Playa de Peru

Saturday as my family back in Texas was holding a memorial service for my stepfather, we decided to have some family fun in his honor. So we loaded up the SUV, packed some water and snacks, and went to the beach. We brought some friends, Bridget and Tunisia. Bridget is a college student from Texas, and Tunisia is a Honduran preteen quasi-orphan living with a missionary here; a missionary I call Robin the Saint, more on her later. Tunisia is deaf, but that is no more of a communication obstacle than Spanish for us. Bridget knows sign language too, so that helps.

The Playa de Peru is a beach east of town and is quite beautiful. Here is a 360 degree video of what it looks like there.

We all swam and enjoyed ourselves. We parked the car under a hand-made, palm-branch structure that gave us some shade. Surprisingly, there were free ranging cows on the beach, and they too liked to park under the palm-branch structures. It turns out that cow paddies can easily get covered with a little sand, rendering them nearly invisible to bare feet. But we managed to "steer" clear.

The water was semi-clear. If you swam out about 30-40 yards, you could see a through a few feet, but you couldn't see the bottom. Still, it's a lot clearer and bluer than Galveston.

D and Tunisia playing in the waves and digging sand dollars. Are the called sand lempiras here?

Building sandcastles. See how Jono is squinting? I was squinting too because I wore my sunglasses into the water and a big wave ripped them off my face, nevermore to be seen.

These are the cows that "parked" next to our SUV. Do you see the yellow things in the sand by them? They are coconuts. Not the brown-husk variety, but the yellow-husk type. There was a coconut tree nearby. Most of them had been opened with a machette and, presumably, the coconut milk had been drunk. Or perhaps the cows played bovine bocce with them after the people went home. One never knows.

Sometime I must blog about coconuts. A university buddy of mine is researching using coconuts for a variety of income-producing, value-added, frequenty-hyphenated uses for developing countries, including making biodiesel out of coconut oil, running diesel engines directly on coconut oil, and making particle board out of the shell. But that's another post...

These guys are fishermen I think. They were a long way down the beach, but I had my super zoom lens with which to spy on them from a distance.