Tropical Memories
I'm overdue for a return to the tropics. The
last time I felt the trade winds on my face and ate
the succulent flesh of fresh coconuts was three
years ago, when I traveled to Hawaii with my
family. There, we spent seven days in a private
beachside estate, lounging under the palm trees and
playing in Hawaii's bathwater-warm waters.
I made my first visit to the tropics when I was
a young teenager, staying in Honolulu with my
parents and a friend. I can clearly recall my first
sighting of rainbow-colored fish in Hanauma Bay.
But it wasn't until a few years later when I really
immersed myself in the tropical way of life.
In my junior year of high school, I spent a year
in Honduras living with a native family as a
foreign exchange student. During Holy Week, we
enjoyed seven days on the Caribbean coast in the
city of Tela. Here, I truly lived the life of a
beach bum. By day, we kicked back on the beach,
buying 10-cent coconuts from Caribbean women, who
split them open for us with machetes. We would
drink the coconut milk to the calypso sounds of a
group of children making music with homemade
instruments. By night, we feasted on shrimp and
Sprite (a trivial detail I have for some reason
always remembered).
Two years after returning from Honduras, I
joined my uncle in Puerto Rico for two months,
helping him repair his sailboat. We lived in a
small fishing village called Las
Croabas on the east coast of the island,
directly across from St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin
Islands. The water there was so clear that I feared
we would run aground the first time I sailed across
it. My uncle laughed, telling me the water was 50
feet deep. Several tiny cays poked out of the sea
just offshore, barely more than a grove of palm
trees surrounded by a ring of white sand. On
Sundays, local families would climb into their
boats and spend the day on these islands, just as a
stateside family might drive to the city park for a
Sunday picnic. Whether it was playing in the
tourist mecca of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas, or
exploring the vast lagoon near Las Croabas, this
too-brief time in my life was truly carefree.
The Navy took me to the tropics on many
occasions. While stationed on the USS Bunker Hill,
I traveled extensively throughout the Far East. On
one of many visits to the Philippines, my shipmates
and I took an excursion to Pagsanjan
Falls, a lush hideaway where part of the movie
"Apocalypse Now" was filmed. Dugout canoes held two
of us, along with our two hired guides. We traveled
upstream through a gradually narrowing canyon, the
walls of which were covered from top to bottom with
palm trees. The waterway finally dead-ended in a
sheltered gully, where a large waterfall fell down
high cliffs to feed the river. Never have I
traveled through such fertile jungle beauty. Other
tropical visits courtesy of the United States Navy
included the resort town of Pattaya Beach,
Thailand; Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia; a
brief stopover in Singapore, 80 miles north of the
Equator; several days on Diego Garcia, a tiny
military outpost in the middle of the Indian Ocean;
and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where I
snorkeled in the Persian Gulf.
My first and most recent trips to the tropics
both took me to Hawaii, but I have been lucky
enough to travel to many parts of the world between
the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.
With salt water flowing in my veins, part of my
heart will always remain there.
Development note: I've
noticed that this site doesn't look like it should
in Netscape Navigator. Rather than waste time
jury-rigging it to look right in a
soon-to-be-obsolete browser, I'll just add the
cliché "This site best viewed with Internet
Explorer."
©2003 Michael
Strickland ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
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Today's
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Previously...
3/26:
Regurgitation
3/25:
Piece
of the Puzzle
3/24:
Echoes
in Eternity
3/23:
Booing
for Columbine
3/22:
Not
Recommending Diving
3/21:
Works
in Progress
3/20:
Three
Rings of Shock & Awe
3/19:
Paris—A
Beautiful Blur
3/18:
Ignorant
Idiot Man
3/17:
The
Pirate Queen
3/16:
To
War or Not to War
3/15:
So
Long, Seau
3/14:
Telemarketing
Pays
3/13:
Free,
For Now
3/12:
Chicken
Little Gets Respect
3/11:
Axis
of Evil
3/10:
Writing
Kept Me From Writing
3/9:
King
Arthur
3/8:
The
Women are Smarter
3/7:
Salt
on Old Wounds
3/6:
3/3/03,
3:33 p.m.
3/5:
Beer
Day
3/4:
Pulling
the Trigger
3/3:
Make
'Em Laugh
3/2:
Whither
Iraq?
3/1:
Strickland
Cellars
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