughtfully along the ocean shore, and watch the surf and the waves crashing against the rocks.
In bad weather or after sunset, you could sit in the house and write a book. Right with a pen on paper, and absolutely no gadgets — media asceticism for deep thoughts, obviously!
And when you get tired of that, meditate. I actually downloaded a manual not too long ago, practically "How to get enlightened in 10 years". Right on the first pages you can find out that the Buddha himself said you could do it in seven. Another question is how much effort and talent that takes.
For anyone interested, the book is called The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness.
You can download it, as usual, on Library Genesis. There is no Russian translation.
The sand-and-water dust in the distance caught my interest. In Morocco I saw dust, but the water kind. Maybe here, too, it just looks like half of it is sand-colored.
We really liked it on the islands, we didn't pay for the ticket for nothing. We probably could have sailed there on public transport, but our schedule adapts to the capabilities of all the members of our crew. So better somehow than not at all — the motto of my whole life, you could say. And in the last three years it's gained completely unprecedented relevance.