November 29th: Dolphin Encounter

Man, did I sleep a lot. Like, 10 hours of sleep. It was so nice. We eventually dragged ourselves out of bed, though. It was time to do some more exploring!

We walked down to the restaurant near the beach for breakfast. The buffet was pretty impressive, and the view was pretty sweet, too. 

We walked down to the beach after breakfast. This was the view from the swings at the little bar next to the beach.

We had a little bit of time to kill before we had to head out, so we grabbed some beach chairs and hung out on the beach for a bit.

We did eventually have to head back to the room to grab our bathing suits and backpacks. We saw a bunch of people hanging out at this one spot in the water...turned out there were dozens of fish! The lady in the water had a piece of bread and was feeding them; the fish were going nuts. It was pretty crazy to watch.

We couldn't watch for too long, though...we had a ride to catch to our Dolphin Encounter!

After learning a bit about dolphins from one of the trainers, we got in our kayak and paddled out into the pool. The trainer showed us some of the tricks that the dolphins knew, and we got to splash with them and make them chirp. It was pretty neat.

Even better than the kayaking, though, was when we split up into smaller groups...

...and got to do all sorts of tricks with the dolphins!

There were four of us, plus the trainer and Lulu the dolphin, in our group. We all got to do a full range of tricks with Lulu, which was really neat.

I like how it looks like she's smiling. She was really heavy, though!

As part of our dolphin encounter, we also got to ride on a boogie board with the dolphin pushing us. It was FAST (and very fun!).

Just before my ride started. Vroom!

The photographer got a few pictures of the dolphins jumping while we got ready for the next thing...

...feeding a manatee! I'd never seen one up close before, but we got to touch it (it was rough and slimy) and feed it.

Its mouth was bananas; it kind of grabs the lettuce with the sides of its mouth and pulls it down. We got to hang out with the manatees for a little while before eventually getting out of the water.

Once everyone was finished with their dolphin encounters, they drove us over to a different part of the complex for a buffet lunch. Mark and I grabbed some food and watched some of the trainers working with some sea lions.

There were some more manatees swimming around, along with some neat looking fish. We wandered around for a little while, checking out a few shops and watching some of the other dolphin encounters, before eventually getting our ride back to the resort.

The sun was just starting to set as we got back, so we walked out to the beach to check out the view.

We walked down the beach for a while, then took the palm tree path back toward the rooms. We hung out in our backyard for a little while, then got cleaned up so we could head to dinner.

It was hard to pick from all the options, but we decided to go to La Hacienda, the Mexican restaurant. It was really good! We split a bottle of wine (and demolished the chips they brought when we first sat down). Mark tried mezcal, which was pretty tasty, and there were two mariachi guys wandering around, playing their guitars and singing. It was pretty cool.

We wandered around for a while after dinner and eventually wound up in the Plaza Espana, listening to the Imperial Band. They were really good, and the drunk people dancing were hilarious. My favorite was a guy we named 'Coffee Cup'; he's the one in the red shirt and lighter shorts standing by himself. He had a coffee cup full of some mystery drink that must have been very strong for how, um, great his dancing was. We hung out for a while, had a couple drinks, then eventually made our way back to the room.

The sky was really clear and you could see a ton of stars; this was the view from our backyard. We sat outside for a little while, enjoying the view, then made our way to bed. We had a long day ahead of us!