Thanks, Ananya, for checking in with last month's "Chocolate Hills". Sounded tastey.
One love. Mellow island tunes on the radio had you swaying all the way up to these lime-green waters. You sipped from coconuts handed through the window by roadside vendors. Now upon arrival, you adjust your unisex sarong and wiggle the winter out of your sandaled toes. You feel all right. Scrrraaaatch...Wrong sound track, wrong reverie.
Sure, you're going to have a blast frolicking under those cascades, but don't expect to find jerk chicken on the menu tonight. You've interrupted your drive along a forty-five-mile river for a stop and a swim in a fifty-five-square-mile national park packed with more than eight hundred plant species. Who knew that this decidedly non-tropical country could be so lush and idyllic. As you float lazily in your inner tube, you'll want to read up on how karst and tufa deposits created these dazzling pools. Later, you might get a hoot out of watching the deliciously dreadful spaghetti-esque westerns that were shot here for a northern audience.
As you continue your riverine journey, you'll pass a string of old water mills and fortresses and an island monastery. Eventually, you'll arrive at a town near the riverhead that was liberated from a not-so-neighborly neighbor to the east. Three months from now, this nation will celebrate a fourteenth year of thanksgiving.
When you reverse course, you'll finish at a coastal town with an immense domed cathedral. You may be asked if you know the sexy local actor who starred on an American TV medical drama until it was retired last month. With time on his hands, maybe he'll soon follow you to a nearby peninsula town where your most strenuous activities will be admiring the hilltop church and lifting an espresso cup to your lips in the many outdoor cafés.
Just around a bend of sorts begins one of the nation's more touristed stretches, where yachts are anchored off rocky islands and a honey-colored-stone town draws crowds. But you can deal with that—you feel all right.
Where are you, anyhow?
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I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing 