In our stay, Yelapa

There is a house cat who just gave me a flea. I can hear the cicadas playing their maracas in unison. They come out in the morning and in the evening. This morning, I woke up to the sunrise, the pink clouds over the green mountains, lit from below. The sky lifted, showing off the reflection of the clouds in the bay. A momma bird was teaching her babies how to chirp. In her morning lesson, she would chirp a song or a saying. Then she would tell them to repeat. They would repeat, trying to imitate the sound she makes. Then she would repeat this lesson until they got it. Then she would move onto another phrase. And so on. This lasted a couple of hours. Every once in a while, a baby bird would squawk as if frustrated. Then the momma would teach her baby to fly. She flies below the baby as if she were a safety net while the little one is flapping vigorously and somewhat non-directional.

But this is all new to me. I imagine the old lady who runs the place is quite bored with such things.

To leave this guesthouse, we climb 178 algae-covered stone steps to the entrance. We walk through the town center, lined with concrete homes, small restaurants and convenience stores, kids running around barefoot, using brooms to knock the collected water off the tarps on their front porches. Construction workers let us walk by. But this town is small, only having one main road and donkeys and horses for transportation. Sometimes, we would see a motorcycle. The waterfalls above the town allow for some streams to wash over the road, and after we walk through the lush and humid paths, we finally see the river we need to cross to get to the beach. It's a wide river about three feet deep. We lift up our dresses and wade across without shoes. The warm water rushes by with twigs and a random floating fruit. We are across, finally making it up the sandy embankment and we reside on the beach for one more day of potential sun.

On our return from the beach, we enter a small restaurant where an old woman prepares one of the best breaded fish tacos I have ever eaten. Her kids are watching TV and her husband (or son) serves us. Her daughter smiles as she runs to ask her dad for more juice in a plastic cup.