Rain in St. Lucia ):

So Miles and I woke up to RAIN!!!! Can you believe it?? I was soooo mad; today was supposed to be our hot and sunny lazy beach day ); and it was clearly not going to happen anymore. And it never rains out here, so that was really maddening—of course it would rain the one weekend we made it up here. So, we had to improvise! We left the villa and went to the safari booking place to set up our hippo/crocodile safari cruise for later in the day, and to find out about the half day big 5 safari the following morning. But, we found out that the half day safari started at 5am….meaning we had to meet at 430 am…which wasn’t about to happen. So we opted into going to the game reserve on our own little safari in the morning instead—that way we could start at a more reasonable time. The beach and pool was clearly out of the question as of now, so we visited the craft hut again in search of more cool items to buy. We found tons…well…more like I did! I’m so excited to send out all of my gifts and for the cool finds I got myself. Since this is a beach resort with estuary wildlife, they have tons of surf shops, and Miles was in search of something cool and South African-unique so we looked through all of the shops down the main road. We had a very nice time. Then we got groceries to cook tonight, and headed out on our hippo/croc safari cruise. It would have been an even better cruise if it wasn’t grey, cold and wet. But, that is ideal hippo weather, and we got to see a ton of them, which was lovely. Not so ideal weather for crocodiles though, so we didn’t see any. We got to see a very interesting thing though; hippo’s mating! Apparently, hippo’s only mate every three years, and we by chance got to see the hippo’s mating today on our cruise. It was quite an odd experience. The male pretty much stands on top of the female, who is under water. Hippos can hold their breath for up to three minutes, so every three minutes or so she would try to come up for air, and the male hippo would push her back down with his legs; kind of funny. And their ‘children’ were standing on each side of them while this was taking place; it was a family affair. Luckily it was all taking place under water so we didn’t have to see whatever else was going on. The tour was two hours long, and by the time it was done, we were pretty cold. Both Miles and I assumed it was going to be hot and steamy outside, just like it usually is every single day in South Africa, so we only packed shorts and tank tops. We were not prepared for the cold rain and weather today. For the cruise, we brought along these huge fuzzy blankets from our villa to keep us warm and everyone was looking at us strangely, but we were toasty and that’s all that matters. Miles had (oddly enough) brought this chocolate truffle hot chocolate/chocolate milk mix, so we returned to our villa and had this gourmet hot chocolate with cookies and muffins. We stayed at the house for a while, and then decided to go search for hippos! The tour guide on the cruise told us that since this is the hippos favorite weather, 20 times out of 30 you can find them walking in the town down the main street; we wanted to see! But, instead of finding hippos walking through town, we found a completely deserted one. There were hardly any people out because of the torrential rain shower, so we turned around to go back to our villa to cook.

Miles and I made a good little cooking team. We were going to make pasta—I was craving it since my home stay doesn’t make it and it’s practically a staple at my house. We found all of the ingredients at the grocery store earlier that day and we ended up making such a gourmet meal; Miles took a picture because he was so proud haha. We made pasta with sautéed yellow peppers, crumbled bacon and a mushroom tomato sauce, garlic braii rolls (braii is South African barbeque), green beans sautéed in garlic and butter, and fresh avocado from the craft and fruit market. It was very yummy. Then we played cards for a while and didn’t do much before heading to bed. We are crossing our fingers for sun tomorrow!