On Isle a Vache

One last hurrah, we thought, before our friend, Marcy, leaves Haiti.  So four of us ducked out of our respective offices a few hours early on Friday, caught a tiny plane to the coastal town of Les Cayes, and caught a boat to the tiny island of Isle a Vache.  The island is sparsely populated.  There are two little hotels, each in their own cove and invisible to the rest of the island.

The sun was approaching the horizon when we took the 20 min boat trip to the island.  It was my first time on a boat bigger than a kayak since I left Papua New Guinea and I was surprised by how much I missed the water and how beautiful the golden sunlight on the water was.  That trip itself made the weekend worth it.  We arrived at the private little beach in time for a dip in the water to watch the sunset.

There are only a few cottages that make up our hotel and save the interruption by a boat-full of missionaries, we felt like the beach was ours.  Highlights of the weekend:

• My mornings by the water with a coffee and a book, enjoying the sound of the waves 
• Rum sours and beers in the water

• Putting beach chairs in the water and being read out loud from a great book (The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton)
• Lobster for dinner
• Taking the sit-on-top kayaks out to the sand bar where the waves were breaking and trying to ride them without getting tossed into the water.  The waves won, I think.  Emmett had a real kayak with no spray skirt, so every time he capsized, his boat threatened to sink and we had to haul his boat on one of ours to get the water out.  Fun!
• The boat trip back to the mainland in the silvery dawn