(PHOTOS FOR THIS ENTRY IN THE POST BELOW)
Thursday, we caught the 10am ferry to Jost Van Dyke, a sister island of Tortola. We had wanted to go here to explore its beaches and eat at the renowned Foxy's – an infamous oceanfront place in its harbor. When we got there, we made the 10-minute walk from the ferry dock to the harbor and took in the sights of the island. It's pretty quiet – we were on one of the main oceanfront roads, and there weren't many people to be seen.
On one side of the road, there are restaurants, gift shops, a police station, and a few houses. On the other side, there are big palm trees, hammocks that anyone can walk up to and use, and a multitude of little boats that have been beached or brought up to little docks. It's quaint, but we realized pretty quickly that we probably could've taken the afternoon ferry and had plenty of time to see everything. Foxy's is at the end of the harbor, so we took our time walking down and took some pictures of the scenery (which we may have lost... more on that later).
Foxy's is a cool place – it's all an open-air restaurant with a bigger drink list than food menu. We ordered a drink called a “Vanilla Killa” with vanilla rum and three more ingredients that we sadly can't remember. It was delicious! I got a grouper sandwich and Tom got a burger, and as soon as our food came out, the bartender had a second round of Vanilla Killa's ready for us and brought them to our table. Talk about service! Everyone was very nice here, and we enjoyed taking in the scenery. There are shirts, license plates, business cards & photo IDs, bras, and more hung from the ceiling all over the place. We found a few UNC things and an FDNY shirt amongst all the paraphernalia. As we were getting up to leave, one of the local guys came up to me and said, “You have a body that would melt a grilled cheese sandwich from 10 feet across the bar.” After everything I've been consuming the past two weeks, that compliment was well-received, not to mention hilarious. :-)
We left Foxy's and planned to head to White Bay, the big beach area on Jost Van Dyke, but there wasn't a taxi in sight anywhere. We walked around for a good 15 minutes looking for one and then just stopped into the police department to ask if they could call a taxi for us. A man and his son who were there from Puerto Rico offered us a ride on their boat instead, and we gladly accepted. As I've mentioned before, Puerto Ricans flood the Virgin Islands this time of year – it's only about 60 miles away, and they've got some holidays around this time, so they flock in droves. Their boat was super nice, and it was a quick ride around the bay. We had to jump into the water when we got to White Bay, though – there wasn't a dock – so it's a good thing we were in our swimsuits and had a ziploc bag for the things that weren't waterproof! We jumped in, and Luis (the dad) handed us two beers as a congratulations for getting married. We swam in holding our hands above our heads and praying we didn't get everything wet.
Unfortunately, it seems that this jump into the ocean allowed water to breach our camera's waterproof seal... a drop got inside, and it shut down totally. We couldn't get it to do anything, so we aired it out and waited about 24 hours. We thought it was totally dead after reading about other people's experiences with the same camera, but it eventually turned back on. However, we think there's some corrosion on the memory card reader, and it won't read our card or recognize that there is available memory. We were ble to save the pics that were on our memory card when we got back... at least the camera has some internal memory, so we were still able to use it for our last few days (but with limited memory space).
Thursday night we went to Quito's for dinner – this is a local place owned by a pretty famous local musician who performs live a few nights a week. We stopped by earlier this week for lunch, but they were closed, and Quito told us to come back tonight for live music (and we're so glad we did!). The atmosphere here is very unique, our table was oceanfront, the food was fantastic, and we both really enjoyed Quito's music. This was probably the best meal we had while in Tortola. We both got some delicious mahi mahi and split an appetizer called “monster bread.” It was all so delicious.
Quito was playing acoustic versions of the songs on his latest CD tonight, and I wish he had a CD for sale with the acoustic versions! We bought his latest CD (and we really like it), but I personally like his acoustic versions better. The funniest thing about this music is that it's what the bartender played all day every day at Smuggler's Cove – the beach right by our villa! We already knew a lot of the songs Quito was playing because we'd been hearing them over and over at the beach. That was such a neat coincidence – not only will this CD remind us of our night at Quito's, it will forever take us back to those days at Smuggler's Cove... this CD is definitely the soundtrack to our week in Tortola. We played it and sang all the way home that night.
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