Parks and Beaches

The past week has been eventful! We finally got to go outdoors and experience some of the local attractions. Two local parks were explored, both with beaches and playground areas. The first one was a fairly small park with awesome rock formations. You could walk under, through, around, and on top of the rocks. The water is gorgeous - the beautiful teal that you see in pictures (the picture doesn't do it justice). The beach is made up primarily of ground up coral and shells, as are most of the beaches here. The beach at this particular park was very small - just a little cove to enjoy.






The coolest part of this park is actually the slides they have. Look at these things! The one on the left has little rollers all the way down it. We saw another family playing on it (the dad was enjoying it WAY more than the kids), and they came up with an interesting method to minimize the pain of sliding down on 8,000 little rollers: They would take a toy shovel and sit on it while holding onto the handle! The other slides are made of concrete. They are VERY slick and look really fun.


The other park we went to has this up front - it's a statue of a phoenix next to a statue of a sun. This park has a stadium where they have track and field events. They also have other fields, a building with lots of tennis and basketball courts, as well as lots of walking trails and ponds.









This is a pond where we fed ducks, water chickens, turtles, and fish. We fed them from the little bridge that you see in the picture. It is really quite pretty.




Then we found the beach! It was low-tide, so the water was REALLY far out. There were a bunch of locals out with buckets and nets. We -think- they were out looking for crabs. We saw one man leave with a crab that was, no joke, at least a foot across. It was enormous. Given how people eat here, I believe that one crab could feed a family of four, if not more.

We also came upon a large 'rock' (for lack of a better word) in the middle of all the flat area that is normally covered by water. If the tide were in, it would be an island. So, naturally, we climbed up on it! The picture on the left is a from the vantage point on top of the island.

While up there looking around, we saw a coconut hanging from the tree in the center of the 'island'. Naturally, we needed to check it out. It turned out that it was a geocache! A geocache is where someone places an object for others to find, often with some 'treasure' in it, then documents the location using the coordinates. People then go looking for the 'treasure' using hand-held GPS systems. The one we had included three sharks teeth and the little guy on the right (I don't think they meant for him to be in the coconut). The idea is that you leave a different treasure for the next person to find if you take what's in the geocache. You also log your visit both on paper and online here.

Completely unrelated, I particularly enjoyed the signs that were around the park. In addition to signs warning that it is unwise to leave the trail because it is habu territory (a rather poisonous local snake) with a somewhat cute caricature of a snake, there were some other fun signs. Here are a couple of them: