In which Doris reminds herself to be just a little more expansive.
I need to tell you about a lesson we were taught once when we were on a flotilla in Greece. The boats were docked along a village quay on a smallish island, and across the road was a moped hire company. The prices were small, maybe £15 a day, maybe not, it was a long time ago. Sid and Doris sat on their boat and thought it through. The island may be a bit small to be worth exploring, the perils of moped hire are well known, there wasn’t long to go before dinner, let’s do some boat tidying first and think again, etc etc.
And meanwhile a chap on the next boat, quite a jolly friendly chap who enjoyed life, had hired himself a moped. He drove it up and down the quayside and round the little village, and maybe across the island a bit or maybe not, we couldn’t see from our boat, and he had a FANTASTIC time. He beeped the ridiculous little horn at his girlfriend on their boat, and he was grinning so much that it was surprising that the top of his head didn’t fall off, and it cheered everyone up and we all laughed and waved at him. He was like Mr Toad from Wind in the Willows – Parp parp!
“Let that be a lesson to us”, said Sid. “In future when we are offered the chance to do something that might be fun, let’s do it. Let’s channel our Inner Toad.”
Well, we haven’t been brilliant at this over the years, but we do try, and today’s opportunity was in the form of the Mangrove Boat Tour. It wasn’t cheap, in fact it was £eek and when we booked it, it was surprisingly £eek x 1.5 because the minimum number of people they would take on the tour was three and we were the only people who had actually signed up. But we wanted to see the mangroves and so we channelled our Toad and went for it.
It will come as no surprise to you, gentle but long-suffering reader, to discover that we had a stupendously brilliant time. It turns out that each group gets their own little motorboat to drive – little but surprisingly powerful, because in a two hour tour you go round the whole of the Cancun lagoon which is a total of around 20km, as well as drifting gently past the mangroves. Parp parp!
Doris drove and Sid drove.
We saw a real alligator or maybe a crocodile or maybe a piece of unusual vegetation – it’s the ripply green thing in the middle of the picture. Please don’t tell us if you don’t think it’s an alligator.
We saw traces of mysteriously abandoned Mayan civilisations.
We saw some sort of specialist entertainment for modern-day hominids, up at the party end of Cancun.
And we saw pelicans and egrets and little blue herons and bigger herons and two types of cormorants and little flying fish and of course grackles and melodious blackbirds (that is their name not their description).
And we said LET THAT BE A LESSON TO US.
Signed, toadily,
Doris. xx