Jim & Leslie's Adventures

Feb 27th, 2009 Being there

(NOTE: this is the second of three posts. Somehow it came up first. The order should be “The Really Fun Trip” “Being There” and “Water Blogged”.

So we had arrived at Mammy Wata (http://www.mammywata.net/index.html to see more). What a great time we would have here.

The setting was ideal. Marvin & Penny had prepared us for the worst as they had never been here. “We will stay one night and then see …”, “I hope there aren’t rats running in the ceiling, it keeps you awake”, “There may be a lot of mosquitoes, but we can sit under the mosquito net on the bed and play cards”. Best to be ready for the worst.

All for naught. It is wonderful. Very few bugs (tons of ants, but they don’t count), only a couple of mosquitoes, and no rats (that we saw, anyway.) Tons of lizards, but we like lizards!

Nestor and Aruna …. these are the ‘boys’ that looked after us. They are not boys (and we didn’t call them that), but they are the hired help that serve and look after the people that stay in the bungalows. Nestor is the prime ‘guy’ and Aruna helps him. They probably serve most people hand and foot most of the time.

Penny told Nestor right off that we were not used to having servants and would probably not require their services very much. So they mostly disappeared. Of course, they were watching from a distance. We would finish a meal in our ‘dining room’ and move to the ‘living room’ to digest, and, miraculously, the boys would appear and remove the dishes and clean them. Yea! We got used to that quite easily! (Penny was our go-between and gave directions for the meals etc. We got used to them calling her “Madam” and I joined in! She’s the boss!)

The bungalows have a charcoal BBQ and we were glad to have Nestor and Aruna to help us with that. Aruna got the BBQ going for me to do pork chops one night. Nestor cooked french fries for us (From scratch. Did all the work. Nestor knows how to make french fries.) Nestor did fish on the grill for us another night. We had it with Attieke (dried fermented manioc) which we ate with our fingers. A wonderful African dish!

Nestor also prepared Aloco for us (http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/miscellaneous/fetch-recipe.php?rid=misc-aloco). This is a plantain banana version of french fries. Eaten with hot sauce. Awesome!

Nestor also got us some fresh coconut (as in, just off the tree). He chopped off the top so we could drink the milk. Awesome! The meat is a little bland and we ate little of it. But the milk …. sweet! (sorry, bad pun).

We had a good schedule: Get up when we wanted. Have breakfast. Read a bit. Go to the beach. Come home for a snack lunch. Sleep & read. Go to the beach. Come home for happy hour. Have supper. Play games. Go to bed. That kept us going the whole time we were there. Wonderful!

Posted in The Really Big Trip by jimt with 2 comments.