Today I was up early to take pictures of the sunrise. But there was no sunrise. The east facing side of Con Dao island has a permanent cloud over it and the sun doesn’t really shine until it is high in the sky. So I took some pictures of fishermen unloading their boats. Here on the island they still use coracles, a round boat we last saw in Ireland. The fish are caught using a small trawler and then ferried to shore in a coracle. They seem to make it to market the same day. The fishermen stopped on the beach and arranged their catch so I could take a picture. Then they picked them up again and continued carrying the fish to a waiting truck. One man spent a lot of time trying to teach me the name of the fish, but it didn’t work. I forgot it before I could tell Joan.
After breakfast we rented a motor scooter and did a partial island tour. We drove around the south part of the island as far as we could go and then had a picnic of pomelo, bananas (with seeds) and tangerines. The pomelo is a giant grapefruit and the market lady cut it up for us when she sold it to us. Delicious! Later, we stopped off at a fishing dock in Ben Dam and immediately got propositioned by a water taxi driver who offered give us a tour of the harbour which we accepted. For the next hour we toured the harbour, taking pictures of the boats and every now and then the driver leaned over the side to fix something with his fishing net.
After a siesta (after all - we are recovering from jet lag) we took a little walking tour across to the other side of the island. The nature walk goes downhill for one kilometre and then you return uphill one kilometre. Much to my surprise the downhill was worse than the uphill, since the steps are so steep. But we made it with no mishaps.
No comments:
Post a Comment