That time I fought an Iguana in Mexico...

I am sporting an "awesome" souvenir from our vacation, a huge non healing scab on my knee, all because I fought with an iguana and I sort of won. Well not really, but that is what we told Alex because as usual the story is truly just an average story for this Nicole.

So on Tuesday of our vacation we went snorkeling, the second biggest natural reef in the world. We loaded up a huge air conditioned bus with our party, drove 40 minutes past Cancun and up the peninsula, and then drove down a dirt road in a forest of regrowth from when the last hurricane hit. And then we ended up on the beach of a resort somewhere. Where they promptly put all 20 some odd of us on a huge catamaran, fitted us with life vests, masks, fins, and snorkel things.

Half an hour later we were at our first diving grounds, where we all jumped off the boat and made elephant noises through our snorkel tubes about the beautiful scenes we saw below us. There was amazing new coral reef, vast amounts of reef skeletons, lobster, massive schools of fish and a guide who continuously yelled Yooo HOO at the party of floating gringos. All was well there except I struggled with my mask and I lost my hair tie so my hair, which is a beast in itself, was everywhere.

Ever try to snorkel with lots of long hair not restrained?

An hour later they loaded us all back into the boat and took us to another diving ground, this one with many many more fish, sting rays and eels. And we were right up against the reef. Towards the end of our hour there I decided to get back on the boat, and I successfully managed the ladder out of the water and back into the catamaran. Now let me explain a little something about the boat, it had a hard deck that basically had the texture of a cheese grater covered in plastic, not bad to walk on, but not something that you would want to fall on.

Which is exactly what I did. I unfortunately slipped when our boat hit a backwards swell, which wasn't the bad part, it was when the boat dipped back to level that my knee that was planted on the deck decided to shred itself. And because I had been in the water for the previous two hours, I bled like a stuck pig. Like seriously bleed.

But I was lucky enough to be with some great friends and was even luckier that one of our unexpected guests (a women who was invited to join our party from our resort) happened to be a Russian Holistic nurse. So between Carla the nurse, Dana my well supplied friend, and a rousing rendition of 99 bottles of beer on the wall to cover up any curse words I might utter when we scrubbed it out with alocohol ( Did I mention that there were two sweet very young Mormon girls in our party) and half an hour of constant pressure, we finally got my knee to stop bleeding and sort of clot.

So with that story, I left a little bit of myself in Mexico and I sort of wish I had got this wound from an iguana fight because as Tracy tells me, iguana's have 127 serrated teeth.

And I hadn't even had a drink yet. I swear.