Pedro el buceador
…y el pescador a la playa
On the 28th I went to Montezuma. This lovely little tourist village stretches along several long beaches along the pacific coast . It is a very popular location for backpackers and other travellers who try to escape the “tourist beaches”. Of course, this doesn´t make this beach less touristy, but in a more pleasant way.
And apparently, also local people live there ;-): For example Pedro, the diver/hunter. On sunrise of my first morning in Montezuma, me and a Swiss girl, Miriam went to a nearby waterfall to take a good bath after the hot and humid night before. A little bit later, a local with a harpoon, a plastic bag and diving goggles came to the waterfall. We talked a bit and it turned out that he is hunting for freshwater shrimps in this stream. He showed me some shrimps that he already caught further down and explained that actually it is currently not the season for freshwater shrimps, so the chance to catch one in the pond around the waterfall (which he said is 12(!) meters deep) is not big; during the season, he said, the shrimps can even reach the length of a forearm and there would be so many that he can fill his bag of hunted shrimps (the size of a forearm).
A shot of the waterfall…. look, rainbow :-)
Pedro shows that the pond around the waterfall really is deeper than expected ;-)
The other encounter I had at the same day was with a fisherman who was fishing at the beach right next to my hostel. I was just swimming near him (he stood in the water until his breast) when something big bit on the bait. And it was really big (he yelled something like “whoa, es un monstruo!”), so big that he could actually not hold ground was dragged further into the water until the water reached to his neck. I helped him to gain a few feet out of the water and when he reached the beach and thus had proper ground under his feet, he walked away from the water, pulled the string in while walking to the water, walked away from the water etc… to pull the fish in. At that point, he already got the attention of the whole beach. When the fish he caught finally came to surface onto the beach after five minutes or so of pulling in, the whole beach applauded and local and travellers alike rushed to the fisherman to have a look at and photograph the catch and congratulate the fisherman. I got the following pictures from a Chinese couple that is currently travelling the world, thank you Liu!
The fish. A Gallo.
The fisherman and his catch
According to some locals I asked, the fish is a “Gallo” (Spanish for rooster) because it has also a comb on it´s head like the rooster.
