4.22.13

To finish our statement from last night, if it seems to good to be true, we now know it definitely is. The beautiful utopia hotel was a disaster. We had hung our clothes out to dry and were getting ready for bed. Val pulled the sheets after taking a Benadryl (we counted her 170 bites this morning. 170!). She found 4 little ants crawling alive. I lifted the sheets to do a thorough search and found nests of eggs and tiny crawling things. (I think they were fleas). We're posting a few pics so you can all get an idea. We know these pics are what you're missing at home.

Anyhow, at that point, with Val about to pass out from Benadryl, we packed our backpacks and decided to leave. As Val headed down to grab the toiletries, she shrieked. There was a giant (about 9 inches in diameter) thick black spider crawling on the wall. We dropped everything and jumped on the motorbike at 2am.
We needed gas but still couldn't find a station until 2 nice girls from the 7-eleven drove us to an automatic pump station where you can fill up 24/7. They saved us!

The next issue is that hotels here don't have night shift people. So even though every place had a "room for rent" sign, we couldn't get someone to talk to to rent one to us. Two hours later, on the opposite side of the island, we found a nice, cheap, and clean (Jacob inspected the bed) place to stay.

We woke up the next morning, drove back across the island and got our money back and they paid for our bags to be sent to next hotel. We are returning to Palita Lodge tonight.
Everybody warned us that the trip would have adversity and we would have to see how we would react to it. So we want everyone to know that we survived and came out stronger and we're happier for it.

We also had a day we forgot to write about. It included amazing, cheap outdoor markets, a beautiful sunset at a resort lea showed us, and fresh local fish eaten on a table on a boat at a place called "fisherman's restaurant".