We let our bodies decide where to wake up and they
do it early. I’m taking my snorkel equipment to the breakfast as I must
be at the Sports Center by 8:30 AM. Tour is at 9 AM. The sun is gone
today and dark clouds make us feel it will rain.
On despite of the bad weather with a small rain
we’re going to leave for the tour and say good bye to Eva as she has an
appointment in the Spa while I’m out. They explain manta rays are big
but harmless creatures. They’re surprisingly fast too and the advice is
not trying to chase them as they’ll disappear. Two guides come with us:
one will snorkel with us and the other will watch from above.
It’s a short trip by a small boat but we’re not
the only ones as there are 3 or 4 more boats with tourists looking for
the same than us. This way, the first approach is the easier: we just
go where the other boats are. Soon a sort of black fin appears above
the water: we’ve already located one. But in the time I get my camera
ready for the picture the fin is gone. It seems the task of swimming
with these animals is harder than it seems as at the time we’re all
ready to jump to the water the animal is not there anymore so we keep
at boat. Other groups go down, though.
We keep searching all around the place, with our
lookout always looking at sea. It’s like 30 minutes until the animal is
located again. They explain some other times here were a group of manta
rays but today there is only one. When they tell us to go to the water
the manta ray appears over the water showing its 3 meters length and
coming back to the underwater world where it belongs with a big splash.
We’re told this is very unusual and I feel it like a “leave me alone”
sign from it as it happened when the other boats were arriving to this
point.
Once in the water we go all as a group following
our guide and trying to see a silhouette on these dark waters. I can
see the bottom, with the white sand and full of big fishes, closer than
expected, no more than 20 meter deep.
And it appears by the left, its quietly presence
is detected by the white front as the rest of its black body mixes with
the dark water in the distance and is hard to see. It passes fast
around 10 meters in front of us to definitively run away from us by our
right. I still hope I’ve started the video on time to get even one
single frame of it leaving but later I’ll check it is not and all the
media got from this tour is full of pictures and videos I could label
as “One second before it was a manta ray here”.
The experience has been exciting, but also
disappointing because we’ve just got a glimpse of the animal. In other
tours there are people could even touch it, although there are a lot of
tours too couldn’t even have a glimpse of it. I guess this is the
reason the tour ends in a snorkel session at the local reef of Komandoo
Island, as it is not going anywhere and is a guaranteed experience.
We stop near the island where we can perfectly see
the row of water villas they have there and go to the sea to enjoy its
local reef, which is more beautiful than the one in Kuredu.
The tour takes around 2 hours and a half and we
haven’t got any sun. We’ve even dived with rain, but it is not annoying
when you’re doing things mainly underwater.
When we arrive there is still a small rain, which
is the reason of seeing Kuredu’s beaches empty. I, after passing by our
bungalow, take a walk in our small bay full of stingrays and sharks as
sky is getting better.
May be it’s just my feeling, but I think there is more life today than other days at beach.
When we’re ready we leave for lunching. Now there is some
sun but we’re very grateful could change the Robinson Crusoe experience
day as, although we cannot know the weather for tomorrow, today it had
been a bad day.
When we arrive at the huge hut where the buffet we cannot join as it’s
10 minutes after end time. There are still people eating but we’ve
completely forgot about it is just one hour and a half for lunching:
from 1 PM to 2:30 PM.
As we’re hungry we go to the
most popular a la carte restaurant here: Franco’s. It is an Italian
restaurant where we can get full with two delicious pizzas by 25$ in
total. I was expecting it would be more expensive than it is.
We reach our bungalow with rain again which will be
here for the rest of the day and during the night. With this, we spend
the most part of the day at room and only leave a couple of times with
the two umbrellas coming with the room. We go for some souvenir
shopping and later go to dinner.
We still haven’t told, but dinners are always thematic. Yesterday we
had Chinese food – which means a small part of the buffet is with this
kind of food – and for today we have something familiar: Mediterranean
food. It means there are a lot of pasta, some moussaka and salad with
feta cheese.
Before going to dinner we’ve got the visit of the
heron, which is not changing its favorite place for dinner even in
rainy days.
