Camping at the beach...

Hugo has this week off of work. It is the first week he's had off since we returned from furlough waaay back in July. It was, we decided, high time that we went camping at the beach. Now, camping here is not like camping in North America. There's no booking your site online 3 months in advance. No option for hook-ups or RV sites... Here, you make a plan and pack absolutely everything you'll need for the duration of your stay and you drive down to the dock and hope there's a boat willing to take you. There always is... You negotiate a price and load up the boats. In our case, we went with two other families (Canadian families!) and so we needed 2 boats. One for stuff, and one for people. We told them which beach we wanted to go to and that was where they dropped us off. It's not a super long stretch of beach, but there are a few choices of where you'd want to set up camp. We picked what we thought was the best place. News travels fast in these parts and the lady who owns that section of the beach showed up and we negotiated a price per night with her. A rather reasonable price I might add. The advantage of camping on that particular stretch of beach is that there is a bathroom around the mid-way point. However, that bathroom is owned by a different fellow than the part of the beach we stayed at. During our three day stay there, he came to work on his bathroom and is enlarging it. It's quite the bathroom (I forgot to take a photo...). The hinges of the door are made from old inner tube. Someone put up a World Vision poster around part of the outside wall cause it was a bit holey. It's a squat pot of course. Anyways, in the end we paid him some money because some of us did make use of this toilet during our stay. He was happy I think.

Tarps are crucial as it usually rains at night. It only rained a bit during our second night. Plus, with a tarp you don't need to put up your fly which only serves to make your tent more oven-like... Thankfully by the middle of the night it cooled off a bit.

It is wavy season here so boogie boarding is the thing to do!

There's Hugo catching a big wave around the corner from our beach, the only place to catch a wave big enough to surf on.

This is what a man is supposed to do on his holidays!

The government decided to "help" the people who own the various parts of this beach and give them pre-fab shelters to put up. So we decided to use one of said shelters as a "kitchen" and were pleasantly surprised that we didn't have to pay extra to use it! (See right hand-side of photo above) We had to bring all our own drinking water and we did dishes with water from a fresh-water pool located near our camp. We cooked on little stoves that use little cans of butane. Very handy!

It was a fun time at the beach and we definitely want to do it again!