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Our friends who brought us around half of the island yesterday picked us up for an afternoon drive again today. This time however we had the opportunity to go four wheeling in their 4×4 truck! It was awesome.

Laurent picked us up and one by one everyone was saying they wanted to go swimming at a little river that we had been told about. Unfortunately we forgot to bring our mosquito repellent. Because all of us wanted to go however we needed to make two trips to his house. We then took two cars out to the little river not far from their place.

To get to the river we had to turn down a small one lane paved road and wind around a few kilometres before we arrived at a turnoff that was not much more than a grassy path cut through tall shrubs. We all had to get out of the car and into the back of the pickup truck for the drive down to the stream.

Alyssa, Jaeden, Dailin, Orin and Eli were all thrilled to see that there was a perfectly placed cliff perched 30 feet above a 8 foot deep pool of water. This is what they had kept asking for. We let them splash around in the water from the cliff while Teyauna and Zakary just splashed around in the shallow water around the burbling brook of water. It wasn’t more than five minutes however before we realized that the mosquitoes had found us. They were everywhere. In the meantime Jaeden, Dailin and Orin used their brand new machete to hack a path to a nearby tree that had spidery branches growing in all directions. It was the perfect freshly cut path to a jungle gym of a tree. The mosquitoes however were so bad that they had barely got started with their climbing before I had to call them all back to the truck.

Reluctantly they returned but were rather thrilled to hop into the back of the pickup for a four wheeling adventure they would not soon forget. We headed up a dirt path in search of some relatives that worked their plantation in the area. We drove along a narrow hardly used trail of two tire tracks that wound up a hill and had us crossing a slow moving stream. Teyauna shrieked from the back of the truck with excitement of the entire experience as she looked out over the side.

The relatives were not around and so we continued up the main road we had turned off. We drove up through the valley as the road wove through rustic homes and plantations. As we continued on to a sheer cliff of a mountain that was said to be covered with waterfalls when it rained, a new barrier had been erected to stop us from going further. It was many miles in however and we turned back and stopped at our host’s friend’s plantation. As we had headed up the valley he invited us to stop by on our way back to help ourselves to some bananas.

With his machete he whacked down a few banana stalks before trimming off the bunches of bananas and handing them to the boys to carry back to the truck. The kids helped themselves to passion fruit that was littering the ground and we all walked past the pineapples and many other types of fruit that he was growing. It was an incredible four wheeling adventure.