The Lagoons of BaHiA de navivdad
Story & photos by Editor
On one fine January day I took the local bus to Villa Obregon, got off at Calle Esmeralda, and explored the lagoon that lies between there and Barra de Navivad. It is a very large area full of wildlife, including white herons, iguanas, and crocodiles. It is legally only accessible on the perimeter which means walking along Calle Primavera, and/or Vicente Guerrero on the far south side of town, and then along the beach. Or, you can access it from the main roads outside of the villages. The downside of the lagoon is that both towns have more mosquitoes than most other coastal places along the Costalegre.
Calle Primavera has a walkway along parts of the swamp, and as I walked on it a young boy pointed at a tree, yelling ‘Iguana’. I managed to get the lizard in focus on my video camera when it jumped off the branch and caught a bird or some other prey in it’s mouth. I gave the lad 10 pesos.
From then on I looked more closely. The herons stood still with their peaks pointing toward their next meal underneath the foliage in the murky waters of the large lagoon, which is separated from the ocean by a mere sliver of beach, although that would be a hundred metres of sand at the closet point.
The road narrowed until on one side there was lagoon and the other an eight foot wire fence which the people of each casa had erected to keep the crocodiles out. Some of the more prominent houses had walls. On the cobblestone calle, one of the few roads maintained in the area, young girls rode bicycles and giggled as they went by, while boys hung in groups plotting the overthrow or something or another.
Down on the beach I headed towards Barra de Navivad, a 4 kilometre walk along sandy beaches. Keeping near the fence that surrounds the lagoon, watching for more wildlife, the view of the lagoon became more panoramic and the variety of vegetation exposed itself. There were a few areas where I could see the placid water of the lagoon but most of the water was covered in varieties of aqua flora, and on land bushes and coconut trees grew above them. Higher above, flocks of birds flew. Vultures, hawks, sea gulls, something that looked like a smallish pterodactyl, and pelicans scattered the blue sky and the mountains in the distance.
The only real trouble was that I didn’t buy some cheap sandals, so after an hour my feet were getting hot, and I didn’t want to put on shoes until reaching the restaurant at Barra. I sat on the beach and watched a man fish from shore, the gentle waves deceptively turning at the last moment into large concave semi-spheres that crashed with a sound of a distant cannon. Behind me a vulture had found a dead fish that the tide had left earlier, and was giving it his attention.
It could have been a female. My lens was not that powerful, and getting too close to the ugly-headed former dinosaur didn't seem like a good idea at the time. However, I did watch it at a distance, and once or twice as I got nearer, the vulture reluctantly flapped its wings and landed near-by on a post, still eyeing the fish with something of a territorial expression. I got close enough to the fish to take a photo, then walked on towards the next town. When I was twenty metres away the vulture reclaimed its lunch.
I trampled the other kilometre to Barra, and was happy to brush off my sandy feet, put on my shoes and go to meet a couple of new friends for lunch under the umbrellas of a Costalegre restaurant on the beach.
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