Day 4: Walking along Horshoe Bay and Snorkeling in Castle Rock Bay on Bermuda.

Lois left the ship for her around-the-island bus tour at 9:00 a.m. and spent the day meandering around Bermuda on a tourist bus. Besides Hamilton, the capital and largest city, the tour included Somerset on the western tip and innumerable other little towns and villages in between. Some of the towns came complete with a town square, and one even had a pretty fountain in the middle. The tour also stopped at lots of churches along the way, (she recalled at least 6), and several pretty beaches. At one point the tour bus had to cross the world's smallest drawbridge; the gap in the center is exactly the width of one sailboat mast! Lois certainly got her money's worth: the tour actually lasted longer than advertised, and she didn't get back to the ship until well after 3:00 p.m.

We had booked a different excursion that involved snorkeling on a coral reef, something I had dreamed about ever since reading Jacques Cousteau's "Undersea World" when I was a tadpole. Our snorkeling trip was scheduled from 2 to 5 p.m., but that left our morning free. We decided to explore a bit using the public bus/ferry system that we had tried out on our previous visit on Wanderung 17. This time, however, we opted to take the #11 bus to Hamilton and then transfer to the #7 bus that would convey us to a line of beaches and parks on the southern edge of Bermuda.

We enjoyed our bus rides tremendously; it was a great way to see large swathes of the island. We also found the Bermudan people to be very friendly. I sat next to a lady working for Fed Ex or UPS, and we chatted about life on the island as we rolled though picturesque little villages. We passed houses painted in every color of the rainbow, and caught tantalizing glimpses of rocky shores punctuated by the occasional inlet with a pristine white, sandy beach. It seemed like everybody knew everybody else and minded their business very much like it used to be in small towns in the American heartland. I saw people getting on the bus call our bus driver "Jimmy" and greet each other by name.

Conversely, people also felt free to pay attention to our affairs even though we were "just visiting". Monika was scolded for jaywalking in St. George and a gentleman at the Hamilton bus station took the trouble to tell me that my camera was just about ready to fall out of its case. Lois noticed that her bus driver continually honked and waved to other trucks or buses on the road because he knew all the drivers. When we left for our session of snorkeling on the coral reef, the Captain of our catamaran kept his speed down in the harbor because, as he put it, everybody knew him and if he went too fast and created a wake people would come back and complain to him.

We disembarked at the bus stop for Horseshoe Beach and walked about a block down to the concession area where the tour busses dropped off their loads of visitors. With sparkling white sand, gentle waves lapping in from the turquoise colored sea, towering clouds building up just off shore, and majestic eroded limestone headlands on either side, it was a strikingly beautiful beach. Off to the right we found a sheltered, shallow inlet, almost a pond, that was being used as a kiddie pool.

The huge crescent of the main beach stretched off to our left in a gentle arc about 1/4 of a mile long. Near the concession stand the beach was, as you might expect, a bit crowded, but at the other end of the arc the beach was almost empty. I thought that the rocky headlands with fantastically-shaped formations of old, eroded limestone were particularly intriguing. The beach itself was of a fine, off-white sand that turned out to be easy to walk on but remarkably tenacious about infiltrating our shoes, clothes, and so forth. I kept my camera in its pouch when I wasn't taking pictures and hoped the sand wouldn't get in it and gum up the works.

At the end of Horseshoe Beach I chanced upon a brilliantly colored and rather sassy bird perched on the rocks, and he obliged me by staying still just long enough for me to zoom in and take a close-up of him. We continued walking to the next beach over and found it to be practically deserted. The waves were breaking over the coral reefs just offshore, but because of the reefs the wave action on the beach itself was relatively mild. We would have liked to shuck off our clothes and swim, but we had to be sure to get back to the ship in time for our afternoon trip, so we kept walking past a public campground and back up to the road to find the next bus stop.

As it turned out, we returned to the ship with plenty of time to have lunch, change into our swimsuits, and get aboard the catamaran docked next to our ship for our afternoon excursion. The trip out of the harbor lasted about 35 minutes and our Captain kept up a running commentary about Bermuda and its reefs as we chugged slowly through the gaps in the coral reef. We finally anchored next to Castle Rock and spent the next hour and 15 minutes snorkeling slowly up and down a reef that measured maybe 300 feet long by 20-30 feet wide.

We were on the lagoon side of the reef (next to H. Ross Perot's mansion) where there was absolutely no discernable wave action, so we could slowly slide along through the water just above the coral and watch the fish. The fish were gorgeous and ranged in size from small slivers of silvery fish about the size of a sewing needle, to fish a bit over a foot long, although it is hard to estimate when you are looking through water! Some of the larger fish were plain silver, but others were a solid blue or other mixes of stripes with yellow, orange, or other colors.

The different forms of corals and sponges were almost as interesting as the fish. Graceful fan corals waved in the currents and I was surprised to see some of them colored a vivid purple. The brain-shaped corals really did have fissures on them that rather resembled a very large brain, but they were colored a surprising shade of orange rather than the neutral gray that a real brain would be. Other corals looked like small trees without any leaves, just the branches Still others looked just like tiny bushes growing on the sea floor. One sponge plant was formed of soft, branching tubes about the diameter of a nickel, and it certainly didn't look like any sponge I'd every seen before.

After a bit over an hour of steady snorkeling our hands were wrinkling and I was once again getting cold, so we headed back to the boat for a trip back to our ship and another excellent evening meal in the dining room. After dinner we disembarked yet again to see the Gombe dancers perform in the town square. The colorful costumes, masks, and highly percussive music of these dances stems from their African origins, so we were actually watching a bit of non-western culture that had been adopted in Bermuda. The dancers were energetic if not frenetic, and I really didn't see how they kept it up for over an hour without keeling over in the heat. By the time the Gombe dancers finished it was dark and we repaired back to the ship for the night.