It's a funny thing arriving at a place that is apparently "beautiful, you'll love it". At Coral Bay we were promised a beautiful beach, warm turquoise water, a small place with just a bakery and grocery store.
Turns out there is a good deal more than that, including two large caravan parks, a liberal sprinkling of young foreign backpackers all of whom are skinny, tanned and beautiful, and arrogant and thoroughly annoying. And children! It was a mystery why they were there, despite being mid week term time. They should all be locked up every day in classrooms and allowed no holidays, ever. That'll teach'm.
It's also a funny thing being forced to overhear other people's conversations. The loud old Brit couple who looked like they should be in a resort in Spain had several chats with family, loudly, to whom it seemed important to be told "you're on speakerphone" at regular intervals. I'll never meet these people attached to the voices on the end of the phone, but I feel I know them well.
In reality the beach was small, the water was cool, there was a vaguely rotting smell at the waters edge which may well have been from the dead fish bobbing in the shallows. The caravan park was built on sand, and the formula for sand plus camping equals sand in tent, and though it didn't rain, at 100 per cent humidity everything was dripping wet by morning, and the formula for wet plus sand equals two pissed off travelers.
Coral Bay. It leaves a bad aftertaste, somewhat like a badly executed espresso, of which I have had too much experience of late.
